Whistler in the Dark

“Recent Tragic Events” at the Factory Theatre

Leave it to Whistler in the Dark to give us a dark romance set the day after the 9/11 attacks where Joyce Carol Oates appears as a sock puppet. Craig Wright’s Recent Tragic Events (at the Factory Theatre through March 24th) is lighter than the material the Whistlers usually take on (at least recently), and mostly thanks to Nathaniel Gundy’s groovy performance as Ron, and Meg Taintor’s sock-puppeteering as Joyce Carol Oates, the show is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a while. It’s this well executed comedy and wit that carries the play through it’s darker and sometimes tedious scenes about loss, blind dates, and a dialogue on free will vs. determinism.

Recent Tragic Events has a thick coat of meta. It actually begins with a scripted speech by the house manager (Jen O’Connor/Melissa Barker), who has a volunteer toss a coin, then goes on to explain how the result of that coin toss will determine the course of action in the play…and that the points where the play turns in a direction set by the coin toss will be signaled by sounding a bell. This is pretty much how the first act goes. Awkward Andrew (Alejandro Simoes) shows up for a blind date at Waverly’s (Aimee Rose Ranger) Minneapolis apartment, as the news cycle reports from Ground Zero and Waverly tries to reach her twin sister in New York. Ding! Waverly’s nutty neighbor Ron drops in. Ding! Waverly gets a call from her great aunt Joyce Carol Oates who is in town for the night due to a canceled flight and wants to to drop by. Ding!

We’re not really sure what’s going on as the House Manager’s explanation is vague at best, but we are led to believe that the play is some kind of elaborate Hypertext. A kind of Choose Your Own Adventure performance where actors must have had to memorize any number of possible outcomes and shift through this maze of forking paths without dropping a line.

After intermission, it’s revealed that this was all BS and Recent Tragic Events is, in fact, a normal play with a normal script. Wright tricks us. He wants us to read a layer of hypertextuality into the plot. So that when the bell rings while Andrew makes one of his many attempts at a nervous egress from Waverly’s apartment or Waverly can’t get through to her sister for the nth time, we think the narrative is exercising some kind of non-linearity based on that coin toss. That chance is playing a role here and not everything is predetermined.

Why did Wright go to all this trouble? Because the play takes on 9/11, romance, and family tragedy with a little healthy debate on free will and determinism. Seeing the 9/11 attacks as “deterministic” was a little controversial the day after they happened, but Wright gives his characters the advantage of a not-so-rattled perspective, as if they’ve had more time to think on it. Ever cosmically-in-tune Ron, takes the side of determinism, outrightly taking a ‘we had it coming’ position and ends up over his head in a heated debate with Joyce Carol Oates who, being a sock puppet, naturally believes in free will. She calls Ron’s philosophy “fashionable determinism.” In defense of free will, Oates cites the same mental process from Wright’s little trick on the audience in the first act: that we read determinism into what is actually random, perceiving connections that aren’t there.

I find this sort of stuff pretty interesting, but just not here, even though Whistler’s execution of this end of the play is as good as I can imagine it being. Melissa Barker’s charismatic performance as the house manager; Taintor’s voicing of Oates’ diatribes and her characterization of both Oates’ cool aunt status and her abrasive ego; and Nathaniel Gundy’s confident performance of Ron with a voice like Johnny Depp in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, are all excellent and a whole lot of fun. As the couple on the blind date from hell, Aimee Rose Ranger and Alejandro Simoes, more or less enter into Wright’s debate on free will and determinism thematically, through the bizarre series of events that has brought them together and left them in what is, for a first date, a very uncomfortable scenario. These two don’t get to have as much fun as the rest of the cast, but Ranger tackles the extreme emotions of her character extraordinarily well and Simoes gives Andrews’ meek betaness a well thought out pace.

Whistler in the Dark’s Recent Tragic Events runs through March 24th at the Factory Theatre. Tickets are $20.

Whistler in the Dark on Caryl Churchill

There are just two more days to catch Whistler in the Dark’s two play Caryl Churchill lineup. Fen and A Number are just the kind of work one expects to see produced by the Whistlers and I don’t think anybody else is as well equipped to handle Churchill’s complex narratives, sense of mystery, and large themes. Fen is the superior work and here, under Meg Taintor’s flawless direction of a fantastic ensemble (Aimee Rose Ranger, Jen O’Connor, Becca A. Lewis, Lorna Nogueira, Anna Waldron, and Mac Young), the Whistlers draw out Churchill’s themes of broken homes, change, generation gaps, unhappiness, happiness, child abuse, oppression, and contemporary serfdom in Thatcherite England. Spanning generations and English country castes, Churchill’s multi-generational story exists on a dirt potato patch of a set that seems as much a metaphysical and ghostly plane as it does a section of real and gritty earth, as actors kick dust up into the tight space of the Factory Theatre. And it’s due to this excellent production that this effect comes off so well.

Fen‘s scenes are loosely joined together, depicting a small community of mostly female farm workers–not to say there aren’t men, Churchill’s just not that interested in them. Despite the text’s broad generational reach, little about Fen feels epic or grand in proportion. Instead, thanks to double casting of the play’s secondary characters and structure of isolated scenes, Fen maintains an intimate feel, pulling us closely into its individual scenes and slowly building an overall mood and story arc. Double casting is a practicality here, but it’s also, in a soft stroke of meta-textuality, responsible for cementing the bonds and interconnectedness between the female generations, as one actress plays both village girl and village grandmother and another plays the lead and a century old ghost. This gives us a sense of timelessness that’s essential to the play and this village society that’s undergoing economic change, without really changing at all.

Anna Waldron and Mac Young in Fen

The female lead Val (played with a lot of depth by Aimee Rose Ranger) is motivated by a desire for change, to break free from her laborer life and pursue half minted dreams of moving to London and being with her lover Frank, even if it means leaving her children. While her neighbors medicate themselves with evangelism and Valium, she only finds satisfaction in fleeting moments spent dancing with Frank. Val eventually concludes that death is her only means of escape, and it comes, in a murder suicide perpetrated with Frank, that seems like a perversion of Romeo and Juliet. And although her death ties her to the dusty soil of this East Anglia fen, as she was in life with her work of clearing stones from fields and digging potatoes, she appears somewhat content in her ghostly reincarnation.

Fen has a clear setting in the eighties and the Whistlers have keyed us into this with the appropriate sweaters and between-scene music like Joy Division, but it’s important to not see the play as a tragic political narrative belonging to a particular decade–a story of bra burning or a workers’ revolution. What makes Fen so strong and what Taintor and this excellent cast has pulled off so well, is this kind of loose temporality, where the current political conditions are practically inconsequential. In the end, it’s a rather grim thesis Churchill conveys, but there’s something really beautiful about Fen‘s presentation of psychic connections and structure that takes us so deep, without giving up a sense of mystery and the perspective that we’re only seeing a piece of a story in a larger arc, that’s tied to the land and almost as old as it.

Danny Bryck and Mark Cohen in A Number

By comparison, Churchill’s terse 2002 play A Number is a weaker work. Its plot is built around a sci-fi hypothetical situation where Bernard discovers he has ‘a number’ of clones walking around. At the surface, A Number questions notions of Self and nature versus nurture and so on, but Churchill is far more interested in child abuse and neglect and the language used to consider Self, when the discussion is tainted with lies, regret, denial, and resentment. Like Fen, A Number is heavily laden with mystery and a narrative that’s deliberately confusing. Structured across five scenes where the three ‘versions’ of Bernard are in conversation with their ‘father’ Salter, the play slowly pulls together its story of engineered life that came about through tragedy and ends in another. In short, Salter has Bernard, Salter’s wife dies, Bernard is neglected and taken by social services as a toddler, Salter clones Bernard for a do-over and raises him well enough, scientists clone Bernard in secret, the first Bernard kills his first clone, and Salter meets one of the scientist’s secret clones.

The acting is solid, with Danny Bryck hopping between three versions of Bernard, and Mark Cohen (Salter) gradually letting his character develop by letting truths about his past trickle out. Both have an easy time with the text’s complex dialogue that’s rife with fragments and stutters. It’s not naturalistic. The dialogue is actually very much theatrical, but scripted to show how some things exceed the limitations of language. And again, that’s not just the linguistic conundrums one runs into when one is talking about clones, their clones, and the fact that they’re a clone. Churchill starts the play there, but shifts to ideas that don’t depend on a sci-fi plot device; murder and child abuse and even just expressing something personal about oneself. Director Jason King Jones has done well at ensuring tense, well blocked, and engrossing conversations between Bernard and Salter. But, in the end, this production is a little too vague on its plot and more concerned with its dramatic aesthetic than communicating Churchill’s conceptual content.

Whistler in the Dark will continue its season with Craig Wright’s Recent Tragic Events in March and Trojan Women in May.

Shakespeare Interrupted: Whistler in the Dark’s Stoppard Double Feature

IFfringe company Whistler in the Dark has a reputation for one thing, it’s taking on tough material and making it work with limited resources. For their current show, the Tom Stoppard double header Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth, the Whistlers have moved from their usual digs at the Factory Theatre to the BCA’s Black Box, settling in nicely for this production that makes use of little in the way of sets or lights. Whistler regular Jen O’Connor lights much of Cahoot’s Macbeth herself with floor lamps! If you find yourself at the Factory Theatre much, you’ll know that this group has a lot of experience working together, and the strength of the ensemble shows, as they teach each other Stoppard’s imaginary and vaguely British language Dogg, or run around on rackety risers during a genuinely scary abridged version of Macbeth (before it’s interrupted by a secret police officer).

It’s refreshing to see theater that operates and is accessible on so many levels. As the characters of Dogg’s Hamlet work together to assemble some kind of commencement stage out of “planks, slabs, blocks, and cubes,” the play essays how language is learned (here, by the play’s school kids and the audience much faster than the persnickety headmaster played by the always dynamic Scott Sweatt). Or, how different parties may appear to be speaking the same language, when in fact each ascribes a different meaning to the words he is speaking.

This whole scenario comes from a thought experiment posed by Wittgenstein, where a worker building a platform calls out to a co-worker to pass him the individual components of the platform; “plank,” “slab,” etc. (The Whistlers have gone so far as to make them actual building blocks.) Wittgenstein hypothesizes that the platform could be built even if the worker and co-worker each had their own definitions for “plank,” “slab,” and so on. One might understand “plank” as a board and the other as the word for “next piece, please.” Heavy stuff yes, but there’s also an absolutely riotous abridged version of Hamlet, performed by the play’s schoolchildren who, being from some nonsense land that speaks Dogg, are doing Hamlet as some kind of ESL exercise. Our Hamlet, Aimee Rose, is pretty good with a slow-mo sword.

Shakespeare sped up and reduced to slapstick is always funny and the fact that it is ties right into Stoppard’s heady semantic subject matter. At one point in Cahoot’s Macbeth “Easy” (Mac Young) appears, reprising his role as a white glove deliveryman from Dogg’s Hamlet and speaking his Cockney Mad Libs dialect of Dogg. The Macbeth players begin to speak to him in quotations from the text, causing our poor “Easy” even more confusion.

I’m really not qualified to dig into Wittgenstein beyond what I read on Wikipedia, but as two of Shakespeare’s most canonical works are condensed and performed as plays-within-plays by characters who are, at least in the case of Dogg’s Hamlet speaking lines whose literal meanings they do not understand (though phonetically, Dogg is the same as English), one considers how this relates to how an English-speaking audience or cast understand Shakespeare’s language and how dependent we are on already knowing what comes next; plank, block, ghost, murder of Polonius, fatal duel. And as much as language is a force of miscommunication here, it later becomes a mode of subversion, as the players in Cahoot’s Macbeth defeat a secret policeman (commandingly played by Nate Gund) by picking up Easy’s language.

Aimee Rose Ranger and Scott Sweatt in 'Dogg's Hamlet'

Whistler in the Dark’s Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth runs at the BCA Black Box through November 19th along with Imaginary Beast’s production of Eugene Ionesco’s Macbett. Tickets $10 students, $20 everyone else at whistlerinthedark.com.

In on Fringe: Whistler in the Dark’s In On It

Whistler in the Dark‘s In On It is a sparkly little fringe gem if your tastes (or wallets) don’t lean towards the current holiday shows of the larger Boston companies. Actually, it’s worthwhile either way. Tidily produced in the intimate Factory Theatre, Daniel MacIvor‘s two-man-show, starring Joe Lanza and Scott Sweatt and directed by Meg Taintor who can always make a tough text soar, sets a play-in-progress within a play about two men in a troubled relationship, that could just as well be anyone’s.

In bits and pieces we see This One (Lanza) and That One (Sweatt) come together and fall apart and come together again to the tunes of Maria Callas and Lesley Gore, all while they debug a play that mirrors their own troubles. It’s cleverly self-referential and elegantly cyclical, as it pulls John Barth’s Möbius strip out the postmodern desert and applies it to a deeply human story. Lanza and Sweatt each play several characters as they read scenes of the interior play, offering us stories both vastly opposed and intimately adjacent to their own, as well as insight into the creative process that is here projected onto their relationship. What begins as a series of fragmented episodes, becomes the witty and endearing story of a troubled couple, told through their voices and those of others.

Scott Sweatt as That One and Joe Lanza as This One

Scott Sweatt as That One and Joe Lanza as This One

Whistler in the Dark’s In On It at The Factory Theatre, 791 Tremont, through Dec. 6th. Tickets: $20, $10 students.