Reviews 1977
‘We Could Do a History of the World’
In their East Broadway studio, four members of the Paper Bag Players have whipped out some of the old costumes and props to fix a soggy place in an updated version of I Won’t Take a Bath, the show they just did in New Orleans and which they’ll be performing December 26 to 30 at Alice Tully Hall. “The children were pleased,” says Judy Martin. “But we didn’t feel that growing excitement.” They wondered if the problem was in the order of the sketches, but decided that there was just too much in the show that was lyric. It needed more pizzazz. So they’ve taken one number out, and they’re putting in “Shoes.”
While Martin, Irving Burton, composer Donald Ashwander and Douglas Norwick - Jeanne Michels and Virgil Roberson aren’t here today - fish out the “shoes”, four sets of small and giant corrugated cardboard boxes painted on the sides as men’s oxfords or women’s high heels, Donald fusses with his electric harpsichord. “It must have been dropped by a great height by Delta airlines.” Irving, going gray at the temple, with his bald head, glasses and beaky nose, is quickly into his little boxes and starts dancing like it’s a wedding. Then the work starts: trying to remember the steps, the sequence, and match it all to the music. There were several versions of this piece, it seems. “We liked it so much,” Judy confesses, “we kept making it longer."
Judy and Doug clump across the floor in their two-and-a-half-foot-long cartons. Irving swivels in with chunky little steps like an ecstatic Chassid turned on to the pachanga. “You should try them,” he says, after they’re run through it enough times for it to start falling into shape. I’m shy for a second, and then Judy helps me into a pair of the big ones. Got to slide along the floor or the “shoe” does an unseemly flip-flop. Great to tap your foot and get that magnificent thump. Then I’m dancing with Judy, slide, two, three, four, back, two three four. Look, Ma!
The Bags are nearly 20 years old. Judy is the only one of the original group left, but Irving’s been here 19 years. “Some things feel the same,” says Judy. “The same struggle for an idea. And some of it feels very different. I feel freer. There are more things at my command. Now there’s a real core of people excited about making our kind of theatre. We get very hopped up about it. I guess we had that at the beginning too. But it’s hard to compare what I feel about the beginning: it’s like...how did you look 20 years ago? You really don’t know. You look at an old photograph and way, ‘was that me?’ but you really don’t feel yourself changing."
“The work then was very small,” says Irving in a small voice. “Very sweet.” Years ago they didn't work on a stage as big as the sheets of brown paper they rip up at the start of I Won’t Take a Bath. “I went to our first performance at the Living Theatre, literally, with the costumes and props in two shopping bags,” says Judy.
Perhaps the biggest difference is Donald Ashwander, who joined the bags in 1965, and whose lively music is integral to their productions. “I talk to Donald about an idea,” says Judy, “he starts to play something, he starts this beat, and it takes you someplace else.” Donald is also concerned that the Bags’ material may be very contemporary. “Whatever people are thinking about, kids are thinking about,” he says in his velvety Alabama accent. “Our material has become more urban, and more American. It could have been...French. Especially the early fairy tales.” He plays a few bars of echoey, mysterioso bars on the electric harpsichord. “Satie-esque."
So they’ve gotten away from fairy tales. “I loved the princess parts, you know,” Judy says For years, they would tease me because I was always the princess. But today you can’t show a woman locked in a castle and rescued by the prince. There are basic social ideas that fairy tales present that we’re questioning now. You can’t show a mean stepmother because today two out of three families in America have stepmothers and you want to show people feeling good about the new mothers and the new brothers and the new sisters.” Years ago, the Bags did a hilarious skit called “Ma and the Kids”, with Irving as Ma. Now they’re working on “Mama’s Got a Job."
Judy interrupts. “You know, when Remy Charlip first worked with paper, I felt it very restricting. I’d come from modern dance and my idea of costume material was jersey - where you saw the line of the body, where you saw tension. The paper was very alien. Now I feel that the paper is at my command. It’s not just the paper, it’s the fact that - I got a lot of this from Shirley Kaplan - I can pick up a paintbrush and I’m not intimidated by the idea that somewhere out there should be a set designer. It’s so much my world. Our world."
“Sometimes you go to the theatre or go to visit somebody who’s making a play and it’s all wonderful. They’re painting scenery and they’re sewing costumes and somebody’s memorizing and mumbling and that seems very exciting. Then when you see the play itself, it isn’t as exciting as the whole backstage thing. I think some of what the Bags is about is getting it all there onstage. There’s not a secret preparation and then you see the front. You make the scenery there, you paint it there. You see the man making the snow come down. Once in a while you get lucky - you have the whole richness of the preparation onstage. I love it when that happens."
I think of a moment in “Cookies” when Judy, having drawn big, round cookies in the middle of a huge white paper flat, goes to take a nap while they “bake.” She draws a rectangle for a pillow, a long vertical rectangle for a blanket, and marks a criss-cross design on it. She tears the paper across the top of the blanket, lays her head on the pillow and crawls under the flap.
“I always felt we should somehow look like real actors or real actresses or real dancers,” Judy continues. “But now we feel much more aggressive about that. Irving’s not an actor, but he’s marvelous! I’m trying to be more like Irving. And I think that’s given us strength. He’s a sort of model for us, of what somebody who’s far-out and full of fun can do."
“Do the kids think you’re old on stage, do you think?” asks Donald.
“Noooo,” says Irving.
“They know we’re at least as old as their mothers and fathers,” Donald insists.
“Well,” says Irving, “when they see us down from front afterwards....”My God! They look so ooold.” (His voice flutes scratchily upwards.) “They were speaking about us two, Judy and I. ‘I didn’t know they were so ooold.’ They couldn’t imagine that when they saw us running and screaming and jumping and yelling all over the stage."
“Children don’t see adults play very much, I think,” says Donald. “even adults don’t see adults playing,” says Irving. “But they see me. Here I am. Short. I don’t have any hair. I have a big nose. “My God!” they say. “He can do it, so can I!"
Nowadays, the Bags are getting second generation audiences - people who are grown up and are bringing their own children. “It must be the oldest children’s theatre in the United States,” says Donald. “In the world,” says Judy, giggling. “Oh, I don’t know. The Oldest Living Children’s Theatre.” Judy tries it on. “It’s like a bank advertisement. You’d invest in it, but would you go see it?”<br/><br/>“What’s interesting to me,” I tell them, “is that it’s still interesting to you."
“It holds one,” says Judy. “It isn’t that we’ve stuck to it out of a sense of good character. It holds one. There are so many possibilities. And it’s a creative home for us. It’s a place where you can do something else and where every time you do something else there are three or four of us who applaud and get excited. And you have such power. You can make up anything, no matter how fanciful. We could do a history of the world..."
“So,” I ask, “how does it feel to be growing older and still doing children’s theatre?"
“I feel I should have some answer to that,” says Judy, because it’s a question that’s asked a great deal. How does it feel to be an old piece of cheese? Feels like when I was a little piece of cheese, or a young piece of cheese. I don’t feel that we’ve established something, that we’re arrived...it’s changing all the time and it’s still a struggle for the material, to keep the company together, to have the public come see us, that’s very much the same. It’s not like we’re going around in big cars..."
Irving looks aside into the studio mirror, fingers his gray hairs. “it’s all right, I’ still here, working. I still love to sing. I love to dance. I love to move...So I am a little older, and there’s an ache and here’s an ache...but it’s all right."
“People are very suspicious,” says Judy. “How come you’re interested in children’s theatre for all these years? People think you’ve got this big insight about why you do this. I remember when we first got together - we were improvising - Shirley and Susie Bond and Joyce Aaron and Remy. I guess it was even before Remy came. Everything was so terrific in the studio, we said let’s do something for the public. And I said, ‘Well, let’s do it for children, because we can always get some kids together and you can’t always get some adults together.’ And it started there and we haven’t moved."
“And it isn’t even true. It’s not that easy to get kids together."
Toy Store Magic
Nancy Tyndall’s basement Snow Swallow Toy Store on East 4th Street is about the size of a large closet. She hasn’t had a chance to make many of her whimsical toys this fall, and she does seem to find herself making more and more things that she doesn’t really want to sell. One tiny corner boasts a “museum of obscure but magnificent things.” Elsewhere are things like “Sunrise in the Arctic,” a painted box where, for a penny, you can pull a string and see a red sun come up in a white landscape.
She has, however, been working on her solo puppet shows. Martin Steingesser is playing the recorder outside the door to let people on the block know that the show is about to start. “close the door quick, we’ve just let the bird out,” somebody says as I ease in. The store is pretty well filled with about 10 little kids and a few adults. Three kids are hovering over a small box in which they’re fishing with an eight-inch rod for jujube fish. The dove has settled in the window, and spends the show making occasional (apparently critical) comments. This bunch of people is about as large a group as Nancy’s been having, but in the course of the show at least the same number again squeeze in the door.
She toots a tune on a kazoo to announce Thumbelina, sings her own musical transitions between scenes. There’s a makeshift stage that seems to be made partly of an old metal display shelf and an ironing board, but she doesn’t use it right away. She introduces an old woman with hair of feathers and a wistful, slightly skewed face who longs for a child. Nancy simply carries her in front of the children, then sits her on one side. A scrunched crow/witch puppet of cloth has the old woman kiss a feather (“one of her sweetest kisses”) and plant it in a pot overnight. A plain, old, covered saucepan with a lid that fits but doesn’t match is plunked on the stage. “Wow!” gasps one boy, when Nancy lifts the lid and a tall, pink blossom rises out. She opens the petals of the paper flower and reveals a tiny girl. “How’d that happen?” another child loudly demands to know
Soon, Thumbelina is carried away by a dark cloud and finds herself in a tunnel protected/entrapped by a matronly, matchmaking mouse (the sort of mouse that does things for your own good and doesn’t listen to a word you say), who wants to marry her off to her neighbor mole, a bespectacled, sniffly creature with a pink nose who’s as dumpy and sedentary as a bean bag. Eventually, after pulling Penelope’s trick with the wedding dress she’s supposed to be making, and finally ripping it up, Thumbelina makes her getaway on the back of a blue swallow that has been lying, weak and ill, in the tunnel. “He flew over you, and over you, and over you...” says Nancy, carrying the bird over the heads of the children. Back to where the old woman puppet sits. Except that the old woman is no woman anymore. She’s died and turned into a plum tree. “And every spring the old lady plum tree blossomed,” Nancy says, twisting a white blossom into the old woman’s hair.
With nobody in her squashed but contented audience willing to budge, Nancy tells one more story. She tears a sheet of paper off her pad. “There’s a fisherman in here. Let’s see if we can get him out.” And rips a crudely human shape. “He was ugly last time,” says one child. “Well, he’s beautiful this time, as you can see,” says Nancy. She tears out eyes and a “big, expressive mouth.” “What about his nose?” “Ho doesn’t need a nose.” The fisherman goes out in a fog and winds up wandering underwater. He stays under for about a week, till, getting “as wrinkled as your fingertips do when you’ve stayed in the bath too long,” he becomes nothing but wrinkles and disappears. Nancy wrinkles and crumples up the cut-out and laughs. One little boy, who’s had a lot to say during the performance, whose motorcycle-riding toy briefly had to become part of Thumbelina, kisses her on the wrist.
Nancy’s store is open Thursday to Saturday. On Fridays at 3:30, she does puppet, toy and storytelling workshops. The puppet sows (available for “birthday parties, coronations, etc.”) are Saturdays at 1:30. Admission is 50 cents. Snow Swallow is located at 124 East 4th Street between First and Second Avenues. For information call 533-8012.
Pilobolus Puts Six Heads Together
November 28
The six members of Pilobolus hate the poster for their Broadway season. The picture was taken at the wrong moment. They look all bleached out, ad their faces look awful. Jonathan Wolken complains about the red lettering.
The six members of Pilobolus hate the poster for their Broadway season. The picture was taken at the wrong moment. They look all bleached out, ad their faces look awful. Jonathan Wolken complains about the red lettering.
Martha Clarke was looking at The New York Times and couldn’t even find their ad. They’ve just come back from three weeks in Japan, via L.A., and there’s been no time to rest. Jonathan hurt his leg when he landed wrong on the tour. So Jamie Hampton, who has been working as an apprentice with the company, must learn his part in Ciona, one of their most strenuous and acrobatic works, just in case. Broadway is upon them. And like sensible people, they’re getting a bit jittery. “Ask them if we can cancel."
Seeing Pilobolus on television, I had been reminded sometimes of those underwater creatures that appear to be animals or plants, but actually are colonies of millions of simple organisms. The colony, like a school fish, seems to operate in a unified way, through a single will or intelligence, but what’s involved is probably more like terrific communications. And that’s part of what goes on in Pilobolus. They’re very verbal. The talk is incessant. There’s constant input - coaching, commenting, kibbitzing, evaluating. But their antennae are out, they’re alert and listening. They’ll hear a good idea in the welter of words and pick right up on it.
What makes their cooperative a meaningful and effective concept is that everybody takes responsibility for the work. Decisions are made by all, and they are accustomed to, and prize, and insist on making those decisions. But with celebrity, and bigger tours, and being bigger business generally, more and more control seems to slip through their fingers, and some idiot winds up making a decision that may be an embarrassment to them - like that poster.
This rehearsal, in a large club hall in Washington, Connecticut, starts in a fragmented way. Two of the men are fencing. A tape of lute music plays . Kohi (Japanese for coffee) arrives. Martha wants to run through a “little thing we choreographed in Tokyo.” She and Robby Barnett run and hop onto Michael Tracy’s shoulders and spin. They’re trying to find the smoothest way to come into it, the right kind of hold - one that’s clean and secure. They go through it again and again, trying to get their swinging bodies to fly higher up, to take a shape that will give the right flair to the movement I wonder how much of their work is built by these increments.
Jonathan is showing Jamie his part. They go simultaneously, slowly into a deep lunge. Meantime, he’s trying to give a rough idea of what everyone else is doing at this moment in the dance. And a few minutes later - I didn’t see how it happened, or who, if anyone, summoned it - the entire group is gathered in the center of the room, ready to work through Ciona from the beginning.
There’s a lineup of the six slowly shifting weights and balances, moving into more intricate formations. One’s like a choo-choo train. They form a clump that swooshes through and inverts. There’s pleasure in these subtle but distinct forms. Clear as the simple geometric patterns of chorus lines, their essence seems to be the cleverness and rightness of the transformations rather than in “precision.” I can’t help but think of other models for this activity - of diagrams of the way complex organic molecules grow, how an embryo develops in spurts, of time-lapse photography.
“Doesn’t it feel like square dance lessons?” asks Moses Pendleton, as they all sashay through a section where the group links and then breaks into smaller pivoting trios. As they move there are no problems here - they chat about somebody looking for a house, someone else who’s moving nearby. Their breeziness makes me recall a visit I had with Danny and Sarah Chapman, former stars of the Ringling Brothers Circus. I remember Sarah, utterly practical, running through the act, balanced 40 feet atop a revolving ladder behind their Sarasota home, while checking on the baby and discussing spaghetti sauce. No fuss. All in a day’s work.
They’re showing Jamie a tricky section. Moses flies upwards on a diagonal. Jonathan has set himself facing away, with his arms thrust upwards ready to grasp Moses’s hands. After a moment, they let go, and Moses drops swiftly sideways to be caught around the chest. “Jamie’s got to take up the shock a little more.” They keep at it. Moses is no longer being thrown/flown up, but lifted gently into place. There’s conversation, distraction.
Robbie shows Jamie the side “stick.” Jamie plants himself, vertical, ready to absorb the shock of Robbie’s momentum and weight. Robbie leaps - you don’t see him take off - and clamps right on, angled so slightly around Jamie’s chest that he looks straight, his arms pressed stiffly across Jamie’s back. Like an attack by a giant clothespin.
The rehearsal goes on: sweatshirts, wraparound sweaters, etc. come off. Robbie takes off his tabis. They want to fix a swing that no one has been very pleased with. “Let’s change the legs so he makes a small ball.” Or maybe the legs should swing out straight behind. They agree that the movement doesn’t go anywhere. “It just looks like a large hulking man,” says Martha.
In an idle moment, Jamie wants to try something, asks Robbie to catch him. Jamie leaps from what looks like about 20 feet away, sails absolutely horizontally through the air. It’s thrilling, full of breath and ease. Everybody wants to try it. Robbie takes off neatly, but feels “I haven’t quite the sense of my trajectory.” It seems hard for Martha and Alison Chase - particularly t lift their hips into the straight line of the body.
Penny Leavitt Stegenga, who recently joined Pilobolus as production stage manager, was Alison’s teacher in California. She’s got to talk to them abut getting their tapes remade for Broadway - they open Thanksgiving at the St. James, and they’ve got to join AGMA. They remind her that they’ll need thick carpeting to stretch out on at the theatre, and dance linoleum in the wings so that they can do barre work during the show. What about the technical rehearsals? Schedules? And dressing rooms? Some are downstairs, some upstairs. But everybody wants to be close to the stage, so they’ll settle for three or four instead of one apiece. “Do you want your names on the doors? With a star?” (“Nooo.”) “During the show we want pure spring water in the wings,” says Jonathan. “And after the show, pure alk.” Should Martha bring her live turkey for Thanksgiving? She’s got a handsome, reasonably tame tom named Edna. And she wants Penny to check whether she can have live chickens on stage. “I’ll bring my own.” For eats, they want yogurt, vegetable salads (no iceberg lettuce), deli sandwiches.
Penny’s got a cassette recorder to keep track of all this. She can’t keep up with them with a pencil.
3 Kids Shows
November 14
To see three kids’ shows in a row on Saturday was not a good idea. First off, I caught most of a performance of The Mountain of Fiery Tongues by the Queens-based Yueh Lung Shadow Theatre at the American Museum of Natural History. I was impressed with the delicacy and mobility of the Chinese-style shadow puppets, which had been copied by company members from puppets in the museum’s collection. Made of donkey skin and much less ornately cut than the better known Javanese and Balinese, types, the parchment like puppets are painted with translucent inks and manipulated by three rods which give them flexibility and flippability. The legs swing freely. In this episode from the adventures of Monkey, the hero tricks an elderly princess into giving him a magic fan to extinguish the flames on the mountain so his master, a Tang monk, can continue his pilgrimage. The liveliness of the puppets was particularly vivid in a battle (which, incidentally, came to a gentlemanly close) in which Monkey and his opponent transformed themselves into an ostrich like bird, a dog, a tiger, a stag, a pony...The dog stretches his head up as if yowling and scratches the ground with his hind legs before attacking. And how beautifully the stag tosses the tiger with its antlers. The last scene, of the master on horseback, followed by a pair of monks in black. climbing the stony peak whose flames we’ve just seen put out, has the bare eloquence of an illumination in a medieval manuscript. But I wish the script had been less cliched and the taped voices more individual; the narrator less academic, the characters less like every cartoon. Yueh Long will next be giving lecture demonstrations on November 12 and 13 at the museum’s People Center.
To see three kids’ shows in a row on Saturday was not a good idea. First off, I caught most of a performance of The Mountain of Fiery Tongues by the Queens-based Yueh Lung Shadow Theatre at the American Museum of Natural History. I was impressed with the delicacy and mobility of the Chinese-style shadow puppets, which had been copied by company members from puppets in the museum’s collection. Made of donkey skin and much less ornately cut than the better known Javanese and Balinese, types, the parchment like puppets are painted with translucent inks and manipulated by three rods which give them flexibility and flippability. The legs swing freely. In this episode from the adventures of Monkey, the hero tricks an elderly princess into giving him a magic fan to extinguish the flames on the mountain so his master, a Tang monk, can continue his pilgrimage. The liveliness of the puppets was particularly vivid in a battle (which, incidentally, came to a gentlemanly close) in which Monkey and his opponent transformed themselves into an ostrich like bird, a dog, a tiger, a stag, a pony...The dog stretches his head up as if yowling and scratches the ground with his hind legs before attacking. And how beautifully the stag tosses the tiger with its antlers. The last scene, of the master on horseback, followed by a pair of monks in black. climbing the stony peak whose flames we’ve just seen put out, has the bare eloquence of an illumination in a medieval manuscript. But I wish the script had been less cliched and the taped voices more individual; the narrator less academic, the characters less like every cartoon. Yueh Long will next be giving lecture demonstrations on November 12 and 13 at the museum’s People Center.
The Department of Recreation’s Cottage Marionette Theatre’s bastard version of Kenneth Graham’s The Reluctant Dragon is an offense. Among other things, the show seems to have lost its first act ( but maybe that’s just as well). The boy who visits the dragon is a twerp and the dragon is no eccentric, idle loner but a sentimental coward. Physically, he’s an unhappy cross between an aqua alligator and a beagle And he needs to be cleaned or repainted. The manipulation of the marionettes was slovenly; their movement floppy and doddering. (The dragon asks the boy to scratch his back; the boy does it with the back of his wrist!) There are three dumb blondes, including the boy’s mother. Into a dustbin, please, with these pseudo-Playboy bunny marionettes! In the degrading conclusion the dragon, pleading for the friendship of the hick townspeople, says “Think what I could do for the tourist trade. I could be the main attraction in an amusement park or a circus.” So that’s how to win friends.
Off-Center Theater is even more off-center than usual. They’ve lost their New York State Council on the Arts grant (I’d like to know why.) Tony McGrath is doing a one-man storytelling show in their theatre on 18th Street near Tenth Avenue, but now they’ve got to charge money. McGrath is grayer than the last time I saw him, and his homey good humor, off-the-top-of-his-head remarks, muttering and casual shenanigans made him seem like a real relative. He’s calling himself Uncle Ant (for Ant’ny) and I caught him in October telling Jack and the Beanstalk. (In November he’ll be telling Beauty and the Beast. Call 929-8299 for information.) I’ve always enjoyed Off-Center’s haphazard, mugging style, even when it’s crude and unfair. Jack and the Beanstalk’s a little scary, y’know, but we’ll tone it down for the younger ones,” says McGrath, “and tone it up for the older ones.” Warming up, he claims he can teach anybody anything; gets a father from the audience and teaches him to juggle. That was no father, that was a plant, but I was fooled. Neighborhood kids recognized Bert Coppotelli, who practiced his juggling in the street.<br/><br/>McGrath, as Jack, slaps a little black hat on his head. A bit of a deadhead, he doesn’t go to school, never gets enough to eat, and sounds like Michael Caine. He switches to a black wig and a mob cap for Jack’s hysterical mom, who punches him out when she feels bad (and when she feels better). As McGrath says, “being poor affects people very adversely, as we all know.” I’m glad McGrath doesn’t shrink his vocabulary for kids. And that he doesn’t muck around much with the story line. Jack goes to sell the cow. “Who does Jack meet?” asks McGrath. “an old man,” says a boy down front. “Not so old,” quips McGrath, putting on a pair of snazzy sunglasses. “Devilishly handsome, and prematurely gray.” Then he cons Jack into trading the cow for beans. “It’s tough world when you’re a little kid and you’re hungry."
The Yelling Contest
October 31
Sultry Tina hands me an “air conditioner” - a small paper plate stapled to a tongue depressor - asks me my age, and breathily tells me she likes older men. Two other actors introduce themselves as well, putting each other automatically as they do so, and Inside Out: A View of Teenage Life begins. The show, presented by the Family Life Theatre (a group sponsored by New York Medical College), features 14 teenagers (from 15 to 17 years old) recruited from high schools in the five boroughs in a series of fast, improvisational skits, with the actors doubling and tripling in the roles of 14 kids and their parents. We seem them in the morning, in class, at a downer of a party, and back home. This is no calm day - though it may be an ordinary one. The kids come on as toughs, sexpots, introverts, spacey types, you name it. The parents are solicitous, disinterested, repressive, worried, contemptuous...What results is a sort of trench warfare between adults and kids, between kids and kids, with brutal punishment - mostly verbal - given and taken by all.
Sultry Tina hands me an “air conditioner” - a small paper plate stapled to a tongue depressor - asks me my age, and breathily tells me she likes older men. Two other actors introduce themselves as well, putting each other automatically as they do so, and Inside Out: A View of Teenage Life begins. The show, presented by the Family Life Theatre (a group sponsored by New York Medical College), features 14 teenagers (from 15 to 17 years old) recruited from high schools in the five boroughs in a series of fast, improvisational skits, with the actors doubling and tripling in the roles of 14 kids and their parents. We seem them in the morning, in class, at a downer of a party, and back home. This is no calm day - though it may be an ordinary one. The kids come on as toughs, sexpots, introverts, spacey types, you name it. The parents are solicitous, disinterested, repressive, worried, contemptuous...What results is a sort of trench warfare between adults and kids, between kids and kids, with brutal punishment - mostly verbal - given and taken by all.
Inside/Out is an exposition of the problems of adolescence and parenthood: it indicts both sides. The dialogue is totally, painfully, familiar: the same words we’ve been hurt, offended, damned by, and equally cruel, hard words we’ve said. It’s a marathon of smartass talk, of misunderstanding, blame, shame, confusion, of non communication, of pain masked as aggression. Everyone is too engulfed by his or her own problems to listen to anyone else.<br/><br/>Asking for help is such a desperate act. Must it be so? It’s clear that the problems of the parents are no less painful than those of the kids, and they are no better at coping with them. Granted, they’ve come to terms with and developed routines to dampen the anguish of whatever bothers them, but when events flare up - when they’re questioned, thwarted, exposed - they thrash around and lash out as blindly as the kids. What makes the problems hopeless is the uniform failure to talk, the inability to stop trying to scream louder than the next person.
The one scene that seemed superfluous was he classroom scene, an echo of Blackboard Jungle with the kids jeering at a pretentious and floundering substitute teacher What it showed - besides that the teaches was a jerk - was the same thing that every other scene demonstrated: how free-floating hostility and ignorant self-righteousness turn anyone into a target, any place into a wasteland. How excellently we’ve learned to make the worst of any situation, and be pleased with ourselves for the accomplishment! What a gift!
The actors are good: sharp, consistent, full of feeling. They show no way out of the screaming hell that family life can be, but they do make a powerful, impassioned and often very funny statement about the monstrous behavior we accept as normal. All the excitement left me frustrated, stymied, despite the rap session that followed the performance. As intended, Inside/Out leaves the problem squarely with the audience. That is where it belongs. I wouldn’t have wanted a series of happy solutions tacked onto the very real problems. But I did want to feel more sense of possibility, to see some attempts, some exploratory steps toward bridging those terrible gaps, those refusals to acknowledge each other as persons. Because that’s the hard part. Teens and parents may recognize their own attitude in Inside/Out. But what do they do then? How do they talk? How can they get through? How can they even try?
Family Life Theatre is on tour this fall at youth and community centers, hospitals, conferences, and colleges. For information call Anthony Vargas at 360--6603.