The play starts with, oh, wait, we already covered that. Or did we? Because though it’s not written in the actual text, this play really starts with a disaster. A ship goes down somewhere off the coast of Illyria (the oh so exotic modern day Albania) and though we don’t know the full extent of the casualties we do know that the shipwreck has separated two twin siblings, Viola (Sarah Sanford) and Sebastian (Blake DeLong), each of whom thinks the other one is dead. And while the script itself may not include the event, I personally would have loved to see what director Dan Rothenberg and the rest of the company would have done with that. Moreover, there is something very significant in the fact that this story starts with a trauma, a displacement, because not only does it set up the actions of Viola and Sebastian, but it also opens the field for everyone else to become displaced as well,  it literalize the chaos instantly and drives the action of the play up until its final moments. Additionally, Maiko Matsushima’s set design seems to beg for an ocean scene. All done in grainy whites and grays, with ghostly wallpaper decorating the back walls, the minimal set comprises of two doors, one set of stairs, and one enormous slide. The slide is, of course, as one would expect from Matsushima, super cool, but doesn’t actually do much to serve the piece itself. It’s mostly used as a way to make a wacky entrance, a small nod to the physical abilities of the company and the cast. It would have been an amazing wave, though…But there’s no use crying over spilled shipwrecks, now, is there, so I will leave off mourning the loss of a watery grave and move on with the story.

So Viola thinks Sebastian is dead and visa versa, and Viola decides to do the logical thing and disguise herself like a man, get a job with the local Duke (Dito Van Reigersberg as Orsino) and proceeds to earn herself the jealously of her peers (folks playing fellow servants include Alex Torra, Mark McCloughan and Jaime Maseda) and the adoration of her master’s beloved, the haughty Olivia (Birgit Huppuch). Some girls/boys have all the luck. Oliva’s new-found love also dashes the hopes of Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Andy Paterson), an empty-headed but amiable enough fellow who spends his time carousing with Sir Toby Belch (James Sugg), Olivia’s ner-do-well uncle, and Feste, the nomad/bum/fool full of wisdom (Scott Greer), and the three amuse themselves by dodging Maria (Charleigh Parker) Olivia’s maid and being scolded by Malvolio (Michael McGuinness) Oliva’s stiff-rumped steward.

And though there are two households in this play, both alike, in dignity (what, like anyone could have resisted that one?) the majority of the time is actually spent with the lady, rather than the lord. His angst and flare for the melodramatic established neatly in the opening scenes of the play (and due to Van Reigersberg’s unapologetic and delicious sense of drama) Duke Orsino sends his new favorite servant Cesario (Viola) on over to Olivia and it is with her that the play stays up to, well, really the end. As Cesario, Stanford’s Viola is prickly, angry, bold and rude to Huppuch’s WASPy and repressed Olivia, resentful of her rival who not only is permitted to be publicly female, but scorns the love of the one man Viola wants. Though, to be fair, he’s also the one man around of a suitable age and station who isn’t her direct blood relation, so, you know, the girl can’t really be picky. The scenes between Stanford and Huppuch are actually some of the strongest work from each of the two actresses. We watch Huppuch’s Olivia bloom with infatuation and quickly grow intoxicated basking in Stanford’s frustration and vitality. The way Viola describes love is the way every woman wants to be loved, for “[Olivia] should not rest / Between the elements of air and earth/ But you should pity [Viola]“. Swoon. Huppuch quickly moves from stiff and self-pitying to adorably giddy and adoring, doting on the confused and concerned Stanford like someone with a new pet. Meanwhile Viola just wants to comfort the lovelorn Orsino, who is so in love with love that he speaks in sighs and whimpers. And he’s not alone in this. Olivia, Viola, Orsino and Sebastian, each one of them is in love with the idea of love then with a person. It’s not really giving away any surprises to tell you that the twins are reunited, DeLong’s cutely indie rock Sebastian and Olivia are quickly married, and of course, she accepts that she’s ended up with a man she’s never really met before with noble grace, and Orsino, when confronted with Cesario’s true feminine nature, basically tells her, “put on a dress and then we can talk”. Of course, that sounds better in rhyme. But then, that’s what this whole play is about, at least for the lovers involved, falling in love with love. The other person in the room is just a bonus.

And if that’s what its like for the lovers, what is it like for everyone else? Because while the lovers are lovely, the fools, drunks and servants are the real stars of this production, and they are led, fearlessly and fantastically, by the twin talents of James Sugg and Scott Greer. Sugg’s Sir Toby is just electrifying, when he’s on stage he’s the only person worth watching. Perpetually drunk (and Sugg as a master at acting drunk) unbearably funny, with a command of the language that is fluid and facile. His every line is either a sexual innuendo, an insult, or both. If the rest of the play takes place in New England, all grey and black and navy tones, somber and serious (costumes by Olivera Gajic) Sugg lives in Miami. He wears a series of synthetic and shiny blazers and rainbow toned pants with panache, his chest hair perennially on display, his hand always clutching a flask. He is complimented by Paterson’s comically meek and adorably nebbish Sir Andrew, whose madras shorts and sherbet toned blazers give him the air of just having wandered off of Princeton’s campus. And Sugg is foiled by Greer’s Feste. Feste is one of the most intriguing characters in Shakespeare’s cannon. A vagrant, a wise man, an idiot savant, a truth teller, a story spinner, he’s all these things at once, and more. He has a magical quality that allows him to see the truth in people and state it clearly. As they say, a fool may laugh at a king, especially in this play which rests it’s foundations upon subverting the natural order of things. In this play, the duke is the idiot and the idiot is the leader.  He is the one standing outside of the world of the play, pointing at all of these funny drunken folks and saying, lord, what fools these mortals be. And he can sing. And Greer’s Feste is excellent, thoughtful, smart, critical, wry and wise. If he and Sugg’s Toby made a two-man show and took it on the road they would make a fortune, I tell you. And this boy’s club lives Parker’s Maria, the rather more street-wise Joan Holloway of the piece, sexy, smart and sassy. The only problem lies in McGuinness’ Malvolio. It’s not that McGuinness isn’t talented, he is, in fact, he’s very likeable. And that’s the problem. In order for the humiliation and shame that greets Malvolio to be truly funny, we really have to hate this pompous and self-absorbed character. But McGuinness’ Malvolio is honestly rather nice, stiff and stuffy, sure, but in no way deserving of the punishment that is meted out for him. The long sub-plot devoted to his downfall feels like a detraction from the play, rather than a part of its hilarity and revelry.

But the music, the music my friends! Rosie Langabeer’s wonderful cross-cultural score mixing Gypsy melodies and Balkan tunes, Sephardic tropes and Klezmer notes is just fantastic, and so well performed by her band of Chad Brown, Patrick Huges, Joshua Machiz and Marina Vishnyakova (as well as members of the cast) that we will sit through even a less then stellar scene all for the chance to hear them again. So even if this production doesn’t say anything new and different about this work of theater, Pig Iron certainly got the music part of that food of love thing down pat. And if the love itself isn’t perfect, well, far be it for me to criticize the source material, but it’s hard to fall in love when you aren’t sure if your boyfriend is really your girlfriend. It’s all surprisingly modern, if you think about it.

Pig Iron Theatre Company’s production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is running until the 17th of September. Pick up tickets here.

Comments? Questions? Concerns? I welcome them all! Please feel free to comment below!

Photo by Alexander Iziliaev

It’s a little known fact that Guillaume Apollinaire, short-lived but extremely celebrated (at least during his lifetime) French playwright and poet, coined the term surrealism in the preface to his revised version of Les Mamelles de Tiersias. The production premiered just a year before Apollinaire died of influenza (people used to die so romantically, didn’t they?), and 6 years after Apollinaire was accused of stealing the Mona Lisa, which is objectively wildly cool. The story goes that Apollinaire passed the buck to his good friend, a lesser known artist by the name of Pablo Picasso, but given what we know about Paris during this time period I’m sure the two just split a bottle of absinthe and a pair of can-can dancers and made up. Like most of his time, Apollinaire was obsessed with new forms, new art methods, and a complete desecration of the past. The Constructivists declared an end to painting, the Futurists wanted to destroy the Uffizi, and the early surrealists used the principles of cubism in drama, or at least Apollinaire, who was associated with the Cubists, did. And if The Proliferation of the Imagination, a newly devised work created by BalletX and The Wilma Theater and presented by the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts is anything, it is an attempt to be true to Apollinaire’s legacy in these respects, and while it may not always completely hang together as a piece of performance, the effort is as ambitious as it is admirable.

Photo by Alexander Iziliaev

We could now start with the plot of Apollinaire’s piece, but given the nature of this work I doubt very much that it would do anyone any good. It may take its name and theme from Ovid’s tale, but that’s about it. Suffice to say that married couple Therese (an excellently two dimensional Mary McCool) and her unnamed Husband (a hilarious Luigi Sottile who is surprisingly good at walking in heels) are having some marital issues, and end up switching genders, making babies, ruling countries and reconciling. As one does. As Sotille and McCool clomp ridgedly around the stage, showing off Maiko Matsushima’s excellently angular outfits which are gloriously reminiscent of Oskar Schlemmer’s works, the dancers of BalletX swirl gracefully around them, specifically Tara Keating and Matthew Prescott as their gender bending shadows.  Though Keating and Prescott move beautifully, teasing each other and displaying their unique flare for movement with style (Keating is especially lovely in a hat that ought to make its way into the Royal Wedding party somehow), their freedom of motion only highlights the rigidity of McCool and Sottile; the actors are effectively divorced from any opportunity of movement, and the piece neatly divides dancers, musicians and actors all the way up until the end. And to give credit where credit is due, not only do McCool and Sottile enter fully into the spirit of this piece, but they gamely grimace and grin as Lamb wiggles and spins, her legs moving like elastic bands in a dazzlingly virtuoso performance, moving to Langabeer’s excellent score like a jellyfish crossed with a prima ballerina. Jaime Lennon and Anitra Keegan are less captivating as the dueling pair Presto and Lacouf, their goose-stepping and grand battement style duel overlaid with a pre-recorded conversation about whether we are in Paris or Zanzibar, which honestly feels like a missed opportunity. Part of what surrealism aimed to do was to embrace free association, exploring new ways of combining concepts and ideas to reinvent artistic expression. The juxtaposition of conflicting or unrelated elements became paramount, as Pierre Reverdy wrote of the idea of “a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be — the greater its emotional power and poetic reality”. The chance then to use this interaction to discuss this contrast, this random grouping of two cities, the glorious absurdity of confusing Paris with Zanzibar (I mean, Zanzibar wasn’t even a French colony!) is one of those wonderful surrealist elements that could have been used better in this work. It’s rare moments like this when the piece feels more like an essay on the surreal then the surreal itself.

But to be fair,the focal point of this piece is really about gender, and therefore it can be forgiven the choices it chooses not to make. Less forgivable is the under use of Steven Dufala’s fascinating set, which almost feels like it’s been avoided rather than actually used. The interactive set piece of a moving kiosk is cleverly done, however, and if it’s function seems a bizarre mix of authority figure and sex toy, well, just chalk that up to the surrealism. In light of the gender issues coming into play here, the questions of power and position as the male prerogative whereas women are only good for making babies (or are they….) directors Matthew Neenan (co-artistic director of BalletX) and Walter Bilderback (Dramaturg for The Wilma Theater)  have taken on a Herculean effort in this work, shaping a whole out of the many elements of this work and allowing it to retain the flavor of the absurd and the surreal while not being completely nonsensical. The piece does still feel a little segregated, dancers in one place, actors in another, which makes sense given that this is the first collaborative devised work that BalletX and The Wilma have ever attempted, but frankly there is such a satisfaction in the final moments of the piece because they actually allow McCool and Sottile to join in and move. And if in the end it’s better for both Therese and her husband to retain their manhoods, and the power that comes with them, well, we can’t really blame them. Just under a hundred years may have passed but for much of the world women still make babies and men still govern nations and genders still bend, to the horror of many. The most important thing, is to “be aware of it”.

The Proliferation of the Imagination will run from now until the 24th of April. Tickets are available here.

Performed in one of the dark cavernous warehouses at 5th and Fairmount (a space leased by the Live Arts/Philadelphia Fringe Festival as a ticket office and two Live Arts performance spaces), Jan and Canuso have created an immense “gallery” of sorts, a huge hexagonal audience bank completely surrounding a large white “cube” as it is being titled. In reality this “cube” is a square veiled by four white screens, which can be opaque vehicles for projection, transparent gauze revealing Canuso and Van Reigersberg as they idle, cuddle, leap and dance around a group of wicker-looking furniture objects(presumably the work of costume/object designer Maiko Matsushima, I swear, she’s the secret mastermind behind this festival), or both at once.

The relationship between Van Reigersberg and Canuso seems to be in constant flux, in one moment they seem completely distant from each other, in another they are embracing, first lovers, than children, than rivals.  The sparsely populated “set” (if that word is even relevent here) includes a birdcage filled with letters, and a small set of stairs leading nowhere. At one point Canuso causally overturns each object as Van Reigersberg tries to right them, to re-arrange, to fix. Each artist seems to be re-making the space, re-imagining the room as it relates to their bodies. Canuso especially tests the contours and boundaries of the cube itself, gently pushing her body against the material of the screens, creating bends and curves in the square. As the two dancers travel through the space the projections begin, remain, intensify and flag, ebbing and flowing to the rhythms of Mike Kiley’s sound design (and, at times, to his original pieces; Kiley is a member of The Mural and the Mint). The series of images becomes breathtaking, a kaleidoscope of ink-blot drawings, a sequence of Canuso and Van Reigersberg dancing with a thousand versions of themselves, of each other.

While Van Reigersberg is a talented physical theater artist and certainly exciting to watch, it is Canuso whose movements are truly gorgeous. There is something in her body that seems to long for ascension, for flight, there is always the sensation of upwards movement even as she is anchored to the ground. The combination of Van Reigersberg and Canuso’s bodies is a fascinating one, he lifts and spins her as easily as if she were a doll, and in some ways the piece seems to be an exploration of how these two bodies can fit into each other. In other ways the piece is an exploration of the nature of audience, as the spectators are invited to explore the 360 degree radius of the cube, to sit up close and far away, to walk, to observe the performance in whatever way they choose to do so, and therefore become a part of the performance in a sense, interacting with it like a museum piece. But if this is a piece in a museum gallery, as Canuso references in the piece she has written for the program, then it reminds one of Richard Serra’s enormous Band, or Tony Smith’s Smoke, both on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. All three of these works seem to say “There is the piece, and then there is you, and you become a part of the piece whether you want to or not, and that’s part of what makes it a piece of art”. Did anyone follow that? Man, the Live Arts Festival can get confusing, don’t you think?

When I saw this piece I couldn’t help but be reminded of the work of Niki Cousineau and Subcircle, the dance company she has with husband and co-collaborator Jorge. I’m thinking specifically her most recent piece, Only Sleeping, a work that had Niki interacting with projections of herself and of another Pig Iron member, Geoff Sobelle (is it just me, or is this kind of a trend?).  I suppose that makes sense, given the fact that Nicole and Niki have collaborated on more than one occasion, and considering that at times it feels like there are approximately ten people living in the city of Philadelphia and you have met ALL of them.  I’m not saying that Takes feels like a derivation of Cousineau’s work, or that Subcircle has appropriated Canuso in some way, but rather that in some respects the pieces feel like a dialog, two different interpretations of the same thing, two ways to ask the same question, one scene, two takes.

Nichole Canuso Dance Company’s Takes will run until the 18th of September as part of the Live Arts/Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Pick up tickets here.

I first had the opportunity to see Ford at her worst (and by that I mean best) in Pig Iron Theater Company’s offering for last year’s Live Arts/Philadelphia Fringe, Welcome To Yuba City. Running around a mythical Southwestern desert and changing costumes and characters at lightening speed, Ford was at once a Russian mail order bride, a nerdy kid, a cross-eyed cowboy, something involving a mullet, among others, and I have to say, there wasn’t a single character she played that I didn’t enjoy. So when I heard that Ford was creating a piece for this year’s Live Arts/Philadelphia Fringe Festival, I was, of course, unreservedly thrilled. That knowledge coupled with the information that the director of the work was to be Geoff Sobelle (and if you don’t already have a giant talent crush on the Pig Iron/Rainpan 43 member/all around tour-de-force, well, you should), found me fairly foaming at the mouth to see what they came up with. And so this past Friday evening I made it my business to be seated, cell phone politely silenced, ready to be amazed. And while you can’t always get what you want, in this case, I did in fact achieve satisfaction.

In an animal behavior course I took in college I learned that human beings are the only creatures in the animal kingdom that can feel disgust. I must warn you that that feeling does come up quite a bit during the course of Ford’s supremely deliciously disgusting new piece, Chicken. The premise is simple enough, three eccentric denizens of a small turquoise and teal submarine take turns torturing each other (and themselves) as they kill time. Our first introduction to this motley crew is Jay Dunn’s Stanley,  the bumbling handyman/chef/housekeeper, who stumbles around the claustrophobic space like a clumsy bear in a mint jumpsuit. Between causally breaking the submarine and potentially endangering the lives of cast and audience alike by creating the most disgusting meal possible (seared squid, condensed Campbill’s soup and noodles mixed together, prepared right there on stage; good help is so very hard to find, isn’t it?), Stanley seems to be engaged in a silent battle with Eddie, another crew member, over the oeuvre of Elvis Presley and the attentions of Captain Pam (Ford). The excellently disturbing Eddie, played by Mikaal Sulaiman, reminds one of a snail crossed with a child molester, all sweaty palms and stares, curling into his little corner of the stage, which is decorated with images of the King, of course. While it’s not clear exactly what Eddie does in this submarine, (he seems to be listening on headphones for a large chunk of time, though whether that’s to hear whales tales or Love Me Tender I couldn’t say), it is clear that he is the object of Pam’s bizarre affections.

And then there is Pam herself, a lisping slurring obnoxiously juvenile, manic deceptive figure with a terrible (and wonderful) wig who takes such pleasure in her sophomoric pranks and bad jokes that she practically fizzes with delight. She fills Stan’s spray bottle with urine and makes him brush his teeth with it, she accuses both her compatriots of raping her and becomes sexually aroused when Eddie plays along and spends the rest of the piece thrusting against ladders and making erotic use of a thigh-master in an effort to seduce him, and that’s all just in the first half of the performance. As dinner for three (seriously, don’t sit in the front, this show is seriously smelly) devolves into a high stakes game of Chicken (see what they did there?) with dares ranging from licking someone’s eyeball (a task Eddie performs almost lovingly, caressing Stan’s face like a soft core porno) to chowing down on Fancy Feast (which really can’t be any worse than the dinner, as my companion observed) to far worse. The last dare culminates in a sharp left turn that leaves our protagonists (Antagonists? Abusers? New best friends?) in quite a pickle, which serves as a nice closing taste to a fantastic and terrible meal. In an effort not to ruin the ending for those who love suspense, I wont reveal any more than that, but suffice to say, like any successful game of chicken, it turns brutal at the drop of a hat.

Because Ford has spent the past year as an Artist in Residence for the Live Arts Festival, she has been working and developing this piece in a large warehouse at 919 North 5th Street, a cement laden space that gives new meaning to the term industrial chic. Instead of using the entirety of the awkwardly shaped loading dock once used for furniture deliveries, Ford’s set (and costume) designer, the multi-talented Maiko Matsushima (who collaborated with Jebney Lewis on the set) has created a beautiful and claustrophobic little underwater coffin for all of this revolting and intriguing insanity to exist within, though it does beg the question as to why the submarine is significant. Apart from the anxiety of a small enclosed space and the excuse it provides for all of these people to be stuck together, there is never a larger sense of their purpose for being there, or a sense of how much time they have spent alone together underwater. Perhaps if we had had a better sense of whatever has been leading up to this point in time the final Twilight-Zone conclusion would feel as if it had been slightly better earned. As it stands now, despite just how gross the dish being offered turned out to be, it still left me hungry for more, more of Ford and her extremely talented cast, and more of this piece, this story. As excited as I was to see this, I am even more eager to see where this might go.

On an  unrelated note, I haven’t read a single article or interview with Ford that has failed to mention the fact that she and Sobelle are romantically engaged. I guess some memo goes around that never finds its way to my desk. So here is my apparently obligatory nod to theatrical gossip, though why everyone is so fascinated with collaborators who get together, I have no idea. Oh, well, don’t worry, Geoff and Charlotte, I’m sure Brad and Angelia can relate.

If you want to see Chicken (and you SHOULD), you can buy tickets here, it will be running through the end of the Festival. Come on, do it, I dare you.