Rest assured, however, that I did make it to the correct warehouse, eventually, and found myself graciously welcomed, handed a bottle of water and a Popsicle and motioned towards the entrance of the playing space. Once there, I joined the crowd of people wandering around the large warehouse space and waiting for the show to officially start (it’s an ambulatory piece in which the audience follows various characters around the space, Medieval Christian theater is quite the theme this year!) As I did so I observed the mental-hospital green wood walls and the intriguing little stations and locations that make up Maria Shaplin’s excellent set and lighting design. The devil may be in the details, but delight lives there too, because each space Shaplin has created is as specific as its residents. We have the Pulpit of Pater Baruch Erleichda (Kristen Baily), especially proportioned for her immense height (thanks to silts, which she moves in better than most people do in sneakers). Dr. Margot Hesper (Mary Tuomanen) is given a tree house-style laboratory complete with hanging apothecary jars and futuristic blood containers and a slide projector for studying possible contagion. Tristan Schwa (Thomas Choinacky), the nonconformist artist, gets a neat little set of stairs that can become a bedroom, a studio or a party, whatever he prefers. Government stooges “L” (John Jarboe) huddles behind his desk, makes announcements and hands out permits (if everything is in order, of course) while newcomer Luisa (Jessica Hurely) dwells in a series of stacked platforms. It may not be much, but it’s home! Dressed in white burlap-looking utilitarian garments (I guess in the future we are just going to make one decision about color and stick with it, Color Me Beautiful be damned) these five characters make up a society, an entire miniature world, like a terrarium inside a closed glass container. But if one plant or person decides to break out, what happens to the rest of them? Can anyone really remain an individual inside a locked room? Is it true that “A Citizen’s duties are more important than it’s rights”? And who makes miracles happen, gods above or revolutions below?

Each little space established in the larger environment carves out a niche, creating destinations, focal points for action and critical information. Sometimes. Because an issue that emerges when you have a piece in which you pick a character and follow them about, or drift from storyline to storyline, is that the dissemination of important information becomes a challenge. The goal of performances like this is that everyone has a different experience, but everyone has the same fundamental understanding of what’s happening here. So the events are the same, you just see them from a different perspective. But insuring that that happens is difficult, as is distinguishing between the moments where the audience can scatter and the moments in which each spectator needs to be witnessing the same things. And when there are so many things happening at once it can be hard to understand what you really need to know. In a piece that includes  the threat of a deadly illness, the struggle of an individual artist versus the conformity of a bureaucratic system, a love story, a religious crisis, and several dance breaks, all enacted quietly and in a way that is the opposite of epic, getting everything you need to understand the final moments of the piece isn’t exactly an easy task. But that’s theater for you. If you’re not working for it, you probably aren’t doing it right.

Overseers takes its audience many places. To a large warehouse, a garden of dead things, a party, a revolution, a religious revelation and the office of the interior exterior identity. It offers us water and beer, gin and cake, it warns us of death and destruction, it lets us celebrate “Potentsday” with it, and it does it all so casually, so quietly, that it almost seems everyday. People conflict, they have anxiety, stress and concern, they worry about the future and the actions of the unseen all-powerful Body Official, but none of these things seems quite real, or quite dangerous. Each performance is compelling, interesting, articulate and sympathetic, and mysterious, but without a real mystery to solve. It’s like a series of clues for a scavenger hunt, only there is no final prize, no ultimate solution or answer or conclusion. Just laughter, and an urge to see what has been created. Which is a lot like life, if you think about it, no matter how much we might crave more danger and more finality in performance. Well, as we are told, “Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is very frightening now, is it?” It’s rather scary, because it’s true.

Applied Mechanic’s Overseers has finished its run but you can find out more about the company here.

When we last checked in with Phillips, one of Philadelphia’s favorite tour de forces (though there are so many from which to choose) he was delighting audiences with his one man telenovela, El Conquistador! and preparing his next work for the 2011 Live Arts Festival, WHaLE OPTICS. But somewhere in between all that Phillips has found the time to perform 17 Border Crossings, a work that spans continents and countries all from the safety of the Painted Bride’s stage. Working with a very clever set, a hallmark of Phillips work and a testament to his design skills as he himself created the set along with the piece itself, Phillips combines a lecture style talk on the history of the passport (invented by Henry the 5th of England) and the nature of borders with 17 tales of 17 border crossings, acted out with Phillips playing border guards and frightened travelers, backpackers and customs officials and even a smuggler at one point, though of what we may never know. Spanning time as well as space, we aren’t really sure if these are all experiences that Phillips has actually had or stories he has appropriated, and it honestly doesn’t in any way matter either way. With his casual charm and piercing focus Phillips takes complete ownership of these stories, which is interesting considering he tells them as a Second Person narrative. The set design along with Maria Shaplin’s well crafted lighting allows Phillips to continually re-invent the space, it’s a row of train compartments, it’s a ferry from Italy to Croatia, it’s an American Customs Declaration queue, but it’s always a line in the sand, chalked onto the ground by people in an effort to transform geography into something we can control, an artificial boundary that says this space isn’t like that other space because if we aren’t us and them then what can we possibly be?

Many of these stories are funny, because Phillips is funny, and because the terror of being held and questioned and yelled at in a language that is not your own is very funny once you are safe at home. And many of these stories are tinged with sadness, with the stupidity of humanity, with the foolish destruction our obsession with separation has caused. And many of these stories are both. When Phillips describes the town of Mostar, Bosnia, a town that has segregated it’s Christians and it’s Muslims and now the church bells war with the Islamic call to pray, creating an aural wall separating the two parts of the city, you can’t help but chuckle at the imagery even as you wince at the implication. When he acts out being stuck in a town in Croatia or illegally entering Cuba we laugh both from the comedy and from the discomfort, the very real conflicts permeating these nations are drawn into harsh relief by the simple act of observation. And then we have the more difficult stories, the tale of Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian fruit seller whose self-immolation in protest of his government’s refusal to return the scales he used to weigh his fruit and, therefore, support himself, ignited a country into action and crossed the ultimate borders between self and collective, between inaction and action, and between life and death. Compare this story to Phillips account of being asked “si eres Taliban” by the Colombian customs inspectors because of his Moroccan slippers or the sexy Israeli border guards at crossings 5 and 6, and we feel a pinch of disunity. All of these stories are excellently told and worth hearing, but they aren’t all getting to the same point. Yes, we can play fast and loose with the Brazilian, Colombian and Peruvian borders as they shift with the Amazon’s currents, yes we can cross from Holland to France and, strip searches aside, make it to our destinations. But not everyone can. Not everyone gets to cross all the borders, which is what makes the last story, which chronicles both Phillips trip to Mexico and a Mexican attempt to ford the Rio Grande and escape into the hostile bosom of the land of the free all the more poignant. And while Phillips imagined scenario in which a Texan border guard watches the “extraterrestre” run into the night, realizing “the pointlessness of all of this” is the reality we wish existed, the reality we live in includes Arizona Senate Bill 1070, it includes the Russian Chechnyan conflict, the persecution of Turks in Holland, and a thousand other border disputes and land wars. So while we would like to relax and enjoy Phillips phenomenal performance like we would a good wine, the truth is we are left bitter in the mouth, and rightfully so. He is uncovering the faulty foundations at the heart of many of our existences, the idea that we are rooted, that borders don’t shift or are immutable and impermeable, these are obvious lies. As Salman Rushdie wrote in his novel Shame:

So roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. The anti-myths of gravity and of belonging bear the same name: flight. Migration,n., moving, for instance in flight, from one place to another. To fly and to flee, both are ways of seeking freedom….an odd thing about gravity, incidentally, is that while it remains uncomprehended everybody seems to find it easy to comprehend the notion of its theoretical counter force, anti-gravity….

Thaddeus Phillips’ 17 Border Crossings has finished it’s run, but if we are lucky he will do it again, soon. Or you can see Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental this coming Live Arts/Philadelphia Fringe festival as they premier their work WHaLE OPTICS.

New Paradise Laboratories is a Philadelphia based theater company that prides itself on it’s collaborative creative process with pieces such as Prom and Don Juan in Nirvana. Their last Live Arts Festival offering was the technologically savvy behemoth Fatebook: Avoiding Catastrophe One Party At A Time, an experiment in projection, deception, and social networking (I know, it kind of sounds like your college experience, doesn’t it?), and their work has the sense of being the product of a host of writers and voices. The Riot Group, on the other hand, is a New York based company whose pieces like Hearts of Man, Switch Tryptic and Hell Meets Henry Halfway (a collaboration with Pig Iron Theater Company) all bear the marks of playwright, performer and co-founder Adriano Shaplin’s distinctively vicious turns of phrase (think David Mamet but with talent). Of the Riot Group works I have been lucky enough to see, all of them were categorized by heady themes, direct audience address, and the fiery talents of Stephanie Viola, a Riot Group founder and performer. So I couldn’t help but be interested in observing the fruits of this joint effort by these two very different very distinct theater groups, and I have to say, they seem to have gone together like, as the British say, a house on fire. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, mind you.

Part one of the 80 minute piece takes place in 1865 in the months, weeks, hours and minutes leading up to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (the versatile and oddly endearing Drew Friedman, The Riot Group) by John Wilkes Booth (the charismatic and compelling Jeb Kreager, New Paradise Laboratories). While Viola plays Mary Todd Lincoln (an amusing contrast to Friedman’s height, Viola is like a sprightly doll seated on his lap and demanding the White House be spiritually cleansed, and this is based on a true story, so I’m assuming Mary Todd was actually into the occult) the rest of the cast takes on various roles over the course of the first half of the play.  Paul Schnabel (Riot Group) and Shaplin himself are both sporting thick New York accents for some reasons, which gives the atmosphere a touch of a Gangs of New York theme, and both Mary McCool and McKenna Kerrigan (both New Paradise Laboratories) shine in their various positions (that’s intentionally sexual, by the way, don’t bring the little ones, this piece does for Civil War Washington D.C. what The Tudors does for pre-Elizabethan England).

Crowded together in a stage made intentionally cramped (I’m assuming) by thick white lines delineating a square divided in two, the actors move like pieces in a sliding tile puzzle, or a chess match, tip-toeing and forming Victorian Portrait tableau (lovingly illuminated by Maria Shaplin’s lighting design) around the two poles of Freedom Club‘s globe, one one side John Wilkes Booth, and on the other side Abraham Lincoln. And, like Othello’s Iago or Paradise Lost‘s Satan, Booth is the anti-hero of this piece, or at the very least, he’s the character we hear the most, and the only character who leaves the confines of the delineated space during the first half of the play, sitting in the audience, strolling the sides of the stage, gun in hand, like Sondheim’s Assassins, but on speed.  Declaiming like an orator, Kreager isn’t the most sympathetic of anti-heroes, but thanks to Shaplin’s dialogue he’s at least well spoken. Effortlessly throwing out phrases like “Who was Shakespeare but a queer puppeteer counterfeiting characters in a play” that would have felled a lesser actor, Kreager’s Booth is practically overflowing with intense theatrical bile, refusing to bend to what he deems “a grand emasculation of the South” by the capitalist cut throat Lincoln and his allies. Lincoln on the other hand has no such victory, he is broken, defeated even as the North itself has achieved victory, and no amount of hand jobs (the gifts of his obedient wife, and a detail that recalls Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love, especially given the fact that Lincoln calls Mary Todd Mother…) can console him for what he calls “the rape of the South”. And while ostensibly Booth is about to kill Lincoln because he’s a white supremacist in a pre-Klan United States, it really doesn’t read that way, but seems to be rather an ego battle, an issue of personalities, not principles.  But then again, maybe that’s what it really was.

Once this portion of the play reaches it’s inevitable conclusion (Sic Semper Tyrannis, etc…), the audience finds itself sitting in the dark watching numbers tick by, a weak attempt at representing the passage of time, frankly, until we arrive in the not so distant future of 2015, where the battle isn’t for slavery but for abortion rights. The cast has thrown aside their gorgeously made Victorian gear (courtesy of costume designer Rosemarie E. McKelvey) for pink spotted cameo in various incarnations, and has transformed into a group of pro-Choice radicals arguing about revolution from the depths of their Virgina-based compound. Apparently at this point President Obama has been assassinated, our president is a female, and abortion centers all over the USA are being shut down, and everyone has suddenly realized that women are the new black, and not in a fun fashion way either. Arguments about action, commitment, ideology and those pesky human relationships abound, and as the cast stands in a line, talking to each other but staring straight at the audience, it sort of feels like A Chorus Line with more anger and less glitter. And while the second half is all telling with no showing, and certainly less fun then I thought the future would be, it does raise one interesting questions, and that is, are women who get pregnant and decide to keep their child automatically NOT pro-choice? When did pro-choice automatically become abortion only in everyone’s eyes? It may not be 2015 yet, but it’s still an interesting question.

One of the goals of collaborative work is to create a seamless whole from disparate parts (though, frankly, that’s one of the goals of theater in general, isn’t it?), and interesting as it is Freedom Club doesn’t quite achieve. It’s an intriguing rumination on the nature of freedom and history and human action, but it feels fractured at points, clearly the work of multiple authors and the product of two different methodologies of making art, and while the points of joining feel the most clean and compelling, the moments of disunity are opaque, unsettling and they don’t ring true.  I guess that”s history for you, though, it always looks different depending on where you are standing.

New Paradise Laboratories/The Riot Group’s Freedom Club is running until tomorrow, Saturday September 11th. Pick up tickets here.