NEW YORK, NY – January 29, 2010 – I keep going to these things thinking one day I'll understand them but I never do but I keep coming back anyway. Experimental theater. Experimental films.
I’ve always been very much a literalist, looking at things in a linear way. Beginning. Middle. End. Well, I’m a news guy! That’s what we do! Beginning. Middle. End. And things come to a conclusion.
But not so in experimental theater. Because it doesn’t come to a logical conclusion, it doesn’t really have an ending, and that appeals to me. It’s kind of anarchistic. And that’s one of the several reasons I moved back to New York. I want to be exposed to some different paradigms, some alternate ways of expression.
Tonight I saw a marvelous production at the -- ready for this? – Ontological-Hysteric Theater in the East Village. You reach the theater by going around the back of this great-looking old church, St. Mark’s. The theater company is the brainchild of Richard Foreman. The New York Times calls him “the emperor of New York experimental theater”. I saw some of Foreman’s work back in the 70s. I mainly remember it because one of the actresses took off all her clothes. That image stuck in my memory for sure! But tonight’s production, “Trifles”, was all PG-rated. But boy was it weird.
The play is "Trifles" by Susan Glaspell.
New York Times writer Ben Brantley describes it “acknowledging that you’re lost, I’m lost, we’re all lost in the unmapped forest of the early 21st century.”
Uh, yeah. Me too.
The story revolves around a murder in 1916 in a remote farmhouse. The wife is the suspect and she’s already been carted off to jail and we never see her. But we see ABOUT her. In an allegorical way, we see her by seeing her shadow. And that’s where the reality starts getting skewed.
The sheriff and the District Attorney come in and do their heavy-handed guy stuff at the murder scene. But the two neighbor women with them don’t see it as a murder scene. They see it as someone's HOME. And in the end, they solve the motivation of the murder while the guys are still stepping on their cranks, dismissing the women’s quite astute observations. (This is 1916 after all!)
I wanted to see the show because murders always interested me as a reporter. I’ve probably covered a dozen. And probably a half dozen murder trials. It’s the highest-stakes chess game in town.
When “Trifles” was over tonight, everyone applauded. I showed my ignorance by nudging the woman next to me and asking, “Is this an act break? Or it over?” It was over.
So I came away with having seen some extremely talented young men and women doing some cutting-edge contemporary material. It’s not something I would have written. And I certainly didn’t understand it. But that doesn’t matter. It stretched my thinking and I enjoyed it.
And that’s what I’m doing in New York. Stretching my thinking.
Copyright 2010 James C. Lewis
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