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Chris Harcum preparing for his one man play “Two Lovely Black Eyes”
The FRIGID festival is on this week, and your intrepid reporter saw two plays Friday night that showcase the diversity and character of Off-Off Broadway theater this season.
As a grown man, I still wear the scars inflicted in childhood by my wonderful mother. I recognized her approach from afar by the click of her high heels, which boomed down hallways in my school. The sound filled me with anxious anticipation, because it always seemed like I was the last person waiting to get picked up. The nadir of our relationship was a family trip to Florida with my aunt and younger sister. I was twelve. In the car on the way down I made the mistake of air drumming the break on a hit Van Halen song. At the resort my mother, my aunt, my sister and I went to the (apparently all ages) dance club, and when the DJ played that track, my mom dragged me out onto the dance floor to dance with her. At the drum break she mimicked my imitation of Alex Van Halen and gestured for me to join in. Need I say more?
Dave Droxler as The Man Who Laughs (photo Carrie Leonard)
The technology of spectacle has changed at an accelerating rate over the last century; the truths of the human heart, however, have remained the same from one generation to the next. The permanent existential crisis that has emerged from world transforming technologies, like a boil on the soul of every human over the age of thirty, hit theatre folk especially hard. First movies tried to be like plays, until plays worried they need to be like movies. Then TV stepped in and made movies a nervous wreck. Now TV is worried that is has to show thirteen hours of entertainment in one sitting if it wants to compete with the Internet. Next thing you know, all theatre will be “immersive,” accessible through social media, and patterned on first-person video games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto. On Saturday nights, patrons will spend five hours with a smartphone in one hand, buying credits to level up, a drink in the other hand, following a group of “actors” around cavernous warehouses repurposed as high concept haunted houses, shrouded in a pleasant or terrifying fog of illusion.
Jake Lasser, Sofia Lund, Randall Benichak, & Joyce Barnathan (Photo Stephanie Warren)
“The world breaks everyone … those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Two guitarists take a seat on the stage, and a woman in flamenco dress steps into the spotlight, her heels tapping a Spanish tattoo like a brace of castanets. A dandy in a ruffled tuxedo shirt and another in a tweed suit are drawn into the light with her, and each takes turns playing the bull to her matador. She is the ánima of España, and these are her most famous artists, Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí.
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