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Advance Guard featuring Ben Kaufman, Mari Yamamoto, and Alesandra Nahodil (Photo KL Thomas)
MING PEIFFER
The term avant-garde comes from the French vanguard, a military term describing the troops moving at the head of an army or the forefront of an action or movement. During battle you would literally, “advance your guard.” Then, sometime in the 1900s, the word avant-garde started to be used to describe new and experimental concepts, particularly those with relation to the arts.
Among other inspirations, it was this idea of avant-garde art having a militaristic or political agenda that fueled a lot of the themes and actions throughout our play. And thus, the title of our new show, ADVANCE GUARD by Ming Peiffer (me), says a lot about what we, at Spookfish Theatre Company, are trying to accomplish with our artwork and with this piece in particular.
A group of friends have gathered to drink beers and smoke buds under the powerlines in suburban Massachusetts in remembrance of their friend Justin, who died under mysterious circumstances at the end of high school. Now, thirteen years later, they have made their anniversary pilgrimage to a spot by a cliff in the shadow of electrical transmission towers, to party in remembrance of him.
But tonight will be different.
Joey (Nat Cassidy), a successful Hollywood writer with a famous singer girlfriend Gretyl Barnes (Lori E. Parquet) and the only member to make it out, has returned as with a proposition. Joey wants to know how Justin really died, and he’s willing to give a brand new Porsche to the one who can tell him. But Stu (Matt Archambault) doesn’t want Joey to learn their innermost stories about Justin. Stu says Joey is a sellout who used his friends’ lives to get rich in Hollywood, and Stu is sick of having his life appropriated without getting the spoils.
Science has brought us many wonderful things, not least of which is an impenetrable set of technical metaphors we can use to describe the mystery of human love. Who (other than a killjoy feminist) doesn’t like to hear a Neo-Darwinist tell you with a straight face that men are attracted to a woman’s red lipstick because it’s an atavistic memory of her nether lips? Really?
Sam Troughton, Neil Stuke, Adam James, and Eleanor Matsuura in Mike Bartlett’s “Bull”
The stage of Mike Bartlett’s new play Bull (subtitled “The Bullfight Play”), included in the Brits Off-Broadway festival at 59E59 Theater, might mislead you into thinking you are at a boxing match rather than a bullfight. But that is just a geometric trompe l’oeil of Soutra Gilmour’s spare, industrial set design. Though the stage is square, like a boxing ring, tricked out with grey office carpet, a water cooler, and clear plastic file holders, the interaction between the players follows the tripartite form of a bullfight.
Sans Merci featuring Alisha Spielman (photo credit Titus Winters)
As the audience finds their seats, a young woman reclines on a couch, listening to headphones.
And there I dream’d—Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream’d
On the cold hill’s side.
Rain lashes the window. This silent, melancholy scene is interrupted by a rap on the door. The young woman rises from the couch and limps over to it. An older woman in a not-so-fashionable pastel colored poncho enters and introduces herself as Elizabeth, Tracy’s mother. Three years after her daughter’s rape and murder in the jungles of Colombia, Elizabeth has travelled from Chicago to L. A. to find out exactly what happened from the last person to hear her daughter’s voice.
culturalcapitol.com 