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Breathing Room
Greenway Court Theatre
Through October 25
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
Most properly a performance piece rather than either a play or a musical composition, Breathing Room could be seen as both an extension and a contraction of the talents of Mary Lou Newmark, who if naught else pursues assiduously her own muse. Playing her trademark neon green electric violin, Newmark incorporates a classically-informed attack on the instrument with an embrace of digitally programmed soundscapes that has one foot planted in the now-quaint experiments of the last quarter of the 20th century and another in her own determinedly dreamy optimistic take on a stern assessment of contemporary mores. In short, an eccentric modernist with a distinctively emotional Romantic core.
Evolving out of Newmark’s poetry, Breathing Room incorporates a number of forms without alighting long on any one of them. Cast as a four-movement work with a coda, each labeled with an allusive quotation from the likes of Alan Watts, George Santayana or Native American tradition, the music starts out with a sublime concentration on a cohesive sense of rigor. Neither programmatic, nor providing underlying support for the spoken vignettes, instead the actions of the characters, a Professor who teaches high school science (Charles Reese) and his neighbor Marilyn, a former teacher (Eileen T’Kaye), provide counterpointed commentary on the music, a refreshing turnabout from convention.
What through-line exists in the acted portion is thematic rather than dramatic, making observations about disjunctions of perception and priority that it aptly dubs “the technological vertigo” of everyday experience. Sometimes the insights are pointed, others generic. Newmark takes special delight employing scientific theory as metaphor, sometimes inevitably stretching ambiguously complex theories into moral fables, for which I have far more empathy than those who propagate bald superstition as spiritual superiority.
That notwithstanding, over the course of the brief evening, the music gradually recedes into a role subsidiary to the skits, which, while sometimes diverting thanks to savvy mounting and charismatic performers, tend toward a genial preachiness that may have grown far more nuanced than its foundational New Agey roots but still lapses overmuch into generalizing attitudes. Newmark comes by her metaphysical vision of renewing contact with body and land honorably, though she nevertheless remains a rather orthodox outlier.
Given the relatively spare materials at hand, the degree of production skill applied certainly maximizes the impact of both the philosophical ideas and the visceral, aural stimulation. Newmark and her codesigner Will Mahood have fashioned an inventive ear environment. The Greenway Court affords an almost harshly reflective acoustic space that is deployed to an enveloping effect that obscures the directional source yet amplifies our hearing to guitar-hero proportions, only adorned with a subtler, more layered, womb of loud sound.
For their part, Reese and T’Kaye amiably and ably puncture any tendency to pretension with an array of rhetorical flourishes, familiar if deft comic byplay, and always welcome basic dance steps (how simply delightful they dance a minuet during the Minuet that precedes the Trio). Director Dan Berkowitz exhibits a firm grasp on how to wring the most staging value out what assuredly had been bare bones of dialogue and situation. One expects nothing less than resourceful lighting from Jeremy Pivnick, and while his notions are not complicated, they do wrangle some surprising effects.
On the whole, though, Breathing Room does not benefit adequately from the interplay of its parts to achieve the cohesiveness of some of Newmark’s earlier, more purely musical, work, such as her recording Green Angel or her best opus yet, the Canto de Luz concerto played at the Kirk Douglas a while back with the Culver City Chamber Orchestra, but it’s a commendable attempt to stretch that honestly builds upon her gifts. Sorry if I craved far more of those pyrotechnics on that green violin…
Greenway Court Theatre, 544 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A.; Sat., 2 & 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through October 25. (323) 655-7679 x100, www.greenwaycourthteatre.org/breathing-room
