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Getting to Know You: An Experiment in Intimacy
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Hollywood Dance Center
Through June 22
RECOMMENDED:
Take eight actors playing eight characters at eight different points in their relationships in rotating, one-on-one scenes with eight stationary audience members, and you have the basic mathematics that informs poet-playwright Anne Katherine Lesser’s mind-blowing, 45-minute journey to the inner ontological limits of the live dramatic performance.
In a large mirrored dance studio awash in a small forest of brightly lit umbrella lamps, each audience member takes an isolated seat along the room’s expansive circumference. Soon the sound system begins warbling a tape loop of Gertrude Lawrence singing “Getting to Know You” from The King and I, as an actor appears and takes a seat nearby. How near? Only a dermatologist has a license to perform any closer.
The scenes take the form of key moments in eight different relationships, with each actor relating to the audience as the same character but to each individual at a different point in the same relationship. For the audience member, however, that bigger picture remains obscured by the radically limited and fragmented points-of-view imposed by Lesser.
What follows is part Milgram experiment, part Sanford Meisner-eque acting exercise: In quick, shape-shifting succession, one finds oneself first the fervent object of a determined pickup in a single’s bar, then the bashful fixation of an awkward adolescent’s puppy love, then a deadbeat roommate in a decidedly soured living situation, then a job applicant as a gallery assistant with an owner who makes visiting him at home (to see his Rothko) a condition of employment. Though no audience member experiences the exact same moment.
And at such in-yer-face extremes, a profoundly disorienting and unsettling thing happens: The lines between audience, actor and character begin to break down as the physical intimacy also erases the histrionic distancing of the traditional dramatic performance and takes it across an interpersonal boundary where fiction and reality become confused and blurred. When, added to the hallucinatory cacophony of the other, simultaneous scenes echoing in the room all under the haunting repetition of the King and I song, it begins to feel like some kind of harrowing, waking dream.
The ensemble (Jesse Goldhor, Dasha Kittredge, Melissa Klein, Kate Lane, Josh Mann, Brigid Marshall, Jan-David Soutar and Sarah Ullman) is superb, ad libbing around the company-devised narratives. And Lesser proves to a congenial if somewhat wickedly controlling host.
Hollywood Dance Center, 817 N. Highland Ave., Hlywd., through June 22. Hollywoodfringe.org/projects/2241
Romeo and Juliet: An ASL Love Story
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Flight Theater
Through June 27
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Photo by Aly Easton
It takes some time to orient oneself to the strange dimension opened up by director Aly Easton’s radically abbreviated, American Sign Language staging of the Bard’s immortal tale of teenage romantic obsession, but once it takes hold, Easton’s surprisingly supple and engaging, modern-dress production proves delightful.
Easton’s most fascinating conceit is her refusal to kowtow to the hearing-enabled. Though the actors perform simultaneously in Shakespeare’s English and ASL, for key scenes, it is ASL-only, with follow-along transcripts provided in the programs. Sometimes the choice makes perfect sense, like the infatuation-at-first-sight meeting between the lovers (played by Nicholaus Mizrahi and Stephanie Nogueras) that is signed beneath the pounding din of the Capulet disco party. At other times, such as during Romeo and Juliet’s post-coital love scene, it lends an additional layer of tenderly poetic intimacy.
Additionally, Easton doubles certain characters, with one performer signing and the other speaking in duets that play like fraught, internal dialogues. This proves especially effective with the Juliet soliloquys played between Nogueras and “voice” Sydney Berk, teasing out tensions in the language that too often go undiscovered.
Otherwise, Mizrahi turns in an appealing if somewhat stolid Romeo; Nichole Trugler is likeably gruff as the pugnacious Mercutio; Philip Rossi ably doubles as both Benvolio and the narrator; Tara Bopp’s nurse is comically engaging; and Jared DeBusk is a graceful Tybalt.
The show’s biggest revelation, however, is Nogueras, who not only convincingly looks the part but delivers a sensitive and fully felt performance that is made all the more powerful by the expressive balletic beauty of her signing.
Flight Theatre, 6472 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; through June 27. Hollywoodfringe.org/projects/2371
