right left with heels

Reviewed by Gray Palmer
City Garage
Through August 14

RECOMMENDED

Sebastian Majewski’s play right left with heels, now receiving a U.S. premiere at City Garage in a disturbing, lovely production directed by Frederique Michel, gives us a tale of post-war Polish history as told by a pair of shoes.

These shoes (Lindsay Plake as right and Alexa Yeames as left) are innocent in their complicated way. They presume that we who listen to their chatter must also share in their evaluation of history (framed in terms of sexual allure and fashion etiquette). But it doesn’t take long for us to recognize a distinctly Nazi superiority in their view.

One might go so far as to say that these awful shoes, to twist a theological category, are “invincibly ignorant.” Their origination, whether from factory operation or from demented artisanal craft, was, as they claim, a pre-natal event for which they cannot be held responsible. And yet they are also proud to claim an abysmal, briefly imperial, distinction: They were manufactured especially for Magda Goebbels from the flesh and fat of victims at Auschwitz.

This pair of black, stiletto-heeled shoes, made more lovely by white streaks of quicklime, were snatched from the corpse of Magda and sent to Nuremberg where they were placed on trial in special proceedings for degenerate objects. As supporters of the regime, they were then sent east to Wroclaw (pronounced vratswaf), formerly Breslau.

The pair then recounts adventures with a series of owners: a Red Army soldier, a doctor’s wife, a secret police investigator (here fashion becomes literally a weapon), and finally, in 2007, a transvestite who comes to a bad end at Wroclaw Square.

The shoes’ playful, scornful tone is maintained throughout. But what is one to expect, ethically, from a pair of shoes, especially shoes like this? Playwright Majewski never loses touch with questions about the actual history of Wroclaw, (the administration of mass population transfers after Potsdam, the hidden criminal collaborations, the risks of opposition) but the distance between the play’s manner and subject even seems to increase as the story progresses toward the present moment — and then is re-doubled with further complications (and a new rise of a new right).

Director/choreographer Michel and designer Charles A. Duncombe have created a marvelous evening of theater.

Their style is a distinctive, individual form of dance-theater, using a movement vocabulary that, in the present case, communicates immediately with gestures sometimes like seductive cabaret performance, always with a sense of the pair operating like a single organism — or like female acolytes in a wicked ritual. Those familiar with past productions will recognize common elements of design (hues of red and black in the costumes, vivid graphics as a backdrop) —the elaboration of a singular theater-language.

There has been some amusing controversy about this production of right left with heels. The Polish Consulate withdrew support of the show, rather than risk the disapproval, by some accounts, of the new Law and Order government in Warsaw. The cultural attache issued a statement saying, in effect, that they never withdrew support because they never offered it. And that it was all a matter of budgetary limitations anyway. On opening weekend, City Garage and its supporters played host to author Majewski, who said he was flattered to stir controversy with a play written ten years ago.

City Garage, Bergamot Station Arts Center, 2525 Michigan Ave., Building T1, Santa Monica; Fri.-Sat. 8 pm.; Sun. 3 pm.; through August 14. (310) 453-9939, citygarage.orgcitygarage.org. Running time: one hour 15 minutes without intermission.