Divided to Conquer
By Jonathan Kalb
Avenue Q
By Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty
Golden Theatre
252 W. 45th St.
Big River
By Roger Miller and William Hauptman
American Airlines Theatre
227 W. 42nd St.
It's hard not to be a little cynical about
alternative theater trends on the Great White Way: autobiographical
solo performance, Tanztheater, multimedia collage, bang-on-a-can
percussion, poetry slams, and a hundred other sources of revitalization
grabbed up by the hype machine. Most of the time, the Broadway
theater is an enormous sponge, a massive organ of crude absorption
and regurgitation where originality is readily hawked but grows
naturally only as a fluke, like an opportunistic fungus, and the
truly edgy is quickly vulgarized and politically neutralized by
the pressures of mass appeal. This point hardly needs reiterating;
commercial cooptation no longer raises eyebrows. All the more
interesting then, that a relatively sophisticated off-theater
technique--the split focus--now stands at the center of two Broadway
musicals with much of its complicating power intact.
Avenue Q, the "Sesame Street"
spinoff for grownups, demands that audiences divide their attention
between live stage action and animation clips played on large
monitors off to the side, and between near-life size puppets and
puppeteers who mimic and play against them. Big River,
the Roundabout/Deaf West Theater revival of the 1985 musical version
of Huckleberry Finn, is performed simultaneously in speech
and sign language, with some characters played by two actors at
once. Sometimes one signs and the other speaks and sings, and
other times both sign, or both speak or sing, and other times
signers are "given voice" by unassuming choral actors half a stage
away.
From a certain standpoint none of this
is new. The National Theater of the Deaf has been performing in
sign language since 1967, and Big River's Los Angeles-based
Deaf West company is itself twelve years old. Puppets were sassing
their handlers long before the Muppets, or even Kukla, Fran and
Ollie, and puppet-human interaction reached a height of subtlety
and sophistication in the last 20 years in the work of "alternative"
artists like Ralph Lee, Larry Reed and Theodora Skipitares. What's
remarkable about these two musicals is: (1) that their split-focus
techniques are unusually subtle for their commercial contexts;
and (2) that they are used as central structuring concepts, not
afterthought flavoring. The charm, eloquence, and depth of both
shows issues in large measure from these techniques.
It's novelty as necessity.
Let me be clear on what I do and don't
mean by split focus here. Because theater is a collaborative art
where a lot is often going on, there's obviously a sense in which
it always involves divided attention: spectators look away from
actors to admire sets, sound effects, lighting, or they divert
their eyes from stars to appreciate backup performers, or they
pause in listening to attend to costumes, props, attractive bodies.
All this is unavoidable. At least since the art of directing was
born, however, most Western theater has operated on the presumption
that the artist in charge is supposed to control the distraction
as much as possible. The director is expected to have a strongly
cohesive vision of what is most important at every moment of a
production, with the end product planned as a preconceived, unitary
experience, regardless of chance reactions. In commercial venues
like Broadway, this unitary convention reigns supreme. Even in
high-octane extravaganzas that blast a profusion of lights, legs,
voices, shapes and colors at the audience simultaneously, every
sequence has a dominant focus, if only to keep the wildness aligned
with plot and character development. This singularity is in fact
intrinsic to Broadway's essential conventionalism and conservatism:
it promotes the idea of a single, dominant, overarching vision
(author's, director's or producer's), long unfashionable among
those hip to the pluralizing and relativizing trends of contemporary
theory, and it pretends that the culture's postmodern aesthetic
of diffusion is inconsequential and irrelevant when in fact it's
ubiquitous.
Many of the theater's most important artists
have of course been indulging in this aesthetic for decades. Pick
up any substantial interview with Elizabeth LeCompte, Richard
Foreman, or Peter Sellars, and you'll find some eloquent justification
for multiplex signaling, multiple points of view, simultaneous
action in disjoined stage spaces, constructive friction between
text and action, and more. In a 1988 conversation, Sellars mentioned
that his preferred sort of theater was specifically unlike television.
What I love is that theatre is not like
television, which features one thing at a time. You move in
on a close-up of her face or whatever. But theatre has three
or four things happening at once and you have to decide what
to look at. I try and leave it open to the audience what to
look at. Obviously I guide the eye in certain situations. I
also leave it open so that two people sitting next to each other
saw different shows because they were each looking at a different
place at a given moment. Two people watching a TV show see the
same thing.
Sellars might have gone on to point out
that the longevity of single-focus on Broadway has undoubtedly
been sustained by television, whose nature is comparably conventional.
My guess is, the commercial inroads that split focus is making
today are an aftereffect of the rise of the internet.
"The internet is for porn!" croons the
genially grumpy Trekkie Monster in Avenue Q. Point taken.
But of course by now everyone knows that the internet is also
for distraction and instant gratification generally. The Web is
the ultimate procrastination and multi-tasking tool, and its cluttered
aesthetic of windows-within-windows has permanently altered design
in countless non-electronic contexts. From breakfast cereal boxes
to billboards, info-age surfaces have more stuff crammed
onto them than anyone would have thought feasible or desirable
a few decades ago. Recently, the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln
Center premiered a feature film by Julie Talen called Pretend
that was made entirely in split-screen--four to eight different
frames together onscreen at all times, in contrast to the fleeting
split-screen effects used in previous films such as Timecode
and The Hulk. Thus, when the director of Avenue Q,
Jason Moore, expects his audience to bob mentally back and forth
between an actor (John Tartaglia) sincerely singing an anxious
ballad, a puppet controlled by that actor making contrastingly
silly faces, and two animation clips cutely transforming the word
"purpose" into "propose" (the puppet-character is freaked out
about marriage), that's okay. We're equipped to find it all fun
rather than confusing.
Avenue Q, whose thin plot is about
disaffected post-collegiates squeezing by on pluck and perkiness
in a fairyland-dilapidated, 1970s-ish New York, has been praised
for its youthful energy and clever media appeal (the show has
the feel of a TV-episode shoot). But its basic presentational
strategy is its real source of subtlety. Being modeled on the
Muppets, for instance, most of the puppets have giant, intently
ogling eyes, but the actors operating them only rarely mimic that
straightforward earnestness. Mostly they temper it with calmer,
more measured expressions so that the composite characters are
really blends of two attitudes, one simplistically allegorical
and the other more complex because it's filtered through the specifically
human. This doubling is crucial to the edgy confessional humor
in a song like "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist," which plays the
real racial identities of Asian-American, African-American and
Caucasian actors off the imaginary racial distinction of monster/non-monster.
It's also what makes the much publicized realistic sex scene between
two puppets rise above kiddie porn. The performers doing the manipulating
don't act aroused, but they aren't passive or indifferent either.
They're businesslike and bemused, occupying a strange, expressive
middle-ground like emotional referees. In this quasi-Brechtian
circumstance, the point doesn't seem to be to disrupt empathy
but rather to complicate it by generating it from two different
sources.
Such
multiple perspectives are the essence of Big River. Huck's
greedy, drunken, ne'er-do-well father, for instance, is literally
"doubled" early on when looking in the "mirror"--a silly comic
gag involving a basic acting exercise of two actors in direct
mimicry that soon takes on serious undertones of self-confrontation,
especially when the reckoning ends in his death. The actors who
play this role, Troy Kotsur and Lyle Kanouse, wear identical bushy
beards and ratty woodsman-clothes but have opposite physiques,
one giant-like, the other smaller and nebishy, and although only
one speaks, both sign and the director Jeff Calhoun has closely
choreographed their behavior. Not only do they gesturally "dance"
with others; they also (seemingly) confer, spat, sing and dance
with each other. I can't be completely sure because I don't know
sign language, but there's no need to get every nuance to see
that these self-consultations open up rich questions about the
father's "true" nature. Along with the show's many other signer-singer
partnerships, this pairing also touches in some measure on the
limits of trust and understanding between people of thoroughly
different experience.
On top of this, Big River splits
focus with its set (designed by Ray Klausen), whose central conceit
is a collection of outsize pages from The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn with type so large they can be read from the balcony
(some page-panels also open to form puppet-theater-like mini-prosceniums).
For the spectator, the invitation to read is irresistible, and
pausing to read necessarily means skipping something else happening
onstage, or giving it half attention. Gertrude Stein once pejoratively
referred to this sort of skipping as "syncopation"--a systematic
delay in apprehending certain aspects of a performance, particularly
the flow of emotions--but in this case the syncopation feels apropos.
Presumably, a hearing-impaired person always experiences delays
or syncopations when watching a drama, signed or unsigned. Thus
I wondered whether this production's enticement to read might
possibly be a crafty attempt to equalize experience among the
public, and perhaps generate mutual empathy.
None of these ends or means is revolutionary,
of course. Split focus isn't necessarily even progressive in itself
(think of its numbingly spectacular use in rock concerts and political
conventions). That two Broadway musicals opening within a week
of one another embraced it so thoroughly and complexly, however,
certainly is worth a moment's pause. No triumph of complexity
to be sure, but perhaps a harbinger, an opening gambit, or just
a fresh breeze.
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