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.