Somebody's Watching
By Don Shewey
The Angel Project
Lincoln Center Festival
July 1-27, 2003
One of the scenes that haunted me most
from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America was cut after the
first production at San Francisco’s Eureka Theater. Nothing much
happened, just two tired hospital nurses -- a white lesbian and
a black gay man -- having breakfast after the night shift. But
to me they represented the real angels in America, ordinary humans
doing God’s everyday work, more than any winged apparition out
of a Spielberg movie or a New Age greeting card. I guess that
was pretty much the premise of the popular TV show "Touched by
an Angel," which routinely portrayed accidents averted and emotions
soothed by the kindness of supernatural strangers. Deborah Warner’s
The Angel Project, which ran July 1-27 as part of the
Lincoln Center Festival, also walked the line between mystical
and mundane, with a streak of melancholy added to the mix. Once
the exhilarating novelty of the adventure wore off, I realized
that I was left with a heart-aching consciousness of the powerful
unseen forces at work below the surface of life in the big city,
including a grief that is older than September 11, older than
AIDS, older than Times Square.
Nearly everything about The Angel Project
toyed with the basic elements of theatergoing. It wasn’t exactly
a "show" -- it was a walking meditation with an itinerary linking
nine locations, mostly in midtown Manhattan, some of them completely
uninhabited. It wasn’t exactly "performed" -- at least 29 actors
participated as designated angels, but they never spoke or enacted
scenes, and much of the experience consisted of the viewer moving
through New York City with a heightened awareness. Even buying
a ticket wasn’t simple -- you made an appointment for your "journey"
(scheduled at five-minute intervals from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. most
days) and showed up not at some box office but at the tram station
on Roosevelt Island. There someone picked you up in a golf cart
and took you to the southernmost tip of the island, where you
waited your turn to enter a nondescript trailer for your pre-journey
briefing.
What a place to wait! In a wide-open field
smack in the middle of the East River, looking out at the Manhattan
skyline, the Queens waterfront, and the vast open sky, all of
it looking back at you. Almost all the themes that emerged in
The Angel Project were present from the first instant:
waiting, watching, being seen and being invisible, time, New York
City, your personal history with the city, an Alice-in-Wonderland
sense of shifting dimensions, the vulnerable and sensual experience
of life in a body.
Numerous site-specific theater pieces have
used the city as a backdrop before. In 1980, Anne Bogart‘s The
Emissions Project allowed viewers to watch soap-operatic
scenes played out on street corners and in apartment windows.
In the 1990s, Anne Hamburger’s En Garde Arts company created a
series of outdoor spectacles, including Reza Abdoh’s Father
Was a Peculiar Man, which herded audiences all over the meatpacking
district, and Mac Wellman’s Bad Penny, which unfolded
on the Bow Bridge in Central Park. There was a make-your-own-experience
quality to The Angel Project that gave it a family resemblance
to interactive theater events as disparate as Tamara, Tony
& Tina’s Wedding, The Donkey Show, and Chris Hardman’s Walkman
theater piece Antenna. Unlike those shows, in which the
audience shared the same time and space, The Angel Project
was designed as a solo venture. You went at your own pace, taking
two to three hours, depending on how long you lingered at each
site.
I couldn’t have picked a more perfect time
for my trip -- 4:00 on a clear, sunny Friday afternoon. A friendly
young woman shows me the long thin booklet of directions that
will guide me and encourages me to do the tour in silence, to
take my time and not feel rushed, even if I encounter other patrons.
The immediate effect of launching the journey is wondering, nervously
and/or excitedly, what’s part of the show and what’s not. Am I
supposed to linger here enjoying the view, or should I race to
the first site? The father with his small daughter playing in
the field -- are they planted? That intriguing abandoned building
nearby -- will crawling around that be part of the tour? Apparently
not -- the golf cart that picks me up zooms right by it and deposits
me under the 59th Street bridge.
At the first stop, I’m surprised and pleased
to encounter Nicky Paraiso, a downtown actor I’ve seen many times
onstage and socially. Already my personal history of New York
theater (memories of Nicky as the musical maestro of Jeff Weiss’s
Hot Keys) is intruding on The Angel Project.
We acknowledge one another wordlessly, and he points to the door
of a wooden shack and a small handwritten sign that says "Knock
and enter." The bare structure has two windows. Through one I
watch Nicky assume his character -- a fishing pole and thermos
nearby tell their tale -- and I follow his gaze out across the
river. I move to the other window and look down at a man sitting
in a rowboat mending a net. He turns his head and his eyes meet
mine with shocking directness -- a slow, eerie, penetrating gaze.
Who are these fishermen? Is this a Christian reference? Is there
a narrative here?
When the next patron knocks and enters,
I leave the shed and walk away. Then I remember the instructions
-- don’t feel rushed -- and wonder if I missed something by leaving
the site so quickly. On my way to the subway, I pass an elderly
man in a hat and sports jacket hungrily eyeing the catered lunch
spread out for local hospital workers. Is he part of the show?
As instructed, I take the escalator down to the platform and wait
for the F train. That young man with the basketball sitting across
the tracks from me -- is he part of the show? Riding to Times
Square, I marvel at how simply Deborah Warner has nudged me out
of my usual subway-riding habits of reading or listening to music
on headphones. My attention to the dense population of mute strangers
passing me by conjures Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire,
surely an influence on The Angel Project.
I follow directions to an anonymous apartment
building on Sixth Avenue, where I tour two shabby, almost bare
apartments that show signs of recent inhabitation (an unmade bed).
City maps, pages from the phone book with names circled, and binoculars
on the windowsill suggest a creepy form of surveillance. Who lives
here, and where are they? While some maps point to churches, I
can’t help thinking about terrorist cells. Are these the dreary
temporary lodgings of itinerant underground criminals? I sit in
the chairs provided, peek through the binoculars at windows opposite
and at people on the street, expecting but not finding scenes
staged for my discovery. At the next site, an office building
nearby, I take the elevator to the 27th floor and walk into a
more obviously composed art installation. It’s a large light-filled
room with two rows of standing lockers (the open ones contain
angel props -- prayer cards and heraldic trumpets), a cage with
two small birds, and an astonishing, carefully groomed, four-foot-wide
strip of white feathers on the floor. (These environments were
presumably coordinated by installation designer Tom Pye.) The
windows that line the room look out on (among other things) the
previous site, a spectacular overview of Bryant Park, and ornately
detailed specimens of midtown architecture.
The
next stop on the angel-hunt is the Peep-o-Rama on 42nd Street,
a mirrored storefront whose musty-smelling and dimly lit backroom
proves to be furnished not with coin-operated porn booths but
with bins of antiquated religious texts from every imaginable
spiritual discipline. I flip through a few books, pondering the
trail of evidence so far, which has the scent of abandonment and
extinct traditions. Where are the girls? Where are the angels?
Coming out of the backroom, I sit for a while on a folding chair
and watch the theater of 42nd Street -- I’m looking through a
window that passersby see as a mirror. I wonder if some scene
will play out if I wait long enough. That young man who stops
to check his hair -- is he an actor?
But nothing happens. I’m bored and hot,
so I follow directions to the island in the middle of Times Square,
past the police station and the Army recruiting station. Besides
the dizzying visual blare, I’m aware of this location as one that
officials view as a prime target for terrorist action and the
heightened security surveillance that goes with that, not to mention
the various TV shows filmed here with pedestrians gawking in through
the picture windows. Who’s watching me right now? The booklet
guides me to One Times Square, the triangular building covered
with billboards and TV screens and the news zipper. On my way
there, I pass a young white woman dressed as a nun standing stock-still
reading a Bible. Aha! She’s clearly an actor, the first one I’ve
seen since the two fishermen on Roosevelt Island. But Times Square
is such a zoo, nobody seems to notice her.
Inside the building, which turns out to
be surprisingly derelict and devoid of permanent occupants, I
take the elevator to 15 and follow taped arrows from one floor
to another, walking through a series of unpredictable tableaux.
An empty office dangles many invitations for snooping. The file
cabinets contain a lot of old baby pictures, hand-written wedding
announcements, even a few pages from the Menendez brothers’ trial
(?!). A blindfolded actor lies sprawled on a giant palm leaf,
next to an enormous cardboard coffin. Next door: a room containing
more than a dozen caged birds (are they baby angels, or fellow
travelers?) and revolving fans. Down the hall: a room of junked
computers and then several surveillance monitors, one of which
runs a video of a bearded man standing in the middle of Times
Square holding a lamb in his arms. Upstairs: a triangular room
that is a garden of white lilies sprouting out of several inches
of some snow-white substance. (Salt? Sugar? Sand? I taste it.
Salt.) A very black man sits silently by the door -- angel or
security guard? I exit this room into an area set up with a dozen
buckets of water with washcloths and towels for some kind of cleansing
ritual I can’t fathom.
On another floor the arrows lead to a big
deserted corner office with a huge oak desk, a dazzling view of
Times Square, and a fax machine spewing pages from Milton’s "Paradise
Lost." I sit in the comfy swivel chair and flip through the Rolodex,
which is all travel agencies. Angels, birds, airplanes -- is there
a poem here, or am I straining for connections? Leaving this office,
I almost miss an arrow pointing to a closed door. I walk in and
am startled to find two people and a tiny apple tree crammed into
a small carpeted space. A bearded man sits on the floor (I recognize
him as the guy in the video holding the lamb), and a young woman
jams herself against the windowsill. She gives me that slow, eerie
angel look. There’s a distinct feeling in the room of anguish,
tension, incarceration. I want to flee immediately, but I force
myself to hang out and see if something happens. The two of them
shift positions -- she sits down, he stands up -- but the tension
neither increases nor evaporates. Are they meant to be angels,
or souls in torment, or both? It occurs to me that perhaps something
is expected from me. A blessing, maybe. Hunting for angels, do
we become angels ourselves? I leave that room with a disturbed
feeling that is perfectly captured in the Rilke poem scrawled
on the wall of the elevator lobby I next walk into: "Angels, it
is said, are often unsure whether they pass among the living or
the dead."
My guidebook leads me from there to the
middle of the block that used to be known as "the Deuce," when
porn theaters and B-movie houses lined 42nd Street between Broadway
and Eighth Avenue instead of a tacky suburban mall. An unmarked
door behind a souvenir stand leads to the breathtaking remains
of the Liberty Theater, the disused former vaudeville house in
which Deborah Warner staged T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" as a
solo performance by Fiona Shaw in 1996. Stripped to bare walls
and floor, this site turns out to be more alive than any other
so far.
A shirtless young man lies on a sheet of cellophane, ostensibly
sleeping. Onstage, a bouncer sits next to the loading dock. In
the balcony there’s one -- no, two! black men wearing enormous
black-feathered wings peering down, perfectly still, with spotlit
ladders behind them rising to the ceiling. A very old, thin white
woman sits on a straight-back chair in the middle of the orchestra
seats. I recognize her as Irma St. Paule, a wonderful actress
who once jokingly acknowledged that people hire her because she
looks like the oldest actress in the world. (She played Flaubert’s
dead mother on video in the Wooster Group’s Frank Dell’s The
Temptation of St. Anthony.) I approach to within a few feet
of her. There’s a connection between us she knows nothing about:
she toured for six months with a dear friend of mine who died
of AIDS in 1989. Standing this close to her conjures the presence
of my friend. Tears come to my eyes. She looks at me, we both
smile. I feel almost dizzy with the sense of being between two
worlds.
This tableau vivant at the Liberty calls
to mind performance art pieces such as Marina Abramovic’s "The
House with the Ocean View," in which she lived on a shelf in an
art gallery on display for 12 days. I marvel at the meditative
discipline of these actors. Can they really sustain these poses
continuously for 12 hours a day? (Later I read that they worked
in two shifts.)
Walking out of this spooky half-life into
the crowd outside Madame Tussaud’s feels like trudging through
a carnival coming home from a funeral, with a secret in my heart
and the smell of popcorn in the air. I go back to the subway and
take the shuttle to Grand Central Station. I traverse that spectacular
theater space and enter the Chrysler Building across the street,
where I take the elevator to the 63rd floor. Strains of magnificent
choral music welcome me to the recently vacated offices of some
dot-com company. I turn the corner and there’s a sleeping angel
with giant white wings sprawled on the industrial carpet in the
middle of the hallway. At the end of the hall, a heavyset man
sits with his back turned looking out at the most glorious view
of New York City that I can imagine. Empty offices on either side
of his give me the opportunity soak in this (bird’s-eye?) view
myself.
I wander down the hall and in the window
of another empty office find perched another actor I recognize,
Keith McDermott. He was once a beautiful boy who played opposite
Richard Burton in the Broadway production of Equus. He
lived for a time with the writer Edmund White, whose novel Caracole
turned Keith into an actress named Edwige who stars in a hit play
synopsized thus: "The heroine is silent in the first act, nude
in the second, and smothered to death by feathers in the third."
Now he’s a handsome man with fine lines around his clear green
eyes. Even without wings, he is perfectly cast as an angel, the
kind of beneficent being you might hope is stationed high above
the city, keeping an eye on things. He has the same kind of luminous,
soulful face as Bruno Ganz, the angel who broods all over Berlin
in Wings of Desire. By this point in The Angel Project
I’ve been emboldened to do that thing that’s usually impossible
in the theater, which is to create your own close-up. I walk right
up to Keith and look in his eyes. He holds my gaze. We could speak,
we could touch, but we don’t. I could think of this as a lark,
or I could consider it darshan, an audience with a holy man. When
I let myself risk the latter, the moment takes on a different
aura, time out of time. This encounter is both real and imaginary
-- in other words, theatrical.
Down the hall I peek into the kitchen,
where a young chubby black man lolls on the counter like a baby
seal on the beach, with tiny white wings sprouting from his back.
It’s disconcerting to confront such a character and not speak.
What’s he doing here? He doesn’t look very comfortable on that
counter. I walk over to the window and can’t help noticing that
from here I can see quite clearly the trailer in the field on
Roosevelt Island where this journey began. Someone else in a golf
cart is just beginning.
I walk to the elevator, turn the page in
my booklet, and am relieved to find that I’m at the end of
The Angel Project. I’m full to the brim with feelings and
images.
Warner had staged The Angel Project
twice before, first at the 1999 London International Festival
of Theater (when it was called The Tower Project) and
then in 2000 at the Perth International Arts Festival in Australia.
The New York version gained considerable resonance from the aftermath
of September 11; not many cities have the ashes of 3000 people
still sitting mixed with soot and soil in trees and backyards.
Nonetheless, ghostly sadness seems to be programmed into the piece.
I know I brought my own idiosyncratic associations to the piece,
but I was struck by Warner’s ingenuity in creating an event that
so palpably evoked urban experiences that can’t be verbally dramatized,
most notably the sedimentary layers of history associated with
both places and people. I’m thinking especially of the people
you see for years (in the bank, at the gym, onstage, in the next
apartment), about whom you collect odd fragments of information.
You don’t actually know them, and yet you’re connected somehow.
I found The Angel Project fascinating
and fun to witness, and I was haunted by the experience for days.
The one thing I missed was the opportunity to compare notes with
others who saw it. I know my comprehension of Warner’s production
of Medea (which opened at BAM last fall and had a run
on Broadway this spring) wasn’t complete until I talked about
it with my friend Sarah afterwards. The Angel Project
remains an entirely solitary meditation.
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