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Dystopias I
I’ve been thinking about Bob Trotman, a sophisticated, self-taught artist whom I met this year. Over the holidays I visited his sculpture Vertigoat the North Carolina Museum of Art: a larger-than-life guy in a business suit falls through space as if the bottom had dropped out; he looks surprised, terrified, and monumental. It’s the “monumental” that gets me, like the institutionalization of existential crisis. The falling figure is forever frozen in time like the characters on Keats’ Grecian urn, and while cheap analogies come readily to mind, I don’t want to settle too quickly on an interpretation that reads this work as an expression of the “Occupy Whatever” movement, vague political malaise, or even the larger Zeitgeist. It’s more like a local expression of a recurrent aspect of the human condition.
Trotman's "Vertigo"
When you stand underneath the falling man you can’t help but flinch, wondering just how strong those cables are–that block of wood must weigh a good 2,000 pounds, I figure–and you too could be crushed by gravitas. Did this guy jump from a bridge without even loosening his tie first? Was he pushed from an airplane? Or did the floor simply disappear under him? The sculpture’s title should make me think of comparisons to the Hitchcock movie, but instead my thoughts quickly flicker to another monumental sculptural form before which I stood open-mouthed on my last trip to London: Sir Jacob Epstein’s Jacob and the Angel at the Tate Modern, an unlikely alabaster performance that has been regarded as an allegory of Britain’s struggle in WWII, or of the Jews during the Holocaust.
Literally, it is just what it says: at the end of the wrestling match, though Jacob’s thighbone has been dislocated he refuses to give up, and the angel clutches him, sustains him perhaps against his will. The two become as one, their embrace almost a rescue, almost erotic. “Let me go,” cries the angel, “for the day breaketh.” And Jacob, beaten, persists: “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” It is a terrifying moment.
These two sculptures have no obvious connection: one Biblical, the other secular; one a fugue, the other a solo; one affirmative, one hinting at our darkest fear. Yet they touch me in the same place. I think I will have more to say about this.
Once More into the Trapeze, Dear Friends
Staging technologies can be integrated so as to seem, if not inevitable, at least natural. I think of the 2004 Danish movie Strings, performed by marionettes, as a particularly moving example. Well, last weekend I got to see Henry V (on Trapeze) at Burning Coal Theatre in Raleigh, NC.
To say that nothing really prepared me for it means that despite hearing about it ahead of time from artistic director Jerry Davis, and even after watching their video trailer, I assumed the trapeze would be a gimmick rather than an organic part of the production. Certainly including it in the title suggested that we were meant to come to some kind of Cirque du Soleil in which Shakespeare was likely to take a back seat; I was even afraid they would write some iambic pentameter of their own expressly alluding to the hardware.
Anyway, Director Steven Cole Hughes pulled this off in Raleigh pretty well. The five trapezes (what, in that little space?) are virtually the only set, and they become walls, battlements, thrones (of course), scaffolds, weapons, and I forget what all. They allow the actors to use the vertical space of the theater in a wholly different way–the highest bits being reserved for the moments of highest drama–and of course to move swiftly, capturing some of the rapid confusion of warfare; and to deploy their bodies in unexpected ways to disconcertingly good effect, as when characters are executed and dangle upside down.
Few lines are actually delivered upside down, but I rather like the idea.
Radio, plus audience
The Murphey School Radio Show production went quite well, and I garnered lots of kudos for my “Triangle News Updates” script (read by NPR celeb Frank Stasio and novelist Lee Smith) and sponsor jingles. (I could cheerfully make a living at sponsor jingles, I think.) Here I am with emcee and fellow scribbler Georgeann Eubanks, two exotic birds displaying their plumage. Georgeann served as emcee. Continue Reading →
I’ve Seen a Ghost (writer)
Michael Hollinger’s play Ghost-Writer, receiving its regional premier at the Ensemble Theatre of Cincinnati, surely had some great tech behind it last night, including especially Matthew Callahan’s sound design. Everything was a little bit of perfect, deliberate and deliberative, yet finally I left feeling unsatisfied.