The Ignorant Critic Strikes Again
I'm not sure what the phrase "experimental theater" means, but I apparently saw a piece of it on Thursday night. I'd seen ads for a one-woman show called "My Ulysses" that was supposed to be a re-imagining of James Joyce's book (or a reaction to it, or something like that). So I went to the theater, which is tucked away in a courtyard and was apparently transformed from an abandoned apartment building only about a decade ago. I'd had to show up early to pick up my ticket, so while I waited for the play to start, I sat drinking a cup of coffee in the "foyer," basically a large cinderblock room with visible fuse boxes and wires and colored lights giving a touch of class. The show itself took place in a similar large room - the crew had set up low bleachers at one end and lined them with cushions for the audience to sit on.
The show opened with some slides of the Greek countryside and a recording of someone reading the first few lines of the Odyssey in Greek. That last bit made me very happy. It was also pretty much the highlight of the play, which is hard to summarize. The woman alternated between reading excerpts from Joyce and talking about the course of "the production" and her search for a new apartment. The general theme seemed to be, "gee, isn't it neat how art imitates life and vice versa, and how we're all on this sort of journey, and how making art is its own journey and stuff?" And that is a neat idea (and stuff), but it wasn't very originally presented. I could have gone and rented "Kiss Me, Kate" and gotten the same message, but with Cole Porter songs. In a show about a book based on an epic that is so much about restlessness and homecomings, I never really felt that the material came to rest anywhere.
Still, the idea that I was watching this show in an old squatter building in Berlin was pretty cool, since Berlin itself is such a restless city - still trying to straddle that line between gentrification and authenticity. It's not a very American spirit, I think. I like it tremendously.
The show opened with some slides of the Greek countryside and a recording of someone reading the first few lines of the Odyssey in Greek. That last bit made me very happy. It was also pretty much the highlight of the play, which is hard to summarize. The woman alternated between reading excerpts from Joyce and talking about the course of "the production" and her search for a new apartment. The general theme seemed to be, "gee, isn't it neat how art imitates life and vice versa, and how we're all on this sort of journey, and how making art is its own journey and stuff?" And that is a neat idea (and stuff), but it wasn't very originally presented. I could have gone and rented "Kiss Me, Kate" and gotten the same message, but with Cole Porter songs. In a show about a book based on an epic that is so much about restlessness and homecomings, I never really felt that the material came to rest anywhere.
Still, the idea that I was watching this show in an old squatter building in Berlin was pretty cool, since Berlin itself is such a restless city - still trying to straddle that line between gentrification and authenticity. It's not a very American spirit, I think. I like it tremendously.
posted by Q at
12:48 PM
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