Duo Neurotica
Likability has long been one of Stephanie Shaw’s strong suits. An appealing performer in just about every way imaginable, she’s assured, intelligent, funny, and vulnerable, one of those people who commands attention seemingly without effort then delivers the kind of thoughtfully entertaining material that shows she deserves the attention. Yet in her first two solo pieces–the 1997 Good Eatin’ and 1999 A Proper Dragon, both pieces about pregnancy and motherhood created for the Neo-Futurists’ “Neo Mondo Solo” series–Shaw seemed just a bit too quick with a joke, a little too eager to please. It was as if a desperate, tiny voice inside her were crying, “God, I hope they like me.” This subliminal anxiety gave these smart, provocative, disarmingly personal pieces a slightly unsettled edge.
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Shaw’s preshow lacks all pretense–she’s genuinely got work to do and has no need to hide behind an actorly persona while doing it. At the same time, her tasks have been carefully orchestrated, so that by the time she finishes and sits down with a cup of coffee, her preshow music has just reached its conclusion and the house lights have begun to dim. Seemingly inconsequential, her preshow has a gentle trajectory, drawing the audience into a world of artifice and structure–the tightly scripted hour that follows.
In two minutes, Shaw plunges her audience into a ridiculous, menacing, hypnotic world where the fantastic and the pedestrian, the ancient and the contemporary, coexist in a kind of dissonant harmony. The princess–clearly a surrogate for Shaw, whose recent delivery of twins inspired Duct–finds herself scripted into a bizarre narrative where she is immobilized and then redefined by male authority. In some ways, this fable represents a hard-line feminist critique of the repressiveness of motherhood.
It’s the perfect conclusion to the piece, both structurally and thematically, making Duct’s final 15 minutes seem superfluous, especially since Shaw uses them to draw some rather obvious conclusions. And she speaks of her work with such levity at the end that she almost seems to be apologizing for it, returning to the kind of joke-heavy insecurity that marred her previous pieces.
Bayiates needs to simply tell his personal stories rather than hide behind a pointless critical facade. As it stands, he seems so uneasy with his own confessional impulse that his stories are half-formed. Despite hearing about his brother for a good half hour, we never really meet him and get no clear sense of his character. In marked contrast, we get to know Shaw’s children through a few well-placed details. And while she uses her trauma to illuminate something larger about the culture, Bayiates doesn’t move much beyond self-pity.
