Transformations
Some of these plays are about race, some are not, but the mostly African-American cast of six intensifies our awareness of racial issues. Henry Godinez and Cheryl Lynn Bruce, two of the five directors who pieced together this theatrical collage, also perform in the ensemble, which gleefully, kaleidoscopically reshapes itself as it moves from play to play. The glee itself gives an effortless, childlike grace to the performances, both illuminating the plays’ mystery, horror, and verbal acrobatics and easing us into the strangeness of each new story.
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The plays are framed and linked by tape recordings and slide projections offering definitions of words related to the productions: “box,” “fly,” “transformation.” The tape loop and large but not quite legible projections interrupt the usual preshow rituals of reading the program and chatting with neighbors as we’re confronted with the many meanings of words, drawn to the white noise of language. Exploring meaning and naming, identity and isolation, truth and imagination, all five plays juggle words as objects. Like the preshow definitions, these plays argue for the artful, untrustworthy, necessary power of language to contain the world.
Taylor directs Dr. Kheal, a one-man diatribe by Maria Irene Fornes, a playwright whose sophisticated semantic turns and skillful characterizations make her one of the visionaries of contemporary playwriting. Played with virtuoso abandon by Godinez, Dr. Kheal is a professor who uses a chalkboard and his frenzied intelligence to convince us of the existence of…everything and nothing. The audience joins the rest of the cast–framed by the cunning cubicles of Todd Rosenthal’s versatile, evocative set–to become his students in a class that veers without warning from shocking to hysterical to poignant. I found myself wishing my professors had been this insane, this inspired, this charmingly sinister.
