Space
Until recently, theater at Steppenwolf has almost always represented the triumph of substance over style. Growing away from its ferocious and messy youth, the company settled into a comfortable, respectable middle age but still sporadically integrated some of its early rock ‘n’ roll roots with six-figure production values. Landau’s Space, however, reflects the company’s disturbing recent tendency to subordinate text and performance to lavish effects.
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In Space writer-director Landau empties her bag of theatrical tricks with a flair that would make Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn envious. John Boesche’s projections of planets and skyscapes onto a massive curved back wall have the stunning three-dimensional feel of scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in Cinerama. Michael Bodeen and Rob Milburn’s re-creations of sound in deep space echo throughout the theater like Sensurround. James Schuette’s beautiful, stark set wittily refers to Alice in Wonderland. And in Scott Zielinski’s breathtaking lighting design, a revolving disco ball not only rotates the image of a night sky around the theater but casts a shadow against the back wall that resembles a solar eclipse. But aside from its spectacular sky-show trappings, Space is surprisingly inconsequential and underdeveloped. Take away a few zeroes from the budget and put the show in Voltaire and you’d have a hard time keeping more than a few people beyond intermission.
Landau has also ingeniously structured her play to represent the notion, expressed by one of the characters, that time is merely a device we’ve invented to prevent us from seeing that everything happens at once. With this in mind, everything in Landau’s play does indeed seem to happen at once. Characters fall into dream states and have vivid experiences only to wake and find that no time has passed at all. Speeches intersect and overlap, settings change without warning, and statements left unfinished in one scene are completed in another as the script seems to go forward, step back, and stand still all at the same time.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): theater still by Michael Boslow.
