Revolving Troubadors
The Rhino in Winter subdivision of the Rhinoceros Theater and Performance Festival started last week with a program of solo spoken-word performances by six of the usual suspects on the fringe scene: Abby Schachner, Greg Allen, Gabrielle S. Kaplan, Antonio Sacre, Judith Greer, and Bryn Magnus. An instructive, sometimes brilliant collection of stories and storytellers, this is an evening demonstrating the how-tos–and how-not-tos–of a certain kind of performance art, the monologue. As usual with the Rhino fest, many of the works are still in progress or very new, a fact that makes the hit-or-miss evening feel like an event. Some performers fell back on their charm or actorly habits to cover up glitches and rough edges, but the most interesting storytellers didn’t bother to cover up–the rough edges were built in, an intriguing part of the performer’s stage persona or aesthetic.
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Greg Allen’s painful, witty neo-futurist exercise My Father the Chair is a good example of rough edges played skillfully. After a startlingly casual, almost confrontational rendition of the song “Pennies From Heaven,” he begins his story. While describing his father’s life and death, he performs again and again an improvised, ultimately symbolic walk across the stage to sit on a chair, which cues the stage lights to go out; when he arrives back at his starting position, the lights go on again. This pattern of darkness and light both interrupts and structures his story, each blunt statement framed by a blackout to define a moment during his father’s life, his crippling illness, or his relationship with his son.
Toteroonie is a mash of puns, mini scenes, and props, including big signs to help with audience interaction and puppets made of real vegetables. Schachner gives herself gold stars on a chart for things she does right, invents strange characters, and sings nonsensical, almost tuneless kid-show-style songs about gold stars and divorce. In one particularly brilliant song about menstruation, an aged, obsessively positive health teacher literally steps “on the rag and off the rag and on the rag again” while she sings of the glory of menstruation in all its evident unglory. A harmless discussion with the audience about the “special” qualities of a globe leads into a strange song about “God’s Testicle,” the world. Inevitably Schachner’s rage comes out in bizarre, hysterically funny ways. And because she’s entirely committed to each moment, she makes this kids’ show about a dysfunctional life work, even though the conventions of continuity and good taste would seem to rule that out. In her still raw wildness, Schachner reminds me a little of Gilda Radner: fearless, wonderfully strange, and a little dangerous.
Sacre’s mix of African folktales with his own story is also undermined by his charm. Sacre’s manner, with his grinning, tender glances toward the audience, is almost apologetic. This persona might work with a different story or a different storytelling mode in which Sacre wasn’t acting out characters and scenes so literally. But in these sometimes brutal tales of the power relationships between fathers and sons, his glances seem a plea for us to be nice. As a result, his well-chosen, clearly told stories are less powerful than they might have been.
