What Ever (An American Odyssey in 8 Acts)
Woodbury calls the work a “performance novel,” a cross between Charles Dickens’s serial novels and performance art. This four-evening event, each show including two acts, is more like a soap opera on acid, however. The ten main characters ramble through their cross-country love affairs and vision quests while a cast of 90 whirls around them, complicating their voyage with drunken binges, mistaken identities, ghostly hauntings, drug rehabs, and midlife crises. One goofy scene in the last act ties all the strings together in an arbitrary knot that supposedly reconciles the event’s spiritual, orgasmic, and practical sides–a bit of a letdown after Woodbury’s wild ride, which returns us finally to the Pacific Ocean. In the end the event’s primary story–a teen love triangle between two girls and a boy–becomes an excuse to meet some amazing people and wink at the addled American dream.
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Woodbury, a veteran of the New York performance underground, started What Ever on a dare from her friend (now her director and editor) Dudley Saunders. He challenged her to write a new play every week for a year; she changed the term to nine months, favoring the pregnancy metaphor. Eventually the pair edited her partly improvised, partly scripted hour-long pieces, performed in the back of an East Village bar, into a P.S. 122 showcase, which has become this touring show. It’s the perfect low-cost one-woman traveling circus. Where Karen Finley pontificates, Spalding Gray drops names and neuroses, and Lily Tomlin carries the audience with brilliantly spare storytelling, Woodbury just talks, really fast and really loud. And if you can’t follow, or you don’t care for the person currently onstage, you just wait until she gets back to a story you do like.
The adult characters form an ambiguous, ironic counterpoint to the trio of teenagers, who are unfazed by the complexities of the world they hitch through. Very believable, the three are also increasingly unsympathetic. Clove, her “fairest consort” Sable, and their would-be lover Skeeter are the primary narrators of What Ever; their valley-child vocabulary gives the play its title. Strong characters, they’re also wearing, speaking in a code at once intellectual, metaphoric, and idiotic, amusing but reminiscent of the worst postmodern academic jargon. Yet Woodbury’s rave talk in iambic pentameter and long, fantastical incantations do reveal the literary heights possible in this pop-culture argot. When these characters aren’t “agged to the gills” or admonishing one another about “waxing Jason Priestley,” they’re “most pious and melancholic” or mourning their “solitudinated” state. But after eight acts, Woodbury’s older, more interesting creations seem better candidates for the role of postmodern cultural questers.
