Hannah Berk

by Hannah Berk

This article was first published by DC Theatre Scene and can be read on their website here.

Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (trans. George Tabori) presents us with a familiar story: a churlish Chicago mobster slashes and wheedles his way to the top. This time, it’s the top of the city’s cauliflower game. In case that doesn’t ring a bell, Scena Theatre’s production offers up Brecht’s suggested projections, orienting us within the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.

Each scene and its players has a direct parallel to historical events and people, and the play has an anti-fascist message to hammer home. The show is high-energy, builds a cinematic gangster world, and has moments of resonance, even if the parable lacks a nuanced consideration of fascism’s horrors.

Brecht wrote this play in 1941 after going into exile from Germany upon Hitler’s rise to power. He envisioned it for an American audience, but its first staging would actually be a posthumous one in 1958 Berlin.

It opens with a vaudevillian summary in which the ensemble lays out the plot, its major players, and establishes the play’s breakneck dialogic speed. We then meet Ui, Brecht’s Hitler analog, played by Robert Sheire as equal parts glory-hungry and insecure. He whines about his reputation, sports an ill-fitting get-up, and needs his henchmen to explain how corruption works, and yet he shrewdly pinpoints his opponents’ weaknesses and evinces a ruthless pragmatism: “When guns are silent,” he proclaims, “so’s the press!”

Ui and his gang wrest control of the Cauliflower Trust from Dogsborough (Joe Palka), a well-respected local politician tied up in some embezzlement schemes. Palka gives a mournful, conflicted performance of a man whose ethics never quite win out over self-interest. Looking out the window of his country house, he muses, “The lake looks just like silver before it’s been beaten into a dollar piece.” Dogsborough is just the first in a long line of people and institutions Ui bulldozes through on his way to power, including the justice system, despite the protests of an astounded defense attorney (Caroline Johnson).

No one seems especially drawn to Ui, other than his loyal friend Roma (Lee Ordeman); his rise is best explained by a critical mass of people choosing the path of least resistance.

This is in part a satire, and the show mostly strikes a good balance between its dark subject matter and sardonic tone. It plays up the absurdity of Ui’s insistence that grocers are in great danger (a danger he has independently and intentionally generated), and the dissonance between his self-righteous grandeur and his apparent petulance is a frequent punchline. A highlight of the show is the scene in which Ui solicits elocution coaching from a classical Shakespearian actor (director Robert McNamara). He learns to strut, gesture, and orate with excess pomp. Sheire exaggerates the awkwardness to comedic effect as his Ui gains confidence.

This moment is punctuated by an intermission and an overall tonal shift in a darker direction; sound designer Denise Rose fills the pause with an eerie mix of “Puttin’ on the Ritz.” In the second act, Ui edges closer to a Richard III archetype; he is decreasingly funny, more paranoid, and quicker to kill. A sort of emotional climax to the play is his decision to have Roma executed on wrongful suspicion of disloyalty. In one of the most effective scenes, his ghost visits Ui’s dreams. Lighting designer Johnathan Alexander bathes the stage in hellish red as Ordeman tumbles, contorts, and torments the sleeping dictator.

The play is sometimes a little heavy-handed in its moralism (see the projection over a courtroom scene that reads, “Mockery of Justice”), and sometimes not hard-hitting enough. Since Brecht was writing about the ascent of Hitler more than his rule, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is absent the extremities of fascist violence. Ui’s avarice is dark, but doesn’t plumb the hatred that allows a genocide to take place, and there is no treatment of either complicity or resistance beyond a blanket assumption of human cowardice.

At a time when we are arguing over what to term the concentration camps popping up along the southern U.S. border and the real-life parallels to historical atrocities proliferate, it can feel counter-productive to toy with fatalism.

The few who make an effort to stand up to Ui are minor characters and almost immediately bend or are dispensed with. The apathetic grocers, stand-ins for the working people writ large, see through him but don’t think about organizing against him beyond throwing up their hands (literally) and imagining themselves defenseless in the face of his gang’s guns. The final tableau, Ui with one arm raised in a heil, surrounded by tentative grocers imitating the motion, strikes a chilling note. Breaking from the group, Sheire delivers Brecht’s famous concluding warning about the fascist regimes brewing as we speak. What are we going to do about it? If Ui’s rise is indeed “resistible,” it’s up to the audience to figure out how that might be.

by Hannah Berk

This article was first published by DC Theatre Scene and can be read on their site here.

“How to translate [Antigone]?”, Anne Carson self-reflexes in her translator’s note to the Sophokles classic. “I take inspiration from John Cage who, when asked / how he composed 4’33”, answered / ‘I built it up gradually out of many small pieces of silence.’” I begin with the translator because Taffety Punk’s double feature of Antigonick and The Fragments of Sappho is very much a Carson showcase, replete with her stark lyricism and weird maneuverings among epochs and tones to shape an otherworld of her own.

The two texts both center defiantly femme energies and ancient Greek authors born a century or two apart. To move from Sappho to Antigonick is to move from motifs of silence to those of silencings. In dance, music, and language, these productions explore capacious absences, fashioning from them an always provocative space.

First up is The Fragments of Sappho, a hybrid performance of poetry through dance, music, and recitation, the brainchild of choreographer Katie C. Sopoci Drake and director Marcus Kyd. Sappho was a Greek lyric poet born in the 6th century BCE whose influence has loomed large across time. Only one poem survives in full—it kickstarts the show—and the rest in degrees of fragmentation, printed on weathered papyrus scrolls without line breaks. In Carson’s If Not, Winter, the inspiration text for this piece, she presents the complete remnants of Sappho’s work, including stand-alone words, and uses single brackets to denote missing or illegible text.

In Sopoci Drake’s choreography, a troupe of dancers arch into parentheses and bend into brackets, leaping and contorting around what’s left unsaid. One of the piece’s greatest contributions is its embodiment of translation’s labor, so often rendered invisible. As the dancers lift and carry one another across the stage, we see the work of arranging, supplanting, and conveying language—from thought to page and from one language to another—made manifest. Using only drums, a bass, and a singer’s voice, the original music composed by Dan Crane, Marcus Kyd, and Kelsey Mesa echoes the simultaneous spareness and throbbing fullness of the fragments.

In exploring absence, space, and process, the piece is deft and beautiful. In portraying the poetry’s content, it is somewhat less nuanced. Sappho is most famous for her love poems, often written to other women. All femme-presenting, the dancers’ movements portray the longing and sensuousness of the poems with outstretched limbs and fleeting intertwinings. Sappho’s desire is present, but the intimacy and gratification much of her poetry manifests is missing; the dancers never make eye contact, and the recitations tend to affect a mournful tone. While effective on the terms of this choice, there is a missed opportunity for celebration and queer joy.

Antigonick, too, is interested in excavating its own creation process. This production begins when Antigone (Lilian Oben) steps out from behind a translucent red curtain as she responds to a voiceover of Carson’s translator’s note. Silently, she struts, scoffs, and eyerolls at the interpretations her translator catalogues, aware from the beginning that her signification is historical and up for debate. While the play is an update to the classic, its goal is not modernization or accessibility so much as it is a marrow-ward winnowing; its primary concern is in embodying the experience of grief, loss, and power relations.

The narrative bones are all in place in this retelling. Antigone and her sister, Ismene, are mourning the loss of their two brothers, killed in a battle against each other over legitimate rule of the kingdom. Kreon, their uncle, has just assumed the throne and decreed that the body of Polyneikes, the brother he blames for the bloodshed, will be left to decay in the desert without burial rites. Declaring that justice must supercede the law, Antigone buries her brother anyway and is caught. Kreon, enraged at her defiance of his newly minted authority, orders her buried alive, and tragedy begets tragedy as Kreon’s son and wife unravel, their suicides leaving him alone to suffer the consequences of his folly.

In Carson’s raw translation, the wounds of the play open up. The Chorus (comprising Danny Puente Cackley, Louis E. Davis, Rachel Felstein, and Teresa Spencer, and led by Esther Williamson) sings out, “[ruin] comes rolling the black night salt up from the ocean floor / and all your thrashed coasts groan.” The poetry is reason enough to see the play. But far from locked into one note, the production teases out comedy, too. Dan Crane plays Kreon as an absurdist, grandiose and pedantic. He announces his own entrance on stage and, when Antigone requests an expedited punishment, retorts, “no let’s split hairs a while longer.” Eurydike (Teresa Spencer), who delivers a show-stopping monologue conspicuously absent from Sophokles’ original, is at once madcap and tragic as she relates her niece’s troubled youth: “try to unclench / we said to her / she never did / we got her the bike / we got a therapist…”

Lilian Oben’s Antigone is complex and wildly compelling, mad with grief and yet grounded in a logic of love and justice on her own terms. Oben allows Antigone to be young, vulnerable, and afraid without wavering in her strength and conviction. Her casting as one of only two black actors in the production forefronts the unequal distribution of punishment in the play. Ismene (Teresa Spencer) also confesses to Antigone’s crime in supposed solidarity, but goes free; Kreon is concerned only with silencing “the loud one” between the two sisters.

And then there’s Nick (Katie Murphy), who never leaves the stage and, in accordance with the text’s only stage directions for the character, “measures things.” Without spoiling the surprising effects of this presence, suffice it to say that Murphy’s realization of the ambiguous figure is smart and evocative, and reminds us always that Antigonick, Antigone, and Antigone exist within a function of time—however we may define or experience it.

The Fragments of Sappho and Antigonick both study silence and all its possibilities. They lead us elsewhere, toward a voice, but what it says is ultimately up to us; we’re the latest in a centuries-long line of audiences interpreting these women. Taffety Punk is doing us a service in inviting us into these beautifully (re)imagined translations to inhabit and reshape the spaces they create.

by Hannah Berk

This article was first published by DC Theatre Scene and can be found on their site here.

Tradition Be Damned (TBD) Immersive, DC’s first large-scale immersive theater company, isn’t interested in designing shows for audiences to watch. They want to create worlds for participants to explore, with the stated goal of generating “new opportunities for empathy and engagement.” Immersive theater offers exciting avenues for blurring the lines between reality and fiction, between creator and consumer.

Risk is also inherent. It is easy for experiments to turn into gimmicks, and such shows walk a tremulous line in providing sufficient guidance for participants to understand and embrace the world they are entering while still allowing us to freely interact with and alter that world. The Dupont Under(World), TBD Immersive’s most recent venture, is an entertaining introduction to this innovative genre, but leaves something to be desired at its emotional core.

Under(World) shows are limited to 10 participants at a time, 5 of whom are assigned to travel from life to death, while the others travel from death to life. (I traveled from death to life, and so this review will focus on that half of the experience.) The setting is the Dupont Underground, a tunnel-turned-art space that lends itself to the show’s construction as a journey. Participant souls are met at the underground entrances by a guide who leads them through a series of rooms in which participants complete tasks or engage in experiences that theoretically prepare them for their transition into life or death.

Although the graphic murals and association with gallery openings and trendy shows makes the Dupont Underground seem a little too cool to be a purgatory, TBD Immersive works impressively within the space. Highlights include an ethereal soundscape crafted by Rikki Fromahder, the regal presence of the life guide (Keenan Gibson), and imaginative costumes designed by Deborah Lash and Colleen Parker.

At every turn, Under(World) is interactive; actors ask questions of the souls, guide them through small activities, and offer up elements of the set to be touched and manipulated. It is important to enter the show ready to suspend disbelief and be a willing participant. Nonetheless, interactivity is not the same as immersion. I felt some uncertainty surrounding participants’ roles on the life journey, which kept one of my feet planted firmly outside the underworld throughout. As spirits traveling out from a collective unconsciousness, we are told that we may have only fuzzy memories of the world above and of our previous incarnations. Are we supposed to be playing memory-washed characters, or should we bring our real experiences to bear? Unfortunately, this question goes almost entirely unexplored. While the experience feels somewhat personalized through conversational elements, the choices participants are asked to make are limited and appear to have no substantive effect on the development of the show.

By taking on the weighty subject of life and death, Under(World) establishes an expectation of conceptual experimentation and emotional gravity. The tone of the play is serious, but not reflective. Most welcome, there is no pontification about the meaning of life and death. Producing Artistic Director Strother Gaines explains that the show tries “to guide audience members to use their own lives and experiences to fill in moments of meaning that are important to them rather than us tell them ‘this is how you should feel about life!’” I am always grateful to have unanswered questions at the end of a show, but I wished that this one had raised more of them in the first place.

Most of the experiences participants engage in along the journey feel perfunctory or playful to the point of slight. Even the show’s climax of sorts, in which the life and death tracks cross and souls on opposite paths meet, has an air of empty ceremony rather than sacred ritual. Only the final room along the journey (which, for those traveling the alternate track, constitutes the first) resonated with me. I won’t spoil its surprise, but its success lies in making space for a private moment that grapples with grief, fear, and uncertainty. This room is a glimpse into what Under(World), devised with greater space for silence and mystery, could be.

TBD Immersive clearly comprises a talented, dedicated team. Working in Dupont Underground with its spatial restrictions and electrical oddities must be a major challenge; the sets are smartly designed and visually appealing; the actors are skilled improvisers. Immersive theater is a great way to involve audiences in the artistic and interpretive leaps a play requires, and to democratize the world-making function of theater. I am a newcomer to their productions, though they’ve been at work for the past three years; I can’t wait to see what they do next. I only wish that Under(World) took fuller advantage of the resources at its disposal and the formal possibilities. A show that takes us deep into the belly of the city should also guide us beyond the surface of its subject matter.