Revolutions Theater Festival Report
Philadelphia's Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental made its Western states premiere of Flamingo/Winnebago Jan. 22-23 as part of the Tricklock's Revolutions Theater Festival. The production plays out like a Sundance Film Festival's indie darling - quirky characters on a road trip either in search of their past or with a determined message for the future, replete with socio-political messages relayed through comedic mishap. All that's missing is a sullen, spritely Parker Posey or the deadpan, spot-on humor of Michael Cera. In this case the cast of quirky characters includes the exceptional Muni Kulasinghe (most certainly channeling his own father as he plays 60-something Indian immigrant Ageet Predesh), and the tousled and talented Thaddeus Phillips (also the play's director/designer) in the other lead as Morgan Phillips, a young man in search of clues to his grandfather's sordid past as a worker at the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas. Each of these characters, as well as the two supporting actors, Jeremy Wilhelm and Charlotte Ford, effortlessly transition from three to as many as seven different roles throughout the course of the play.
Ageet, while staring at the dinosaur on the sign of the Sinclair station he's owned for 32 years, suddenly understands the meaning of fossil fuel and its ultimate demise. He purchases a Winnebago and heads off from New Jersey to Bombay Beach, California, with the goal of learning to water ski, filling his gas tank with grease collected from diners along the way. Ageet is concerned with America's future because of the mindless consumption. "We waste too much energy deciding what kind of toilet paper to buy, so that we do not have any left to make important decisions about the environment," he asserts in a diatribe to a brusque, Bud Light drinking Bulgarian in an RV park. Morgan's journey, on the other hand, focuses on his past, but reveals America's uncomfortable relationship with her own history and indigenous people as he travels through the Pueblo of Acoma and stays the night in a concrete teepee at the Wigwam Hotel, where the owner excitedly offers an "authentic", but clearly uneducated, Native American experience. As expected, but not entirely explained, Ageet and Morgan's paths converge briefly outside of and into Las Vegas, but it is enough for each to somewhat inform the other's directive to face the present.
The plexiglas box attached to a small carport on wheels is as an ingenious and seamless of a set design as I've ever seen on stage. Now a Sinclair gas station, rotated 45 degrees, becomes a Winnebago, becomes a diner, a plane and a hotel room. The use of multimedia projected onto the backdrop (Google Earth maps, video and still pictures) is equally intelligent and not the least bit overbearing.
The play is a successful collaborative effort between Lucidity Suitcase and Le Chat Lunatique, Albuquerque's highly sought after gypsy swing band. The three remaining musicians (Kulasinghe is also the band's violinist) John Sandlin, Jared Putnam and Fernando Garavito round out the cozy cast of seven.
Emily Beenen
The UnPOssessed
Called the oldest laboratory theater in the US, Double Edge Theater of Ashfield, Mass., presented The UnPossessed, an interpretation of Don Quixote, at National Hispanic Cultural Center as part of the Revolutions Theater Fest, Jan. 22-24. The audience en masse waited in the lobby of the theater until called to enter the auditorium. On doing so one encountered the sight of actors on stage, on stilts, swirling fabric banners, or tied in upside-down knots like evocations of the hanged man in Tarot. What needs to be said immediately is that the dramatic tension of coming in to this tableau vivant was mitigated almost entirely by the discomfort of having to trudge step by infinitesimal step through the narrow entry corridor, anticipating seeing something mind-blowing that turned out to be anticlimactic. To engender dramatic effect, why did they not simply let the audience enter normally?, while the actors in turn could enter and take their positions on stage as the audience settled? This would have been just as fascinating and much less controlling than the engineered situation which slowed the start of the play and in effect said, "look at us," taking the risk that the "wow" would become just a "so what?"
Double Edge Theater is called laboratory theater in part because its players live, work, and grow food together, in Massachusetts; the artistic process is experimental, indeed improvisionational and participatory. And while the acrobatics of this troupe were impressive; they swung and catapulted, stilt-walked and banner-hung with lithe prowess, the story of this purported interpretation of Don Quixote fixed on the events of September 11, with a "visually sweeping investigation of idealism and fanaticism, cultural wars and social decay, and individual honor and the nature of patriotic rebellion," was more approachable in the program than onstage. That is, this explanation is fine, if they say so. But had I not been told this, this is not what I would (or did) take away. Director Stacy Klein acted as director and responsible for conception and scenario. Carlos Uriona was Don Quixote; Matthew Glassman, Sancho Panza. Glassman's performance was for me the highlight of the show, but whether the acoustics of the theater or the delivery of the actors was to blame, the dialogue even from the orchestra was hard to hear, and the swishing of circus arts and commedia dell'arte made the production appear too gimmick-a-second to hold even the picaresque thread of strange things met with adventure that were the chivalric ways of the knight errant and squire. A let down in this otherwise strong festival.
Ellen Berkovitch
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