Ionesco,
the Optimist?
"The
Chairs"
A Pick Up Performance Company Production
Edited, choreographed, and directed by David Gordon
BAM Harvey Theater
New York
December 1-4, 2004
by
Nancy Dalva
copyright
© 2004 by Nancy Dalva
The
Pick Up Performance Company's production of Eugene Ionesco's "The
Chairs" is a self-referential and idiosyncratic affair. Not the play,
but a version of the play, tailored to to the principals, David Gordon
and his wife Valda Setterfield. The play is transposed from absurdist
to post-modernism, an arena in which Mr. and Mrs. Gordon function as did,
in their day, Mr. and Mrs. Lunt. Like these thespian predecessors, they
are glamorous, they are fabled, and they are, of course, married.
As are the characters in "The Chairs," which is only one of
the aspects that must have made this play seem to them so ideally suited
to themselves. Another is the actual appearance of actual chairs, which
usage was novel to Ionesco in this one instance, but which is old hat
to Mr. Gordon. He first employed a metal folding chair in choreographing
for his wife after she had suffered an injury in a car accident. She motored
on, but the chairs stayed, augmented by two other devices common in Mr.
Gordon's choreography and on display in this production: framing devices
(here, frames on wheels), and a split stage (here seen on an old video
of the couple in a marvelous duet they did on and with folding chairs)
and in the staging itself. There is also another kind of framing and splitting—that
offered by the introduction of two all purpose black-clad stage manager/dancer/mummers,
in the persons of Guillermo Resto ( whose sovereign dignity has never
failed him, in a long and distinguished career, including twenty years
with the Mark Morris Dance Group), and Karen Graham (since 1986 a stalwart
of the Gordon enterprise). They are joined briefly by Aaron Burcham Heisler,
an actor-dancer. It's nice to have people with wit and depth about them
in any case, even when they simply carry chairs and in other ways serve
as prop masters, but this show is not theirsit belongs to Mr. Gordon and
Miss Setterfield—and they do nothing for the Ionesco, which Mr.
Gordon feels free to augment with some vaguely dancey material for them,
perhaps to stretch the show to 75 minutes. (This is a big mistake, by
the way. It is not a good idea to augment something bleak and spare, because
the amendments are then also diminishments.)
David Gordon works here with a new translation of the play by Michael
Feingold, whose deft linguistic play aligns Ionesco with Beckett, with
perhaps just a soupçon of Ogden Nash. The words are spoken gloriously
by Miss Setterfield, who retains the physical daring of the dancer she
has long been (trained at the Ballet Rambert, a member of the Merce Cunningham
Dance Company, and so forth) with a vocal command (from despair to glee
and back) that we associate with British-trained actors, who have technique
to burn. Mr. Gordon, on the other hand, makes Robert DeNiro look like
Sir John Gielgud. And sound like him, too. He is resolutely a New Yorker,
having migrated from the Lower East Side as far as Soho. Because of this
insistence on his own realness, his own reality, he is not submerged in
the Ionesco. It is, instead, subsumed in him. It is, instead, subsumed
in him. The translation—introducing "a producer" in place
of "the orator;" the ease with all the props and their manipulation;
the familiar referencing of the mechanics of the play—the pretense
use of the script, the visibility of the stage management team; and most
of all, the transformation of a vision that is grim to one that is of
happy transcendence, and potential transformation; all this is David Gordon,
not Eugene Ionesco.
In Gordon's hands, the play is about a happy couple whose long life in
the theater is capped by a simultaneous retirement to the grave, to which,
as Philomen and Baucis of the Greek legend, they have the good luck to
retreat simultaneously. You'd never know from seeing them step cheerfully
out of their frames and into the audience that they have, in the text,
just committed suicide. But no matter. We still have the play. We have
this new translation. We've heard the cellist Wendy Sutter play Michael
Gordon's plangent and interesting score. And we've had a night with David
and Valda, lit by Jennifer Tipton. If there is something optimistic about
David Gordon and his "Chairs" absent in the play, who can blame
him? On the evidence, his chairs and his wife—his life—have
given him abundant reason to find, in Ionesco's play, a comedy, and to
think that, stepping off stage together with his wife would be, indeed,
a happy end.
Both photos: Jack
Vartoogian.
Volume
2, No. 46
December 6, 2004
www.danceviewtimes.com
Copyright
©2004 by Nancy Dalva
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Writers |
Mindy
Aloff
Dale Brauner
Mary Cargill
Christopher Correa
Clare Croft
Nancy Dalva
Rita Felciano
Marc Haegeman
George Jackson
Gia Kourlas
Sali Ann Kriegsman
Alexander Meinertz
Tehreema Mitha
Gay Morris
Ann Murphy
Paul Parish
John Percival
Susan Reiter
Jane Simpson
Alexandra Tomalonis (Editor)
Lisa Traiger
Meital Waibsnaider
Kathrine Sorley Walker
Leigh Witchel
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