A Triptych written and directed by Gilbert Girion

By Stefan Matthew

Through May 10

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People come to art events with their own idiosyncratic references, associations, semblances in order to make meaning of the soon to be unraveled spectacle. People come to death events and such events’ transference to realized and unrealized acts of intimacy with the same laundry list (peep actor Josh Liveright as Math Professor Michael in the third installment “Number Land” and his inability to move his feet “glued” to a spot on his ex-student’s lawn). I came with my own list anticipating a work on mourning and melancholia; specifically, the depiction of hell in Hieronymus Bosch’s Millennium Triptych painted in the 1500’s and Amiri Baraka’s explanation of the modal insistence and pointillism of Miles Davis’s 1959 recording Kind of Blue.

Brecht once said, “I’m writing this down because I like precision” so let me go into a bit more detail.

I got to Hieronymus Bosch’s version of hell through the art criticism of the great John Berger (See Hold Everything Dear) who reads Bosch’s Triptych as a parable of globalization and contemporary Zapatista resistance to such economic/geopolitical structuring. Key word Triptych—I’m sitting in the front row of The Interart Theatre (this is their last show due to the company’s closing and Bloomberg’s greed) trying to make sense of the relationship, the connective sinews weaving together three play events presented as a unified whole. It is the same night I finally got what people mean when they refer to the modal playing in Miles’s opus. From Baraka’s Miles Davis: ‘One of the Great Mother Fuckers”:

Kind of Blue is the stripped-down recombing of the two musical tendencies in Miles (the American and the African-American) to where they feed each other like electric charges. Here the mood, the lush, the bottom is also sketched. Miles has discovered chords and the implied modal approach that link up object and background as the same phrase and note. Blue is not contrapuntal, it is pointilistic, yet its dots and its backgrounds are the same lines flowing together.

That was my expectation of a semblance of unity for Girion’s song cycle. The sketched bottom, the dots and backgrounds as convergence of lines. Perhaps an unfair expectation, certainly arbitrary as all hell—but over-determining my reception nonetheless.

Bridge Over Land opens with “Darkland” which portrays Ed Setrakian as Husband and Josh Liveright as Son graveside at Wife/Mother’s funeral. Husband sets up for himself the faltering expectation that as “a nonreligious man [he] shouldn’t lose himself in religious sentiment.” Girion’s script and Setrakian’s and Liveright’s performance capture expertly the aggression latent and manifest at a funeral. The layers upon layers of guilt, anger, and embarrassing disclosures in a moment of helplessness—the two men perform an absurdist dance of “are you all right?” that barely masks the aggression and resentment that coalesces around their loss. Everything is questioned in a loving hostile exchange between father and son—records of marital fidelity, coherence of Jewish ritual surrounding death (tearing of the clothing), “a little bible, a little God”.

In “Tableland”, David Hurwitz (giving a consummate performance) as Kid and the beautiful Lisa Chess as Mom confront their Kid/Mom relationship structured around the loss of their Father/Husband and a peculiar mash up of erotic charge and alcoholism.

Mom: I should try and wake your father.

Kid: My father’s dead.

Early on in the work, there a few times in which the banter and physical interactions between Mom and Kid seem to be this close in erupting into a taboo sexual exchange. Such evident fact isn’t what is most disturbing here. Such evident fact is trumped by the fact that such sexual tension is never explained, never developed, never evoked—it is there and it is gone and swallowed by the dynamics between Granddad, Mom, and Kid and platitudes about “shaping the day” and “cradle to the grave”.

For what its worth, I was convinced that this was a case of Nicole Kidman and The Others and that everyone (sans Kid) in the play were actually dead memories, explaining perhaps the ambivalent sexual attraction revulsion between Mom and Kid. An ambivalent, guilty way in which we often process and sublimate tragic loss. There is a peculiar elevated ramp stage right that I still can’t make sense of.

Aside—Ed Setrakian’s iteration of the line “Well, blow me down in Chinese” is worth the price of the ticket.

As soon as you/I thought that I was reading in too deep this intergenerational lust sub-plot between Mom and Kid you get the final offering, “Number Land”. A concluding offering in which Josh Liveright as Math Professor Michael ends up in an intimate embrace of former student Kathy played by Kati Rediger. Michael’s parents are dead, his relationship of many years has ended and he can’t seem to consummate his desire for his ex-student. Most of the action takes place with him stationary on her lawn and her stationary in her doorway trying to negotiate whether or not she is going to “let him in” and if he will follow.

In a moment of embrace Kati Rediger recites a smart, confusing and competing laundry list of labels of address to Math Prof—“Poor Baby, Poor Man, Poor Professor, Poor Crazy Professor.” In an equally poignant moment, Rediger hips Prof to the fact that the class she took with him was “Math for Dummies”. This prompts an awkward, hilarious response in which he tries to comfort Rediger’s character (who isn’t in need of comforting) that she really isn’t a dummy. The power dynamic, the Professor/Student dynamic, the return of the repressed comes back in awfully funny, telling ways. Ways often more profound than the overarching theory that the play cycle offers about how we handle our loss and try to recapture lost innocence in a perhaps inappropriate inter-generational, nostalgic sexual union.

Berger links the three panels of Bosh’s painterly narrative to tell a story about global economics and resistance. Baraka links up background and object in Miles’s compositions. These were the primers, the filters in which I received Girion’s three dramatic offerings. Kind of Blue come to find out wasn’t too off the mark. Girion’s play cycle posit coherence of mood over coherence of philosophy on mourning and death, or for that matter coherence of philosophy in dramatic performance. The disappointment in the works for me is in how each segment ends with an easy “glimmer” of hope—the proverbial sun rays at the end of the first movement illuminating the funeral plots. “A sun kiss for Mommy.”

I liked it better when Girion’s writing and the ensemble’s acting are at its best—messy and unresolved. The wait, Mom and Kid are about to fuck and they don’t or they have already, or they want to, or they aren’t really even there. The I teach math for dummies, you were my student, now I want to fuck you, but you really aren’t a dummy, because I’ve lost all confidence and swagger and you are comparatively much more composed. I wish Girion lingered longer with such ambivalences.

Such ambivalences are the pointillistic messiness of mourning and melancholia. The connective tissue linking background with object. The coherent narrative thread connecting Bosch’s three panels. Check out “Bridge Over Land” before Bloomberg’s money machine profit lust renders Interart Theatre Development Series something that is no more… Something to be mourned.

Written By Emma Sheanshang

Directed By Michael Melamedoff

By Stefan Matthew

Despite Jouissance Theater’s program-notes proviso that “there is no ‘outside’ to the text,” during my viewing last Sunday of this highly entertaining, visually enthralling glimpse into the dating lives of five beautiful New York women, my mind ventured outside. To Germany of all places. One of the aphoristic, didactic Geschicten (stories) in German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht’s collection—Stories of Mr. Keuner fits right at home with this charming dramatic exposition on the absurdity of dating in New York City. It’s about ideal types, ideal objects of desire, painterly objects of desire. I couldn’t help but think of this fragment while watching the cast execute perfect dialogue to discuss the travails of Margot and her mercurial, never on stage, painter boyfriend Tristan. (Brief aside and admission—Sarah Wilson, who plays Margot in the production beats every crush I have ever entertained including Lisa Bonet, Cristina Ricci, Alyssa Milano, and Punky Brewster). Brecht:

If Mr. K Loved Someone.

“What do you do,” Mr. K was asked, “if you love someone?”

“I make a sketch of the person,” said Mr. K.,

“and make sure that one comes to resemble the other.”

“Which? The sketch?” “No,” said Mr. K., “the person.”

Brecht is commenting on ideal types and how one should take idealizations of a desired love object seriously as a material force in one’s perception of the actuality of that figure and molding of thus. The sketch for Brecht (in what on the surface seems like a counter-intuitive reversal) holds the weight of transformation here. Brecht’s insight is vastly appropriate in thinking about a two-part dramatic exposition that with great humor and great care offers up a discussion on a boy, Margot’s current love object that might not really exist! The dialog is infinitely amusing, penned and delivered with intelligence in tempo and momentum, the set design is sufficiently sparse (a table at a Manhattan-café), and the casting works wonders. The play presents a hot and insightful glimpse of Manhattan dating life from an eclectic group of women’s perspectives. Sheanshang even had the good judgment to include the gorgeous Amy Flanagan to play Gaby, the character from New Jersey. This works to the benefit all of us who couldn’t really identify with the bougie class aspirations of the other Manhattanites, with the exception of Margot, whose gloom and doom and quiet mannerisms makes her a bit more palatable than the other Carrie Bradshaws on stage. That admission in and of itself is a testament to the strength of the acting—Chloe Whiteford does an exemplary job playing Mary in all her “very upper East side” glory. Her feints at domestic bliss, her off mannerisms and serious investment in her cashmere sweater artificially half-attached to her shoulders conveys the rational kernel of that upwardly mobile social class—They are absolutely miserable and spiritedly deficient. Anna Margaret Hollyman playing Kate musters the kind of presence where it is quite difficult to keep your eyes off of her.

This is a worthwhile endeavor to come check out and furthermore it is funny, well written and expertly acted by the entire ensemble. The bar setting of the theater plus clientele mirrors scrumptiously the action on the stage. The night I went the audience felt like a cross-section of the weekend club scene in the Meat Packing District. (Lady in the suspenders last Sunday, Holler!!!) I was waiting for the Laura character, admirably played by Cass Buggé to interject some statement to the audience, some clique philosophical observation about art imitating life. Throughout the production Laura references Derrida, deconstruction, and high art theories in a tone that is not quite ironic, not quite ingenuous. A tone unsure of its confidence in its own pretensions. A tone sort of mimicked in the program notes of the production—naming your theater Jouissance and not referencing the great late critic Roland Barthes!

Even if Margot’s boy Tristan is right and that “internet dating is a way for the conservative Right to instate a form of eugenics which results in stable marriage and minimizes the subversive power of passion and chance,” Every Girl Gets Her Man proves that it can still be the fodder for amusing theater. Great accolades are due to the writer, director and wonderful cast. And the charming bar tender who supplied me with the Heinekens.