A Play On Words

TO THE ACCOMPANIMENT OF the sounds of a tropical forest in a bird-infested jungle and flashing projection of lighting, John Cage, when he was at Harvard last semester, presented a multi-media symphonic reading of Thoreau's Walden, with a dozen readers speaking simultaneously in irregular polyphony. With its torrential waves of sentences upon sentences, and splashing words and spilling syllables, the Cage extravaganza explored the possibilities of the human voice when reduced to a cascading unintelligibility. Cage showed the cathartic effect of flooding all the senses, and I remember myself screaming in unison at the top of my lungs toward the climax of the piece.

A similar multi-media reading of Dame Edith Sitwell's 1923 sound poem, Facade, is now at the Loeb. While I did not feel impelled to scream along with the show at the end--this being more like, say, a Mozart concerto than a Beethoven symphony--the Loeb production is admirably creative, refreshing and unhackneyed, and certainly deserved the spontaneous exclamation of approval of a member of the audience it did receive at the end of the first act the other night.

Just as the Cubist painters redirected attention away from the representational content of a painting and concentrated it upon the surface of the canvas as a flat plane, so Facade, by reducing words to a musical unintelligibility, explores the surface texture--the facade--of sound. With passages read at break neck speed like.

That hobnailed goblin, the bob-tailed

Hob,

Said, 'It is time I began to rob'

For strawberries bob, hob-nob with the

pearls...

or

Something lies beyond the scene, the encre

de chine, marine, obscene

Horizon

In

Hell

Black as a bison

See the tall black aga on the sofa in the

alfa mope, his Bellrope

Moustache (clear as a great bell!)...the play becomes a virtuoso exhibition of muscle-flexings in alliteration, assonance and puns.

Like a child distracted by the strange things mentioned in the poem, the narrator's voice lingers, hurries, skips, stretches and yawns. In a similar peripatetic fashion, three screens hung above the stage project slides of clippings from a 1923 magazine, echoing in an offhanded and unobtrusive way images and objects mentioned in the poem, while two huge panels of spotlights blink lazily like cows into gorgeous rainbow colors in rhythm to the music and words.

In the Loeb production of Facade, the Sitwell poem is read through twice. In the first act, there is one reader accompanied by orchestra, while in the second, the actors mime to a recorded reading of the poem.

The first act is staged much as Dame Edith Sitwell first performed the play in 1923 to a baffled and exasperated audience in Aeolian Hall in London. The stage is mysteriously covered in movers' white sheets, while the excellent six-piece orchestra (directed by John Major) playfully accompanies in formal black at the center of the stage. Bill Cavness, a local television personality, does the reading, pirouetting through twenty-one highly rhymed, highly rhythmic and almost nonsensical poems. The first act is appropriately restrained and understated, with the audience's attention focused on the music of the words and the orchestra, and the theatrical effects dabbed on as a casual and elegant flourish.

The second act is a repeat of the first, except this time with all the multi-media possibilities of the Loeb exploited. This part is wholly the creation of director Peter Sellars '80, Harvard's own artist-huckster Christo who as a freshman has foisted this crazy unorthodox production on the mainstage. His concept is a chic one A la Altman and Chorus Line, the director and actors got together during rehearsal in a dance studio filled with mirrors and spent a month improvising, trying to squeeze characters out of the Sitwell poetry, while a photographer snapped glamourous pictures of the cast which are projected on the huge screens during the performance. But, unlike Chorus Line, the actors in Facade have an insurmountable obstacle--they must remain mute. The audio portion of the second act is provided by a replay of a commercial recording of the Facade poem.

Sellars has had considerable experience as a puppeteer, but he forgets that people are not puppets. Unlike puppets, people get embarrassed, awkward and fidgety. Mime is a very difficult art which requires absolute control and subtlety. So when the actors are asked merely to improvise whatever they want on stage in approximate time to the poem, with little direction, they are often reduced to exaggerated gestures, uncomfortable muggings, and an aimless messy shuffling on stage.

Elizabeth Philip is strikingly beautiful in her photographed sequence and holds a choreographed tension throughout the play. Elizabeth Bronfen is suitably lactic and senile as Queen Victoria, while Lisa Claudy and Danielle Alexandra both flow through their mimes with professional ease and individuality. The actors are obviously competent and make do as best they can, but responsibility for their scattered incoherence must lie with the director.

BUT WHAT SELLARS LACKS in cynical common-sense about the hard necessities of direction, he more than makes up in style. He has given the whole play a facade of try-anything spontaneity, and daredevil and slightly mad improvisation. Sellars' poster for the play is an unpretentious and quite ineffective quick Flair pen sketch. The program is a jumble of mad typing the night before the opening. All the orchestra seats in the Loeb have been moved backstage so that half of the audience sits at the bottom of the breath-taking canyon-like flyspace of the theater, and they are encouraged to move to different seats during the performance. At one point in the second act, the curtains threaten to tumble down and enclose the backstage audience completely, only to creep sheepishly and mischievously back up again. During the intermission, the cast meanders in and tears back the white sheets to reveal the insane maze-like set with everything from bathtubs, to free-standing fireplaces and rows of chandeliers hanging a foot off the ground and a hundred other incongruous objects littered across the stage. As in the first act, there is peripatetic delight in easily-overlooked details, like a severed mannequin hand here, or a broken champagne glass there. And it is in this serendipitous affection for strange objects, sounds and images that the main pleasure of the production comes.

The Loeb production of Facade is a liberating and refreshing change from conventional theatre, and though Sellars' zaniness is occasionally only cosmetic, he more than makes up for it in his irresistable imagination and impish originally.