ARTSMONDAY: 'Umbrellas' Covers Surrealism With Comic Veneer

During Surrealism’s heyday, Jean Cocteau argued that the criterion for a true work of Surrealist art should be that the images are “lasting and fresh.” “The Secret Lives of Umbrellas” would have us question this paradigm.

The Surrealist qualities of the ambitious play—put up this weekend in the Adams House Pool Theater, written and produced by Jessica S. Benjamin ’07 and directed by Dipika Guha—seemed almost unquestionable. The dialogue, the discontinuities, and the play’s fundamental indifference to narrative all pointed to the same Surrealist conclusion: logic was not welcome here.

However, Cocteau’s standard for Surrealism did not apply to “The Secret Lives of Umbrellas.” Although visually interesting—giant eyeballs and colorful umbrellas popped up throughout the show—what made “Secret Lives” unusual was the fact that it didn’t lean upon images to justify itself aesthetically.

Instead, the show’s successes hinged upon a surprisingly down-to-earth sense of humor—which, coupled with the show’s irrationality, often resulted in a highly idiosyncratic work.

At one point in the show, a character named Sam (Susan C. Merenda ’07) said in response to a complex sight gag, “That’s not impressive, that’s just a bunch of things thrown together.” This description was an excellent working definition of Surrealism—and it could very well have described the serial structure of the play itself. There were some recurring characters, and there was almost the skeleton of a plot throughout the play, but the form of the show was ultimately that of a Surrealist sketch comedy.

All of the pieces were amusing, and a few of them were hilarious. Some turned out to be tightly cohesive jokes about wordplay, and others were built around an innovative conceit.

In one sketch, the characters stood on a darkened stage and told jokes, turning on flashlights whenever they spoke. In another, a character named XY (Rachel Marie Douglas ’09) explained her ambitions to become “the lightweight polyglot champion of the world.”

One thing remained constant: the success of the show was almost entirely contingent upon Benjamin’s sense of humor. If one found it unappealing, nothing else would carry the performance: not the plot, not the theater-going experience, nothing.

Benjamin’s absurdist brand of humor was supplemented by recurring images present throughout the play in the actors’ costumes (designed by Gul N. Dogusan) and in the set (designed by Khadija Z. Carroll).

Notably, two characters appeared intermittently in giant, papier-mâché eyeball costumes. The eyeballs here constituted a larger-than-life visual anomaly in a play where everything else seems comfortably life-sized.

Another interesting motif was that of the eponymous umbrella; many of them were suspended from the ceiling in the background of the play, and in one sequence a character donned a rainbow-colored hat shaped like an umbrella. Although its presence was significant, the rich potential of the umbrella as an image was not exploited as fully as that of the eyeball.

The characters were impetuous and emotional, and they followed an inscrutable logic, but their strange dialogues belied a sophisticated self-consciousness of the artistic enterprise in play throughout “The Secret Lives of Umbrellas.”

The play was challenging, and all of the actors did a commendable job. Douglas brought a delightful comedic exaggeration to the stage in a variety of roles. The performances of Masha O. Godina ’08 as Man 2, XX, and Baby were pitch-perfect, and the innocence of her comic delivery—reminiscent of Giulietta Masina—made her the highlight of the performance.

Guha’s direction effectively focused the characters toward satirical representations that were highly appropriate for Benjamin’s script.

The dialogue of “The Secret Lives of Umbrellas” often evoked the banter between Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” full of rapid-fire exchanges and comic misunderstandings. But where Beckett took on themes like salvation and the human condition, Benjamin’s play sidestepped anything too poignant.

This total lack of pathos may have been one of the biggest limitations of the show.

In consciously rejecting any strong, global, unifying factor, and in refusing to humanize its characters, “The Secret Lives of Umbrellas” made it impossible to empathize with the characters of the play. Effectively, it condemned itself to frivolity. This fact was not exactly a defect—it seemed to be a fundamental characteristic of Benjamin’s vision—but she has still curiously prevented her work from attaining a sense of depth.

And yet the humor in the play was so accessible, it was hard to condemn. In one scene, an actress, turned with her back to the audience, stood behind a placard reading “has a nice ass” and shook, well, her ass.

It was funny, certainly; bizarre, yes; but also a far cry from the formal, unbroken Surrealist veneer of, say, Luis Buñuel’s early films. Another sequence early in the play featured a parodic ballet to grandiose music, about on par with the kind of humor you would see in a commercial during the Super Bowl. If anything, the show was unpretentious.

In its defiance of traditional theater aesthetics, “The Secret Lives of Umbrellas” took a lot of risks—which on balance was quite admirable, especially for a student-written work. But the play’s spectacle of amusing incoherence was certainly not for everyone. At times the characters even seemed to acknowledge its radical sense of humor, explaining, “Anyone can say anything. You should try it.”