Subversive Theatre Collective: When things get Hairy

No full-fledged Scene Report for this, the final day of the festival, because I wasn't part of any particular "scene" today. Despite my best intentions, outside factors intervened and I never even made it down to Allen Street at all. The closest I got was the Great Arrow Building, which this year, thanks to the Alt and Manny Fried Theatres, took the place of Rust Belt as the primary venue for live theater (a smart and understandable move, but, as one festivalgoer pointed out to me midweek, it does take away a bit of the centrally-located aspect of the early years of BIF). There was no way I could let the festival end without seeing the latest project from by its once and future Pooh-Bah, Kurt Schneiderman, and his Subversive Theatre Company.



I have vague memories of reading The Hairy Ape in or around high school, but other than the basic premise and the ending, not much of it stuck with me. And I confess I've never quite gotten America's Greatest Playwright, despite repeated attempts. Even so, I trusted that the Subversives would do something ... well, subversive, with the play.

No disappointment there! From the full-out opening surprise (which I won't spoil) to the live music score by Pat Cain and Gabriel Gutierrez to the overall framing device of "the Burn 'em & Bail 'em Circus," this is easily the most fun you're ever likely to have at an O'Neill play. (It's sinister fun, mind you, but still.) The relatively large cast of familiar and unfamiliar faces is something I've almost come to expect from Subversive projects, and I'm always amazed at how many talented actors Schneiderman manages to find and work with. I'll single out ringmaster Brian Zybala and protagonist Patrick Cameron, each an intense presence in his own way, by name, but pretty much everybody else is called upon to play multiple roles and does so with captivating ease. This particular production is practically a dance piece at times, and there are inventive bits of stage business every couple of minutes. (It's a noisy show, in more ways than one, and at times I had trouble hearing or following the main storyline because of all the hoopla on the sidelines.) Given its staging, I can easily envision this show being mounted in, say, 1967, but that's not to say it doesn't feel fresh and alive in our current era of burnout and bailout. (And face it: 1967 was a pretty cool time to see a play.)

As luck would have it, if you missed Ape during the festival proper, you can still catch it this coming Thursday through Saturday--if you're not already burnt out on artgoing for a while. Lord knows I might be, and I'll be happily taking a break from seeing stuff for at least a week or two. With that in mind, even though I only made it to one show today, I'm glad my own experience of Infringement 09 ended with a bang, not a whimper.

Scene report: Day ten

My only regret when it comes to Lisa Vitrano's one-person show Bitch Bares All is that I didn't see it earlier in its run so I could tell more people about it. (Truth be told, I'm not nuts about the title, which is funny and eye-catching but also a bit misleading, and might scare off potential audience members expecting/fearing something totally different. Ah, well.) I've been a fan of Vitrano since I first started noticing her in Alleyway shows in the 90s. There's something about her energy, her physicality, and above all her timing that always makes me happy, even when I don't like the play she's in.

That's not an issue here, because she wrote this particular piece herself, and it turns out she's every bit as entertaining and interesting a writer as she is a performer. Updating an autobiographical monologue she first developed in 2001, Vitrano tells the story of giving birth to a son when she was essentially still a child herself. If that sounds like a heady, heavy dose of Lifetime Channel movie-of-the-week fodder, guess again--this tale is hilarious almost from beginning to end and utterly idiosyncratic throughout. (A handful of brief moments are alternately surreal, poetic, or directly didactic; some of these work better than others, but they're all essential to the fast-moving collage of voices and perspectives she presents.) At one point she refers to a Newsweek cover story on teen mothers; her own approach is about as far away from something like that as you can get. Clocking in somewhere around 45 minutes, it's short, sweet, smart, and sharp. You've got one more chance to see it as of this writing, but I hope she gets it out to the widest possible audience. Here's a photo that does little to convey the performer's talents--she just happened to be standing in brighter lights at the moment:



There's no way I could convey the appeal of Ella Joseph's A House of Stone or Sunk In, or . . . (or any of her other work I've seen in Infringement over the years) in a mere photo, either:



Entering this particular video installation reminded me a little of a labyrinth and a little of a confessional--only the ceiling is strung with fuzzy little creations that evoke both fishing flies and houseflies. This is the kind of piece you're best off witnessing alone, at a point when you have enough time to sit quietly for a while and let Joseph's imagery and audio wash over you. I won't claim to know what it all means to its maker, to me, or to you--in that sense it's the polar opposite of Vitrano's far more explicit message--but I love the mystery and elegance of it all.

Heading into Allentown, I stumbled upon something I wasn't expecting: an eye-catching installation of works in the fresnelphotography series. I'd seen the photographer's trippy lens up and down Allen Street over the last few days, but the grouping of finished images hanging by clothespins on string on the edge of Days Park was a wonderful surprise:



Speaking of wonderful surprises, Der Wundertisch (The Wonder Table) may well be the single most delightful experience I've had in five years of Infringing. The less I say about it, the better, but suffice to say if you're a fan of Michelle Costa's puppetry, or Joseph Cornell's boxes--or if you've ever wondered what it would be like to fall down the rabbit hole with Alice and take tea with the White Rabbit (? Mad Hatter? whoever)--don't miss this five-minute, one-audience-member-at-a-time project by a pair of artists visiting from New York and Boston. A big part of its charm on Saturday was the fact that it was on the back porch behind Space 224 on a perfect afternoon, whereas Sunday it moves indoors, to the Grant Street Gallery, but I'm pretty sure it would enchant me no matter when or where I encountered it. (Warning: the artist statement may make the piece sound a lot more academic than it really is; I have no doubt that the historical references and critical theory informing it will be relevant and illuminating to some audience members, but for me the appeal is in how homemade and delicate both the set and the performance are. My advice is to dive in first, and suss out its deeper meanings later.)



At this point in the evening, I snuck off with two friends to the Black Rock and Riverside Starry Night Gardenwalk, an event which started the same year as Infringement and, in its own way, has a similar kind of grassroots, funky, all-over-the-place creative energy that may totally challenge your stereotypes of the neigborhood, much as Infringement can expand your sense of what artists and musicians are up these days. (Amazingly enough, it's the only nighttime garden tour in WNY--this idea is too much fun not to catch on!) Alas, looks like it'll always be the same night as the biggest single night of BIF, but if Infringement just doesn't provide enough adventure and inspiration for you, check it out next year. Besides, it's not that far from some of the newest BIF venues.

OK, one more day of Infringing, and it's all over for 354 days! Fortunately, all the events I've mentioned above are viewable one last time, along with so much more. If I can somehow fit in even a third of what's still on my wanna-see list SUnday, I'll be in ecstasy.

Brazen-Faced Varlets: And now for something COMPLETELY different

No full-fledged Scene Report today, since I only had the time/energy for one BIF event. But even it was two--two!--shows in one, so there.

By my thoroughly unscientific estimation, Buffalo Infringement is now (and for the last two or three years) about two-thirds music acts, which is fine by me, since a lot of them interest me and the mix of art forms is absolutely true to the vibe of WNY. But my heart will always be with the kind of theater that was the (or at least an) original focus of the festival, both here and elsewhere. Amazingly, I hadn't been to a single sit-down play till today, and that just didn't feel right.



There was no way I was gonna miss the latest Brazen-Faced Varlets show if I could help it, and the news that they'd be performing an early play of Holly Hughes's sealed the deal. I've been a fan of this (primarily) lesbian-focussed theater company since the first time I saw them, in the 2006 festival doing Ramona and Juliet, and one of my companions at the show tonight reminded me that I first met Holly 23 (!) years ago, when I brought her and other members of WOW Cafe (some of them members of the original cast of The Well of Horniness) to Hallwalls. A marriage made in heaven, assuming heaven is more welcoming of same-sex alliances than we mortals appear to be.

You'll notice I've used the name of the group as the subject line and haven't even mentioned the title of the show yet. That's because "HERstrionics! A HERstorical and HERsterical Hour of Homosexuality" is a clunker of an omnibus name that I doubt many people can remember. All you need to know is that this is the latest group undertaking by one of Buffalo's finest ensembles.

Well, you should probably also know that they're working outside their, and their audience's, comfort zone this time. If you've seen either of their two Shakespeare de-/re-constructions (or, I assume, Catholic School Girls, which I missed), you know they're collectively blessed with terrific comic timing. Apparently they're feeling comedy is too limiting, because they've paired Hughes's ultra-broad (pun not intended but appropriate) soap opera parody with--brace yourself--Kim Yaged's ultra-serious, ultra-didactic one-act about the fate of lesbians in the Holocaust. I'm hard pressed to think of two plays that have less in common; the only link I can think of is the fact that both playwrights love to play with language--but let's face it, Hughes's way with words, even in an intentionally tossed off sketch like this (it was born as an ongoing serial for WOW's teensy club/theater in the East Village in the early 80s) is on an entirely different level than Yaged's in Vessels.

OK, so the other connecting thread is that they're both well performed. Vessels does showcase the talents of three of the four main Varlets, Heather Fangsrud, Kelly M. Beuth, and Lara Haberberger. (Katie White is otherwise engaged with Shakespeare in the Park this summer, though her spirit does make a kind of cameo I won't spoil.) They each embody aspects of The Lesbian Experience in the Weimar Era (and yes, the script pretty much obliges them to describe themselves in roughly that way) in a loosely plotted tale that is undeniably moving, but so heavy-handed that you feel like it's straight out of a Women's Studies conference from the mid-70s. I'm glad someone has documented the period, and there are some powerful parallels to the current era in the play's observations on the price of apathy in the face of totalitarianism, but this is the kind of art that feels like it's Good for You, like eating your vegetables, rather than the kind of art that shakes you to the core and transforms the way you live, which is what I suspect it aspires to do.

Hughes's raunchy Well of Horniness doesn't set out to change anyone's life, either, but one never knows--its shoestring aesthetic and anything-goes spirit just might inspire another generation or two of young queer theater artists, as it has been doing for the last two decades. (When I first encountered Holly's work, it felt like a huge breath of fresh air after years of plays like Vessels.) (I realize my continually pitting these two playwrights against each other violates the non-competitive nature of both art and feminism, but the juxtaposition wasn't my idea in the first place.) The core trio is joined by Bethany Sparacio (a born Varlet herself) and Amelia Kraatz (a worthy grounding force for the "herstrionics" of the others, as she's used here) in a show tailor-made for this cast's considerable gifts. Everybody plays multiple roles, and plays them with irresistible energy. I won't bother you with the plot; trust me, it's not really the point, just a springboard for all manner of hilarity. (Obligatory disclaimer to non-homos of either gender: you absolutely do not have to be a member of the "Tri-Bad" sorority to laugh your ass off here.)

Ah, hilarity and the Holocaust: what a double bill! I don't mean to hate on the serious half; I'm sure its content will be a revelation to many audience members, and I can't fault the company for venturing beyond what they do best. (Besides, it's only thirty minutes long.) But when a certain phone call arrives half an hour into the proceedings and the tone changes radically, allowing the Varlets to do that voodoo that they do so well, I think you'll agree that a good belly laugh is sometimes more subversive than a heartfelt lecture.

PS. Exciting news! More Brazen-Faced Hughes ahead, since the company's next production has Haberberger directing Beuth in the monologue Clit Notes at Rust Belt, Oct. 1-10.