Series C of Screaming Venus' Eve's Apple Festival of One-Person Shows started off on an odd and ineffectual note with Eat Rice! Written and directed by Monica Sirignano and performed by Nicole Higgins, it was full of meaningless profundity, and the superficial masquerading as consequential. Eat Rice! borrowed heavily from Laurie Anderson but without her humor or cleverness. "If you've come seeking a bowl of rice you've come to the wrong place" and "Identification please!" were repeated several times, but nothing was built on the initially provocative phrases. Higgins turned a gun on the audience, but to little point. She moved around the stage seeming to hear, as the audience did, the sound of voices, often overlapping, sometimes speaking, sometimes making noise. The sound (designed by Dan Thorens; voiceovers directed by Monica Sirignano) was the only superior thing about the piece, as it was superbly rendered and at least had an element of surprise - in addition to the voices, the sounds included gargling, static, and Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." The lighting (designed by Miranda Hardy) was also quite effective, bathing the stage in color, or spotlighting cleanly. There was also a large red telephone and some kitchen implements used to comic effect, but was Higgins meant to be in a madhouse? She lay down on a table several times, but was it out of exhaustion? Confusion? This multi-media soup was plotted, planned, and slickly executed, but since the interesting bits were on tape it was at a remove from the audience, and the performer had no way of anchoring it. The slide projections provided no answers either.
Ascending Bodily, written and performed by Maggie Cino and directed by Dov Weinstein, also involved a possibly insane woman, but this monologue made sense in its roundabout way, and benefited from Cino's appealing performance. She came on stage dressed in shapeless clothes, mules, stockings, socks, a large hat, and several purses draped over and around her. But her nonsensical and fractured narrative conveyed a multitude of themes - neediness, anxiety, love, the purpose of life - as she divested herself of the bags, then put them on again. One bag's handles become props in a story of an adventure on a ship - the specifics were less important than the simple, effective theatricality of it. Other declarations, such as comparing the moon to the bald head of a man she's met, then stating "His bald head was the moon" gave her stories an appealing dream-like quality. Insane? Quite probably, but she was sweetly charming, like a crazy aunt or a very little girl, and her final question to the audience about the nature of death was deeply felt. And her tale involving the teeny tiny llamas was a special treat.
The pretentiousness of the first piece and some of the charm of the second were combined in the final part, The Art of Unknowing, written and performed by Marena Lobosco, directed by Amanda Selwyn. At the start, a dancing woman in white (Lobosco) was completely upstaged by the video projection on the wall behind her. The video had interesting images of dancers, and was accompanied by a voice that recited and sang - but Lobosco was the most insignificant thing on stage, even though she was live and the rest was pre-recorded. When that ended, she came back with several hatboxes and tried on the hats as she complained of always feeling "on," as if she were performing her life. It was an interesting point, an actress's self-conscious comment on the different ways people perform, but the hats never became meaningful, as the purses did in Ascending Bodily. Even piling up the hatboxes as she talked of obsessions, control, bank accounts, politics, socialism, and hats came across as self-consciously "significant, " especially since her persona seemed borrowed from Sex and the City. And either the lighting was off, or Lobosco kept missing her marks, but she was frequently out of the light that seemed meant to accent her. She was certainly agile and moved extremely well, but her piece was fragmented, and not a little inflated.
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Eat Rice |
Ascending Bodily |
The Art of Unknowing |
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Costumes |
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Copyright 2002 John Chatterton