Puppets can’t cry. But they can make people cry.
Or at least exceptionally well-made and well-voiced ones,
like those in “Vancouver,” by Ralph B. Peña, can. They create a new path for
emotion by blocking access to paths that have become too familiar.
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“Vancouver” is among the many productions that, at this late
date in the era of remote playgoing, are still exploring the ways artists can
engage audiences theatrically even when what they’re offering is basically
film. The gorgeously carved humanoids (and canines) in “Vancouver” — like the
uncanny green screens in the workplace drama “Data” and the deliberately funky
video in “The Sprezzaturameron” — are just some of the de-cinematizing
strategies I’ve recently experienced online. As audiences creep out of their
shells, these three got me thinking about the future of the digital form — and
also the live one.
But first they got me thinking about their particular lives
and concerns. In “Vancouver,” a production of
Ma-Yi Theater and the
Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival, the subject seems to be the unhappiness
of displacement. For a Japanese man named Hiro, his white wife, Amy, and their
19-year-old daughter, Ashley, that unhappiness is a knot: No one place —
certainly not Vancouver, Washington, where they live — can feel like home to
them all. The only reasonably content creature in the ménage is Lucky, their
scraggly poodle.
That Lucky talks — lovingly, directly and frequently about
bacon — is a bit of absurdity you easily accept within the conventions of
puppet drama. (Like all the puppets, he’s gorgeously made; the puppetry
director is Tom Lee.)
The other characters are more circumspect with their needs.
Hiro (voiced by James Yaegashi) often speaks in anguished interior monologue.
Amy (Cindy Cheung) drinks herself to sleep most nights in a pile of partly
eaten sunflower seeds. Both are exhausted from managing the needs of their
daughter, Ashley (Shannon Tyo), whose Asperger’s diagnosis makes her feel like
an alien in her own world. Washing her hair and keeping a job are challenges
for her; only video games, amusingly rendered in the most analog way
imaginable, are not.
If “Vancouver” is fundamentally about “a mixed-race Asian
American family dealing with racial aggressions” — as Peña, who also directed,
has said — we see that only glancingly during its 35 minutes. Early on, Ashley
tosses off the news that the “weird kid” across the street has called her
family “radioactive from the bombs” once dropped on Japan. Later, as if linking
varieties of hatred, the play finds Ashley at a bus stop, where someone throws
a Chinese takeout food carton at her, shouting, “weirdo.”
Otherwise, the subject of race is buried beneath the
family’s many other problems, where, like some underground buildup of energy,
it accumulates an almost tectonic power. That’s a paradox common to all art
forms — great suppression creates great force — but here, the feeling is
intensified by the paradox of the puppets. Their souls seem more accessible
than human souls do because their eyes are made of glass.
In those eyes, you can see how the themes of “Vancouver” are
linked by the problem of conditional love: how it destabilizes children,
depresses adults and, writ large, victimizes whole segments of society. Even
Lucky (Daniel K. Isaac) suffers when it turns out that he too is provisional.
That moment when people realize how precariously they claim
space in the world is a turning point in “Data,” produced by the Alliance
Theatre and this year’s winner of the Alliance/Kendeda competition for
playwrights in graduate school. In this case, the playwright, Matthew Libby,
had the requisite background not only in drama but also in tech, which is both
the subject of the play and the way it got rescued when the pandemic foreclosed
on a live, staged production.
The tech also provides a neat visual counterpoint to the
story of Maneesh (Cheech Manohar), a programmer at a data-mining company called
Athena. When he is asked to transfer to a unit developing a secret algorithm
for predicting terrorist acts against the US government, Maneesh is forced to
weigh the benefits to himself against the potential harm to others. The others
are immigrants — including Maneesh’s own parents.
If that’s too neat of a setup, it’s hardly science fiction;
real-world cases involving data-mining behemoths like Palantir and Cambridge
Analytica have raised similar concerns. In any case, the payoff is exciting, in
an Aaron Sorkin meets Michael Lewis way. As directed by Susan V. Booth, the
Alliance’s artistic director, the production leaps headlong past its problems.
Certainly its 90 minutes of ticktock action, forwarded in snappy dialogue
between Maneesh and two colleagues — one principled (Clare Latham) and one not
(Jake Berne) — has the feel of a well-paced television procedural.
Better than television, though, is the disorienting effect
of the green screen technology, which allows the actors, who were actually 10
to 20 feet apart while filming, to appear together, even in endless games of
table tennis. As you wonder how the effect was achieved you are brought up
short by the contrast with the content: What does it mean when ethics becomes a
kind of trick and a game?
“The Sprezzaturameron” goes further: In its world, ethics
are a subject of satire. This multimedia “video docudrama” from Tei Blow and
Sean McElroy, who write and perform as Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble, is so
high concept that its content seemed to vaporize as I stared at its bizarre
images and tried to decipher its opaque dialogue. From what I could make out,
it’s about documentarians in a perfected future world who look back on our
highly imperfect one to see how artists in these backward years behaved.
What makes it troubling is its equal-opportunity carping at
both cancel culture and the false apologetics that try to outwit it. It’s
useful to have that conversation, or whatever “The Sprezzaturameron” is, in the
air.
At any rate, its image of the art world as a taffy-stretched
Parthenon teetering on the back of a giant gilded turtle is surely one I’ll
think of the next time a genius is felled by revelations of shocking misdeeds
everyone knew about anyway.
It is not an unreasonable question to ask whether the live
arts, under the weight of the pandemic but also their own long-festering
inequities, are expanding or, like that turtle, exploding — and which would be
a better thing. Right now, my more pressing concern is whether experiments like
these, enforced by the shutdown, will continue after the reopening.
I hope so: By exploring the wilds of what theater can be
without theaters, virtual works clear a path toward continued innovation and
growth of the form. No need to apologize for that.
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