Review of Breathing Room, on stage at the Greenway Court Theatre.
I can appreciate an avant-garde piece as much as the next open-minded traditionalist, except when it feels like a strained, even failing, rearguard action to unify fragmentary ideas into a cohesive whole. The point of Breathing Room is well-taken: A call for reconnecting with nature as an antidote to what creator/composer Mary Lou Newmark terms “modern technologic vertigo.” But the affair is curiously artless or, at least, undeveloped; barely molded clay, despite the undeniable creativity in many of the piece’s individual fragments.
There’s no question of Ms. Newmark’s virtuosity as a violinist, nor the skills of the piece’s two actors, Charles Reese and Eileen T’Kaye (recently seen in the Long Beach ICT’s Other Desert Cities and Dead Man’s Cell Phone). Max Oken’s sparse staging, however, underscores a struggle with translating an idea worthy of Henry David Thoreau or Walt Whitman into an immersive experience. Consisting of a tree stump, a stool, and a cutout tree reminiscent of the sad specimen from A Charlie Brown Christmas, the set, like the few available props, does little but offer the actors something to occupy their hands with from time to time. This creates neither atmosphere nor symbolic encapsulation of the piece’s theme. The onus, then, falls on Ms. T’Kaye and Mr. Reese to engage the audience, but Dan Berkowith’s direction often leads them to overperform, a gesture that smudges over the piece’s lack of substance. A few moments stand out for their lyrical beauty, such as when Mr. Reese delivers a soliloquy on his character’s mysterious father-adventurer or Ms. T’Kaye expounds on the beauty of a mother hummingbird, only to be offset by segments like an invocation of quantum mechanics from the Deepak Chopra School of Misappropriated Physics. And heavens to betsy, there’s even some choreography that makes the case for modern interpretive dance as a cry for medication. Hyperbole aside, the trouble is that the piece flitters from idea to idea, character moment to character moment, evocative quotation to evocative quotation. Some hit, some miss, but altogether none really digs deep in a case of show-and-tell that’s light on the showing.
Then there’s the setup for Ms. Newmark, who is hidden behind a translucent screen and nestled between a laptop computer, music stand, and electronics. It’s inelegant and, worse, distracts from her performance. Even her neon green electric violin can’t quite command attention like her fiddly foot pedals and equipment. She is kept apart from the production, although she is very much in it – an unnecessary tension in a piece that already ping-pongs our attention between her music and the actors’ stage work. As for the music itself, it’s a processed, staccato affair with looped samples and malleable beats that, while interesting and even beautiful in fits, well induces a technologic vertigo of its own. Much like Ms. Newmark’s placement on the staff, it feels both a part of the piece and separate from it, further reinforcing the impression that Breathing Room is a collection of pottery shards that haven’t quite been glued together to form a vase. It works, I suppose, as an experience of technologic vertigo, but doesn’t evoke an experience of its remedy.
Granted, the avant-garde is all about throwing convention out the window and, preferably, under an oncoming bus. To a certain extent, Breathing Room’s appeal rests on one’s tolerance for the unorthodox. In the big picture, however, the piece strikes me as ambition unfulfilled by its execution; a prototype rather than a production. Which is a shame, because there are intriguing seeds and kernels in there, both in the music and the ideas, that deserve to become flowering plants.
Breathing Room, by Mary Lou Newmark. On stage at the Greenway Court Theatre from October 3 to October 25, 2015. Call (323) 655-7679 x100 or visit www.greenwaycourttheatre.org/breathing-room for tickets and information.
Frédérik Sisa is the Page’s Assistant Editor and Resident Art Critic. Reach him at fsisa@thefrontpageonline.com or via various social media at www.kimtag.com/writer.
