1. Eurydice: PURE Theatre, 10 Storehouse Row, North Charleston
2. Lobby Hero: Stelle Di Domani, Chapel Theatre
3. I Live Next to Horses, Piccolo Fringe, Theatre 99

It occurred to me today that there are a couple of things going on between the big festival’s Amistad and the small festival’s Eurydice. Both are concerned with memory and forgetting, and both make creative use of non-traditional performance spaces. Upon further reflection, I suspect that the latter — staging — divides our tastes more deeply than any other factor.

P&C overview critic Tim Page knocked Amistad’s opera-in-the-round staging Sunday morning, noting that the singers can’t project their voices to everyone in the audience simultaneously. This was part of an overall lukewarm review that declared the opera disappointing. But here’s the thing: The people who decided to stage the opera that way knew going in that 360-degree opera would present these acoustic challenges. They said as much. You could have criticized Amistad for its acoustics without even attending.

The more interesting question to me: What did the audience get in the tradeoff? Because in the ever-shifting tension between form and content, in the ever-morphing context of a media-saturated culture, the design of a production has perhaps never been more important. I found Amistad’s set design fascinating, and the use of space in dress rehearsal got me excited about the story’s mythic aspects.

Fast-forward to Sunday’s Eurydice matinée.

PURE’s Eurydice is a fantastic production. I could say nice things about the performances (particularly newcomer Chad Layman), the music, yada yada yada. But what I really want to share with you is the DESIGN. Because I don’t know that you could make me care about this wisp of a story if you just put it on a stage and started acting.

In this case, necessity sparked creativity. PURE lost its black box theater at the old cigar factory last year, and in mounting a production at 10 Storehouse Row, director Sharon Graci obviously did some serious exploration. This production uses the indoors and the outdoors. It uses the natural obstructions. It uses sound like a physical object. It uses water and showers and galvanized tubs. It even incorporates the natural shadows cast by the rusy metal scaffolding connecting the theater to the adjacent building.

Yes, tricycles and squirt guns and odd period dress can be too cute by half. But in Graci’s Eurydice you get the story as much via the use of these bits as you do via clever writing (which I didn’t find all that special, honestly).

Why do I like this so much? Well, this may be a basic concept to some, but here goes: In the same way that photography changed the way we look at realistic painting, so too has television and movies and YouTube changed the way we experience live theater. I spend my life looking at one screen or another. I tell stories by taking recorded bits and chopping off all the boring stuff. It’s how we live now.

So when I pay money to see a performance, and you put the show on a stage, with this pretend separation between performer and audience, you’re already losing me. We’ve seen that. We see that every day of our lives — only we can change the channel.

The Eurydice story isn’t much to moderns, but there are ideas in there about pain and loss and the shifting of consciousness from one state to another. The Stones (I’ve been raving all afternoon about how great the music of the Stones was) seem like evil little killjoys at first, but by the end of the piece you see them differently. Because you’ve entered into this strange little world and played by its rules for two hours.

Next stop: Lobby Hero. It’s a nicely acted piece — really, that sounds like I’m brushing it off, but I mean it sincerely — staged in the modern American tradition: One set, no changes, simple stuff. The idea here is that you focus on the acting and the drama instead of the furniture (the antithesis of the cinematic, excruciatingly appointed The Constant Wife, which Spoleto audiences loved in 2007 and which no doubt looked like the dream living room of some of its fans).

But having just come from Eurydice with a head full of thoughts about staging, it seemed to me that even a modern play (Lobby Hero premiered in 2001) struggles to connect when it seems bound by old conventions. Eurydice and Orpheus are archetypes, not fully developed characters, and so we are freed to explore them in playful, surprising ways. But Jeff and William and Dawn could be our neighbors, and Lobby Hero strives to be naturalistic. There is literally no magic in their world — just unpleasant decisions and an ambivalent story arc that ends on an upward turn.

Final stop: Theatre 99, where Piccolo Fringe continues to put butts in seats, is proving once again that people like to laugh. The show was I Live Next to Horses, a touring sketch piece by two Chicago improv actors.

I suspect one reason that improv has become so popular is … staging: 100 percent of which is created in the minds of the audience, on the fly, by the performers. The staging is imaginary, transitory, and often doesn’t work at all. So there’s another attraction: Danger. If you’ve ever watched an improv act bomb, you know what I speak.

This wasn’t improv — the bits were rehearsed and scripted — but the tools and methods bore the mark of the actors’ improv training. And nobody minded the absurdity, because they’d come to laugh and be entertained. In fact, we seem to love imaginative staging and storytelling until the moment when someone suggests it’s not just comedy. And that’s when audiences start getting suspicious, as if being imaginative with theatrical devices is like being suckered by pretentious abstract painting, as if we’re afraid the company is playing a trick on us.

It’s not threatening when the wild improvising of character and situation is done by a brilliant goofball like I Live Next to Horses actor Jet Eveleth, rolling around on the floor in character as “Barb.” But are we less entertained when it’s a trickster god on a morphing stage in the middle of an opera that’s unstuck in time and refusing to stick to a stage and play nice Euro-classical music?

Why is that exactly?

NOTES:

MONDAY IS YOUR LAST CHANCE TO SEE EURYDICE, and I strongly recommend that you give it a shot. This inventive production never really found its audience — in large part because its audience never physically found the performance space. Which is just ridiculous.

It’s at 7:30 at 10 Storehouse Row, and I overheard people talking about it today at the Chapel Theatre as if the place were in the Upstate somewhere. Listen, I can ride there from downtown on a bike in 25 minutes, and I drove there today in less than 10. Drive up I-26 to Dorchester Road, turn right, then left at Rivers and right again on McMillian Avenue. Drive onto the old Navy Base and look left as you pass the old gate . That’s 10 Storehouse Row.

So don’t be a wuss. No excuses.

THAT’S ALL FOR I LIVE NEXT TO HORSES. But you’ve still got a chance to see The Reckoning on Monday. Not that I recommend it: The more people who show up, the less likely I am to get a seat. And the Piccolo Fringe stuff is really popular this year. I was talking to someone today who suggested it has become the heart of the festival for an entire demographic.

LOTS OF MORE CHANCES TO SEE LOBBY HERO. Everyone in the cast is a C of C graduate or faculty member. Oh, and if you’re wondering whether casting a woman (Joy Vandervort-Cobb) in the role of William is some form of gender-bending stunt, it isn’t. She does the role very well… Mandy Schmieder, who plays the woman cop (Dawn), is the wife of director David Lee Nelson, who appeared on a recent SpoletoToday podcast and is premiering his one-man show “Silence of Lucky” at Theatre 220 on Thursday.

Tags: Amistad, comedy, drama, Eurydice, I Live Next to Horse, Lobby Hero, Piccolo Fringe, staging, theater

This entry was posted on Monday, May 26th, 2008 at 12:02 am and is filed under News, Opera, Theatre.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.