Interludes

VIEWPOINTS – Off-Off-Broadway continues its winning streak with the compelling, rigorous MARIE IT’S TIME and MUD/DROWNING …

• By drediman
• September 26, 2022
• No Comments

This past weekend, I continued my Off-Off-Broadway winning streak with a pair of rigorous, compellingly theatrical experimental theater pieces that explore the underbelly of the human experience. Here are my thoughts on them.

MARIE IT’S TIME
Minor Theater at HERE
Through October 1

First up was Minor Theater’s production of Julia Jarcho’s Marie It’s Time (RECOMMENDED), which is currently in the midst of performances at HERE’s tiny basement theater. The new play with music is a loose adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, a German drama that was left incomplete at the time of the playwright’s passing (the play also inspired Alban Berg’s 20th century masterpiece Wozzeck, a milestone in atonalism and expressionism in opera). In this radical take on the tale, Jarcho gives agency and voice to the character of Marie, a woman who dies at the hands of his mentally unstable husband (the titular Woyzeck) upon discovering her unfaithfulness. Despite the update’s overt punk sensibility and the daring fluidity of its presentation (e.g., the role of Marie is shared by two performers), there’s no doubt that Marie It’s Time is a carefully calibrated piece of theatrical avant-gardism. The production stars the trio of multi-tasking Jarcho, Kedian Keohan, and Jennifer Seastone, each of which imbue their acting with both specificity and a thoughtful eye towards Jarcho’s overarching vision for the piece (a special shout out must go to director director Ásta Bennie Hostetter, who confidently helms the endeavor). Together, their performances create a tapestry that’s hypnotic and emotionally uncompromising. The occasional musical interludes come mainly by way of Marie’s lover Major. As played by Kedian Keohan, Major is a cool presence – his rocker swagger as articulate as it is unaffected.

MUD/DROWNING
Mabou Mines at 122 CC
Through October 9

Then down at 122 CC in the East Village there’s Mabou Mines’ curious but ultimately satisfying María Irene Fornés doubleheader Mud/Drowning (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED). As I missed its earlier sold out engagement (the production was one of the last things to open before the pandemic shut everything down in March 2020), I’m happy to be able to finally experience the well-received staging. The first half of the piece is comprised of a staged reading of the cult playwright’s one-act 1983 play Mud, which chronicles the tumultuous relationship between three strong-willed housemates (their relationships are not clearly defined, often morphing between sexual/romantic and violent/hurtful). It’s a raw, melodramatic work – boundaries are also blurred between brute animalism and humanism – that longtime experimental theater auteur JoAnne Akalaitis tempers with cryptic gestural movements and an overall sustained poetic mood. The evening continued and concluded with Drowning, Philip Glass’s new pocket-sized operatic adaptation – alluringly scored for and performed by keyboard, harp, and a trio of male voices – of Fornés’s five-page 1986 play of the same name depicting two sickly men at a cafe waxing philosophical over the images of a woman and a snowman in a newspaper. In turn surreal, heartbreaking, and strangely beautiful, the opera covers rich emotional and psychological ground over the course of its compact 30-minute run time. Throughout the evening, the pedigree and experienced know-how of the production’s creative team and performers was emphatically evident; each was in complete command of their contribution and cognizant of the Akalaitis’s end-game aesthetic.