What I Saw: Bests of 2009

The Frogs - ~AtmosTheatre~, adapted and directed by Stuart Bousel

I'll be honest: there's a special place in my heart for a theater company that asks me to sign a liability waiver before attending a performance of theirs. And even though I know we're talking about risk in legal terms, as a threat rather than a promise, a necessary precaution in case I injure myself walking the trail down to their stage, that upfront acknowledgment of risk still excites me.

For those of you who don't know, AtmosTheatre produces most of its work in the woods up on Skyline Drive, in Woodside, CA. Going to see a show requires driving down a one lane road (It's not the worst or most precarious road you'll ever drive on. People live there after all and it's quite lovely.), parking by the side of the road, signing the aforementioned waiver, slathering on some bug repellent, and then going for a moderate hike. Along the way, there's a picnic spot and, at least the two times I've been, a pre-show that eventually leads the audience down to the recently built stage with a few site specific stops along the way.

The show begins with Dionysus (Nathan Tucker) and his servant Xanthias (B. Warden Lawlor) coming through the audience enroute to Hades. After a little bit of set up to the story (Dionysus is in search of a good poet and they all seem to be dead), the audience is invited to come along on the journey. This included three stops along the way. First, we walked past a wonderful Cereberus puppet. Next we stopped to get our drachmas where we also met up with a grumpy corpse possibly a philosopher or mathematician (not sure), played by Ben Fisher, who formed the rear of the escort and who lobbed the ball right back to me when I was a smart ass and questioned his assertion that he'd been embalmed with formaldehyde in ancient Greece. Really? Formaldehyde? See? Smart-assy.

The final site-specific scene took place at the bridge to Hades where we met Charon and a chorus of giant frogs nestled along the creek bed. Their masks made them look like creatures from a Hayao Miyazaki film. The sound of the frogs singing in the creek bed with the audience stretched out along the trail and all of us situated in a canyon filled with giant redwoods was such a lovely and magical theatrical image, probably the most striking of the show.

One of the strengths of the company is that it's made up of actors who have strong vocal training and who know how to use their voice in relationship to the space (no mics and you can hear them!). There was a sensitivity to how their voices reverberated through the trees. I loved how it could become part of the quiet of the forest. This was especially clear in the frogs' song at the bridge, but was also apparent throughout the entire production. It really is wonderful to listen to an actor who can modulate their voice to the text and the environment - it's a form of music.

This play aims to blend the high and low brow and when it succeeds, it does this very well. There were a couple of awkward transitions where the slapstick humor didn't play, but this was mostly because of the mechanics of shifting from one location to the next. Specifically, the play got bogged down moving the audience from the Bridge to Hades to seating us at the formal stage site. In this case, Dionysus and Xanthias stood in the aisles of the audience seating and acted out walking the rest of the way down to Hades. Just like it takes a few seconds for your eyes to adjust to the lights in the theater going down and back up, it's difficult for the audience (or maybe just me) to shift from seeing things acted in a fairly realistic setting to being asked to imagine the action of a scene. There must be some sort of suspension of disbelief on-ramp merge that needs to happen, where you either need to give the audience enough time to make the adjustment or put the actors in a more appropriate space, or both. When the action finally shifted to the stage proper, the show got back on track for me.

The final scene of the play is a rhetorical death match (or life match?) between Euripides (Ben Fisher again) and Aeschylus (Carl Lucania) where both give hilarious and damning critiques of each others' plays, punctuated by the increasingly drunken commentary of Dionysus. It felt like Bousel pushed the "original" script past it's dramaturgical tolerance, which is pretty tight... er...thin to begin with. He breaks with the story to ask contemporary aesthetic questions about making and watching theater, as well as supporting art in general, and he posed legitimate, hard questions which felt trivialized by the final action of the play when Dionysus decides which playwright he'll take with back with him.

Still, this was an exciting moment for a couple of reasons. Stepping out of the play and making bold statements about the current state of theater and asking why the audience goes to see it is a tricky proposition and a huge opportunity to fail big. I've sat through too many plays where indictments about art and reception are made of the audience and usually they seem rather remote and oblique and condemning and unimaginative and ultimately pretentious and noncommittal all at once. It really is hard to find the right balance in tone. You don't want to preach to the audience (either the converted or the doubtful), or maybe you do. This show didn't. Even though it was clear what the author thought, it wasn't assumed that this perspective was universal. There was room for debate and disagreement. There was reason to Keep Coming Back. The questions seemed earnest, as if the company was genuinely be interested in knowing the answers and/or pursuing them in their work. It felt like the audience was invited to be part of an ongoing conversation. To be continued next summer.