Nadine’s PLAF Diary for Friday, August 31-Sunday, September 2

Isabella
Take Shakespeare’s problem play Measure for Measure, which has such strange power and love relationships in it and such a weak ending that no one really knows what to make of it. Transport much of the language and some of themes about the dangers of the body (Lust! Corruption!) into a morgue. Watch the dead bodies act it out.

Isabella is an incredibly disturbing, incredibly good show. The acting was just phenomenal. The people who played the dead bodies really made me feel as if I were watching dead bodies. Which is that much more impressive when you consider that they were moving and talking and doing all sorts of things that dead bodies never, never do. They acted with their entire bodies, head to foot, quaking and twisting and never for a moment behaving as if they were alive. That they were naked felt natural. Bodies in a morgue, after all, wear only their toe tags.

I loved this amazing and thoughtful adaptation of Shakespeare. It uses the language for its own ends rather than being bossed around by the text, yet somehow the themes of the original play come through more clearly than ever.

“The Metropolis Project”
When I finally found the theatre, after some adventures poking around the Drexel campus, I was intrigued by the elaborate stage set-up. Recognizable instruments – guitar, violin, drums, viola, keyboards, toy piano, and more – lay enmeshed in a web of wiring. This was the P.A.M. Band (Partially Artificial Musicians), assembled by Kurt Cobble. He has spent what I suspect must be far too much time creating a self-playing orchestra, and programmed it to play an original score over the silent-era classic film Metropolis.

He couldn’t lose with Metropolis, which is strange and beautiful, powerful and incoherent all at once. And the film’s obsession with the strained relationship between humans and machines resonated nicely with the automated band that accompanied it. It was really a cool idea, and I mostly enjoyed myself. However, while a computer can whack a drum with a stick or poke piano keys and have it all sound okay, these robots were not yet up to the task of playing a violin well. The screeching sound of bows sliding across violin strings was exciting creepy to begin with, but after two hours it made me want to scream.

Flamingo/Winnebago
Two stories: One about a man who leaves behind his New Jersey gas station and sets out across the country in his new Winnebago, accompanied only by a disembodied voice from On Star, heading for the promised land of Bombay Beach in California. The other about a guy who’s heading west from New York to Las Vegas, via plane, then car, then bike, as one form of transportation after another fails him, on a quest to learn about his grandfather, who used to work at the Flamingo hotel.

I really wanted to adore this play. There was so much that was really good about it. The set was simple yet effective. The live music was brilliantly incorporated into the performance. The acting was good. Each individual story was interesting and well written. But the two stories didn’t work together to make one play. They didn’t rub up against one another to create meaning, they didn’t expand each other’s horizons. They didn’t make sense together.

Gatz
This is the best performance I have ever seen.

I know that’s a crazy statement to make, but it’s the truth. In a drab office, a bored man finds an old copy of The Great Gatsby, and he starts to read it aloud. He reads aloud the whole book. As he reads the story comes alive and the office morphs, in imagination, to West Egg, or East Egg, or an apartment in upper Manhattan, and his co-workers take on the roles of Daisy, Tom, Jordan Baker, and, of course, Gatsby, while the reader becomes Nick Carraway, the first person narrator of this Great American Novel.

This performance shows up every other adaptation of a great work of literature as second rate. A great book is so great because of the words, and the words are the first thing to go in a theatrical adaptation. On the stage the sentence, “They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house,” becomes two women in white clothes, possibly with a fan blowing on them. This performance kept every word, and brought them alive. I’ve loved The Great Gatsby for a long time, but never before have I as fully appreciated the music of the words, the poignance of the story, the subtle humor and sorrow that pervade the book.

The program lists the actors’ names but doesn’t assign roles, so I don’t know who played Nick Carraway, our faithful narrator. For the record, he was amazing. The program does, however, detail the difficulties Elevator Repair Service have encountered in getting Gatz to the stage. Sadly, Gatz’s brief run at PLAF is over. If you ever get another chance to see it, do.