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Went and saw Eric’s play a week or so ago and it was simply fantastic. For the second time this year, Coble teams up with Nick Koesters (Side Effects May Include) and, again, with highly positive results. Coble is a very good writer, and appreciation I’ve gained since taking a course in adaptation a year or so ago and studying his adaptations of Washington Irving stories in Gold in the Bones. I myself was doing an adaptation of Washington Iriving’s The Alhambra, and studying the choices Coble made in his own adaptions was both enlightening and refreshing. Additionally, many years ago I saw his play Bright Ideas at the Playhouse, which is a send up of the Scottish play, based around of all things child rearing. I also have a copy of his play Natural Selection which was in the Humana Festival and is quite brilliant in it’s own right.

Coble has the ability to weave complex stories that address complicated problems or longings or impulses in modern society and make them both tight and hilarious. My Barking Dog is very carefully constructed and builds meticulously toward its great truth, which in my opinion is an exploration of how modern society has gone grossly astray: the machine has long been running us.

My Barking Dog begins with two stories of isolation and posits a modern world that is barren of essential meaning and meaningful connection, and therefore psychologically chilling. The two main characters are exemplars of the brokenness of society. Melinda (Heather Anderson Boll) is a socially stunted factory worker who works the night shift at a printing company; there she does a mindless job which she loves because it lets her avoid people and cultivate her yearning to be one with the machine that she “feeds” paper into. Similarly, Toby (Koesters) plays an out-of-work middle manager who finds that he is completely replaceable as a cog in the machine and whose sole pursuit, when we discover him, is identifying wireless networks in his apartment and placating his insomnia. The world changes for both of these characters when a Coyote (barking dog) comes out of the “wild” and onto the fire escape of their apartment building. Melinda turns from feeding a machine to feeding the dog; and Toby forsakes his wireless network hunting to come outside.

There is a natural inclination on both the part of a playwright and audience member to expect the two dysfunctional characters to “find one another” and be saved by this new relationship and human encounter. This is a choice that, thank God, Coble avoids. Instead, Melinda finds a love of revolution and creating destruction from her encounter with the Coyote; and Toby, preposterously, gets impregnated by the Coyote and has its pups–thus entirely re- and comically mis-directing the romantic impulse of this plot line. Along the way, Coble skewers so much of modern life and angst that the play just breezes along gradually unfolding to reveal the dystopian lives we live today enwombed as we are by our technical electronic blah blah blahs and avoidance of meaningful interaction with the world around us.

In the end, Toby forsakes the modern world for life with his mate in the wild, and Melinda vows to bring the wild back into the cities and reclaim them for Nature.

Jeremy Paul directs My Barking Dog (I wonder if the man ever sleeps), and does a fantastic job with interpreting the meaningless tasks that the characters “live” in their “modern” life into engaging stage images that mirror the textual vapidness of their lives. He also keeps the movement and time tight so that the play moves ever onward to the inevitable conclusion.

As much as Coble probably hates it, there is some comparison to be made to Fight Club with its radical re-creation of a character whose sole “job” becomes the destruction of modern society to create a chaos that frees people from their “things”; but the Coyote and the absurdity of Toby’s character allows the play to avoid too painful and damning a seriousness that the message really does carry. We have lost and are continuing to lose very real and important parts of ourselves and we give ever away more of our humanity to the machines that we have created–both literal machines and systemic machines–the Dark Vaders and Empires which inevitably follow on such concessions as we are making now.

Boll has a tremendous ass and looks great smeared in whatever she was smeared in (lotion?); and I wish I could say the same for Koesters, but alas, I’ll remember the admonition that he who lives in a glass house should not throw stones… and just say admiringly that Koesters is braver than I am–especially as regards playing the “bitch” who delivers Coyote pups by Caesarean section.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that My Barking Dog is in Kentucky some time soon. Now I’ll go back to reading extant texts from a much more civilized time: The Iliad. After all, nothing speaks of intimacy and humanity like running a spear through so-and-so’s teeth.

Went and saw Insomnia at CPT last week (or maybe two weeks) with Jordan Davis. Had a real good time and enjoyed the show at CPT thoroughly.

 

Insomnia proves again why the combination of Raymond Bobgan and Chris Seibert is powerful. POWERFUL. Tack on Holly Holsinger who can thoroughly dominate (as both an actor and director) and you’ve got some seriously muscular theater, which Insomnia is. Both Bobgan and Seibert demonstrate again (also Holsinger) why the organic process that they use to create inspired productions works and works well. Their exploration of personal story, myth, and religion works on the level of the unconscious leaving one with the peculiar sensation of having slept well and dreamed. And their exploration and use of space, acting techniques, sound, lighting, as well as in the more physical aspects of comic theater give the mind’s eye a feast of stage images to connect with the psionic elements.

The play opens in the attic of a house, which is of course suggestive of the psychological landscape in which the play’s action will take place. At first I wondered if the piece weren’t somewhat like Albee’s Three Tall Women, with each woman representing a different phase of life for the “main” character. I initially thought that this “main” character, in terms of focus, was Holsinger’s character (Ev) but it became quickly clear that Seibert’s character (Zelda) represented an imaginary friend or invisible playmate; and that the “main” character might be Evelyn (Anne McEvoy), who comes up the stairs from the “real” world below.

Seibert as Zelda plays a magnificently manic playmate who reminded me all-too-well of my daughter: with endless pulses of energy and a ruthless and relentless desire to play something regardless of my own lack of interest. Zelda made manifest that constant pushing and prodding that children do so well, as well as a deceptively naïve sweetness that became sharply brutal and precise in a flashing turn. Holsinger lives up to her name by singing frequently throughout the piece, showing off a lovely, deep voice and from the program it appears that the songs are original.

The physical aspects of the production (presentational) are tremendous. At the outset there is only Holsinger on stage, but soon there is thumping inside a trunk which was perhaps overlooked by the audience (was by me) from which Seibert emerges, playfully. She uses a croquet mallet as a periscope and then dances across the stage. Holsinger and Seibert play dress-up and enact the rapid-fire characters and dialogue of a circa 1930s/40s movie, like It Happened One Night or His Girl Friday. In an inspired dream sequence Seibert becomes an elemental force from another plane, cloaked in a diaphanous flowing garment—a resplendent ghost.

Equally strong is the sense/meaning of loss and reckoning in the play; the terrible sense of having settled and having not fulfilled a potential. The sense that life has become mundane and polite; a place that is all too easy for each of us to fall into and to which to become accustomed. If we are not careful and watchful we are at risk of taking much for granted: our life path, the people around us, and perhaps worst of all, our own selves. Insomnia addresses this head long and with an unflinching gaze; so much so that one might lose sleep at the horrifying confrontation.

Not to close on a down note, but I want to get off my chest the fact that I did not like the ending of the piece. There are several reasons for this, but the two biggest include that it 1) broke the frame of the play (with Holsinger going around and out to talk with the audience) and 2) it attempted to but a bow on a play that was best left unwrapped. I understand the impulse. In talking with Jordan Davis afterward we discussed that one great difficulty in this type of piece is that it is very difficult to close off. In my own work I often confront this problem and flinch in the face of providing a neat ending—it is too much for me to bear. I believe Insomnia could end when Holsinger’s Ev is revealed as being the “main” character and walks confidently out of the attic closing the door to descend to the remains of her (old?) life below. The powerful sense that there will be change is comparable to that of Nora slamming the door at the end of Ibsen’s play. I don’t know if there was too much of a sense that perhaps people would miss the resolution of that, or if that was not concrete enough resolution, or if there needed to be some clarification. I didn’t think so, and to me it undermined the power of what came before.

Cut to Pieces, another fabulous piece about which I cannot say enough is coming back soon to CPT and I can’t wait to see it.

After Insomnia, Jordan and I went to Happy Dog and heard The New Soft Shoe, which does covers of Gram Parsons. It was a pretty cool show and we sat with some friends of Jordan’s, one of whom, strangely enough, was a graduating Case student who was in Gilbert Doho’s theater class when I went to speak to them about my play Patterns. Small world.