FOOT NOTES BOOT LICKS TOE JAMS
Rhinoceros Theater Festival Theater Oobleck at the Curious Theatre Branch
Typically Oobleck and Curious have neither borrowed nor invented formal constraints. They work without directors, and have seldom edited their works down to manageable unified wholes. Even their best works have at times seemed like unkept gardens, full of a wild beauty obscured at times by overlooked weeds. Both companies have devoted more energy to developing highly imaginative, provocative material than to devising the ingenious containers necessary to hold their idiosyncratic effusions.
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As a sort of mirror to the schizophrenic impulses in “Bull/Krupp,” Isaacson blows theatrical unity all to hell. Scenes from what would have been the piece had Isaacson not been derailed by the HBO movie intrude like disobedient children, interrupting him as he tries to explain his crisis of faith to the audience. But even these confessional moments, plaintively honest, continually decay into elaborate theatricality as Isaacson compulsively plays himself and his girlfriend discussing the issues he’d hoped to address in his piece.
But perhaps his search is about to end. Magnus’s entry in the Rhino Festival, three untitled one-act plays called collectively Invisible Sympathies, marks a turning point: he seems headed toward a much-needed personal investigation of form: these three simple plays display all of Magnus’s creative prowess yet remain within perfectly conventional forms. It’s as though Magnus had forced himself to return to some Playwriting 101 manual. Each piece has only two characters who never leave the stage–who never even interrupt each other. (In one, about a man apparently describing his own autopsy and the replacement of his brain with movie images, there’s technically only one actor, but the darkness in the room seems a separate intelligence.) In each piece the characters singlemindedly pursue their objectives. In the first, two men try to understand marriage; in the second, a desperate actor tries to get an audition from a director who tries to keep the actor from murdering him; in the third, a man attempts to emerge from a psychological darkness. Each piece is simply staged, the actors rarely taking more than a few steps in any direction: Colm O’Reilly performs the third piece without moving a muscle.
