Rhinoceros Theater Festival
But Over could also be taken as a subtle message to all Rhino Fest audiences that, once you finished viewing the extraordinary spectacle of Laffin’s piece and stepped into the Lunar Cabaret, your evening of polished, edgy, thoughtful theatrical innovation was over. Inside, audiences were in for show after show of the same old fringe stuff, hastily created, sloppily presented, and lavishly praised by the artists’ friends.
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In fact, of the seven plays and performance pieces I saw on the Rhino’s first weekend, only Famous Door’s mostly great production of Vaclav Havel’s The Increased Difficulty of Concentration would have passed muster if the Rhino were truly a festival of off-off-Loop theater’s best and brightest. But then Famous Door has the dual advantage of an intelligent, witty script and of being–well, famous for bringing to life intelligent, witty scripts.
What makes Havel’s play more than just another witty satire about a bankrupt social system is the work’s extraordinary cubist structure. Rather than tell his story like a farce–Dr. Huml cheats on wife, cheats on mistress, is questioned by authorities, and is discovered in various compromising situations by wife, mistress, and said authorities–Havel shatters his play into tiny pieces, then rearranges them in an apparently random order. Again and again we see the outcome of an event long before we see the event itself. Dr. Huml’s successful seduction of his secretary, for example, precedes the scenes in which he makes his initial advances, all of which she resists. A mind-bending way to tell a story, but it makes perfectly clear the unnatural world Havel’s characters inhabit and how that world has disordered Havel’s hero.
I have no idea how long the benighted stage adaptation of Nelson Algren’s genre-defying prose-poem-essay Chicago: City on the Make ran, but it felt like I was in that theater for hours, watching spoken-word artist Larry Jones and bassist Aki Schulz ruin Algren’s work. I didn’t dare look at my watch–there’s nothing more depressing during bad theater than watching the slow seconds tick away. None of the beauty of Algren’s carefully written tough-guy prose came through in Jones’s tin-eared recitation: he read the whole piece–the sweet, quiet passages as well as the angry, sarcastic ones–in the same bellow people usually reserve for temper tantrums. Schulz’s improvisational playing was considerably more successful, though again and again the beauty of his music was overshadowed by the guy on his left reading so artlessly from a sheaf of papers.
