Cocktail Dresses and Cuckolds

My first performance at The Public Theater, This Place is a Desert, a part of Under The Radar, began with the irritating noise of a phone ringing for 15 minutes while the eight or so actors shuffle back and forth between 5 rooms on stage, their actions caught on camera and projected via a live-feed onto four screens above the stage. As such the set is elaborate. Each room a different bold color (Red, Blue, Green, Orange, Yellow) becomes a stunning backdrop for the instantly cinematic action. No stranger to experimental theater I disappointedly wondered if this were going to be the entire consistency of the show. Thankfully the phone stopped ringing and the action began.

Now, I have never seen Michelangelo Antonioni's film Red Desert, nor read much Faulkner, two seeming disparate sources of influence for This Place is a Desert, so as such my reading of the performance and its meaning is limited. That said, I found the greatest moments of delight when the actors were not restrained by the realism of their performance and slipped into strange and acrobatic movement. Most notable: a flirtation between a psychologically unstable wife and her husband's business associate. She begins tapping her shiny black high heels with her hand, alternating as she kicks them up in her cocktail dress. Also rewarding are the aggressively phony sex scenes where the actors propel clumsily toward one another fumbling with clothes in an exaggeration of every cliché of heterosex passion portrayed in any Hollywood blockbuster. It is unclear however, whether this exaggeration, this camp, was intended. I am willing to give this smart cast the benefit of the doubt.

Weaknesses are the heteronormative pairings throughout the work as married spouses cheat on their wife and husband, respectively. Also, the live feed plus live performance technique while novel fails to effectively translate stage acting to screen acting and ultimately undermines performances by literally magnifying them when subtlety is what the big screen ultimately requires. Again, this may have been the intent from the beginning but it is unclear. Overall, an interesting technique materializes as an interesting performance.

This Place is a Desert Conceived and Directed by Jay Scheib
The Public Theater 425 Lafayette Street
January 9 - 20, visit www.undertheradarfestival.com for times
$15 tickets: publictheater.org or 212.967.7555