Out-of-Towner Showcase

by Phillip Andrew Bennett Low | 7/31/09 • ME: Is this your first time in Minnesota? HER: Yes, it is. ME: How is handing out postcards going? HER: What do you mean? ME: Y'know, are people making eye contact? Smiling? HER: Well, they're kind of fake-smiling. ME: (spreading arms) Welcome to Minnesota! I attended the out-of-towner showcase on Wednesday. To be honest, I was far too fatigued to form a fair or coherent response to everything I saw. I would like to toss out the following Quick Thoughts(TM):

womb with a view is the blog of phillip andrew bennett low, one of seven bloggers covering the minnesota fringe festival and other theater for the daily planet.

- There was one piece called Habitat: A Documentary Theater Project. The basic thrust of this one is that the text is largely stapled together from a series of interviews with homeless folks in Duluth. So the project looks fascinating, and like something I'd really like to read -- but I was really struggling with the performance aspects of it. Why? Okay. I'm going to jump back for a moment to that old debate about music stands -- storytellers tend to get very dogmatic about whether or not their use is appropriate in live performance. I've used both -- roughly half of my storytelling shows have been memorized, and half have been read. It's a fairly calculated decision based on what I'm doing at any given time, often driven more by instinct (with a retroactive rationalization) rather than reason. But one thought strikes me: every autobiographical show I've performed has been performed with notes as reference. The one time I tried to do one without, I was extremely uncomfortable with the results. Now, this was flashing through my head as I was watching the preview for Habitat. There were a number of actors onstage, playing a number of the characters who had been interviewed. And I found myself growing -- as I often do with docudrama -- extremely uncomfortable with the artifice: that each performer chose some kind of over-the-top physicality or voice to represent each character. Except that these aren't fictional constructs: they're people. If I'm telling you about something my dad said or did, I don't want to create a walk or an accent or something: I want to just tell you. And I found myself wanting, rather, to be told about these people, rather than watching someone attempt to counterfeit the reality of their experience. Of course, everything we're doing is counterfeit: but I'm comforted by the reminder that we're experiencing reality filtered through another's perception. I'm uncomfortable with the exercise of theatre tricks and illusions on a project that is -- at least theoretically -- documentary. - On the flip side, the high point for me was Was My Brother in the Battle? SONGS OF WAR, which is really nothing more than an extremely well-done song recital. One of the draws is definitely that I'm pretty sure I know the lyrics to every damn song on the bill, but another -- after last night's performance -- is the fact that the key performer is not only a skilled singer but able to effectively emote through the music. And tying back to my earlier point -- the song he chose to preview with was And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, a fairly intense little war story narrated from the point of view of a crippled veteran. He at no point pretends to be this crippled veteran -- he doesn't limp or sit in a wheelchair -- but he speaks in the first person, and nevertheless emotionally engages in the song, and engages with us -- but as himself, and through the music. - It is not impossible that I've read far, far too much Brecht. Phillip Andrew Bennett Low (maximumverbosityonline@gmail.com) is a playwright and poet, storyteller and mime, theater critic and libertarian activist, who lurks ominously in the desert wilds of St. Louis Park, feasting upon the hygienically-prepared flesh of the once-living. His main claim to fame is probably as co-founder of the Rockstar Storytellers, and as founder/producer of Maximum Verbosity, a garage-band-like theater troupe that is in a state of constantly re-defining itself.

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