playing the play
by Douglas Messerli
Back
to Back Theatre company, Ganesh Versus the
Third Reich / performed by Mark Deans, Simon Laherty, Scott Price, Brian
Tilley and Luke Ryan / Los Angeles, UCLA Freud Playhouse / the performance I
saw as a matinee on Sunday, January 27, 2013
The
Geelong, Australia Back to Back Theatre group, according to their own
description, “creates new forms of contemporary theatre imagined from the minds
and experiences of a unique ensemble of actors with a disability, giving voice
to the social and political issues that speak to all people.” Certainly those
are lofty goals, but one does have to question the “all.” Can anything speak to
“all” or even attempt to. The two elderly women who sat next to me yesterday
afternoon had no idea what they were about to see, and were quite visibly
disturbed when, late into the play, the actor also playing the director of the
work (Luke Ryan), lashed out at the audience sitting in the first rows for “coming
to see a freak show,” although he mollified them some by claiming he always
imagined the first few rows of the theater as empty. The production I saw was
sold out!
Moreover, this is a work which requires
the audience attend, that they listen closely just to hear some of the disabled,
Australian actors’ words—sometimes slurred with heavy “down under” accents—and
mentally make large metaphorical connections as well as accept a work that
might be seen as morally reprehensible to some. Indeed, when the company first
conceived of a story in which the great Indian Ganesh, the elephant-headed “mover
of obstacles” visits Adolph Hitler and Joseph
Mengele to retrieve the Hindu swastika symbol, they themselves felt it might be
inappropriate to combine such a “fairytale” within the holocaust.
Ryan, who New York Times critic Ben Brantley described as a “handsome and
well spoken man” (i.e., apparently not mentally challenged) alone sees the
importance of presenting this play, coaxing his often recalcitrant company with
praise, pep-talks, only to finally give up in complete frustration after Price
refuses to fall correctly upon being “shot,” a scene which ends in all-out
battle between him and the others, closing down the play.
This fascinating work ends, in fact, with
a character playing a child’s game—which I would argue is perhaps at the very
heart of any theater (as a child I used to ask other children to “play play”
with me, resulting, often, in a good scolding by some adults for my seeming
baby talk)—when the angry “director” leaves Deans and the others “to take a
swim,” asking him to play “hide-and-seek,” so that he can escape. Deans hides,
quite predictably, beneath a table, but when no one comes to find him, grows
restless, laying down to pretend to sleep, rising again, returning to the
crouch with which he began. Like a trapped animal, he is confused, tired,
impatient, but still continues to participate in the “play” of the game. When
the lights go out, he is the first up for a well-deserved bow to the applauding
audience, and, after the others take their bows, raises his arms in joy once
more to take all that applause in!
And yes, we realize, that does somehow
represent us all. We all want to be appreciated for the theater of the self we
every day create, even if the acts we undertake cannot be as heroic as we might
have desired.
Los Angeles,
January 28, 2013
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