elemental theater
by Douglas Messerli
Philippe
Quesne La Mélancolie des dragons /
The performance I saw was on September 23, 2015 at Redcat (Roy and Edna
Disney/Calarts Theater) in Los Angeles
As
the audience moves to their seats in the production of Philippe Quesne’s play La Mélancolie des dragons, we observe a
stage apparently covered with snow, a large white mat of felt on the floor and
a series of seemingly dead (or wintry) trees covered with the substance. In the
middle of the field sits an automobile attached to which is a small trailer of
the kind that reminds one of the traveling performers in the opera Pagliacci, but here arriving in a dead
world instead of a vitally excited small colorful Italian city.
From time to time we get a notion that
there are people in the car, and, as the lights go down, we see there are
indeed four individuals in the auto, all with very long tresses, munching on
chips and swigging down cans of beer, while the car radio blasts out various
heavy-metal, and from time-to-time, even classical pieces, the four nodding
their heads in their rhythms.
At first it is difficult to perceive the sex
of these folk, and, at first, appears that two are males and the others of the
opposite sex, perhaps a pair of couples on a strange date. If this small
car-bound head-banger fest seems to go on a little too long, it is, in part,
because we are voyeurs, watching them without invitation, kept on the outside
of their world as we are.
We soon discover, in fact, that we have
been mistaken about their genders, perhaps hinting what Quesne’s play soon
reveals: people are not always who or what they appear to be. At that very
moment, a middle-aged Asian woman (Isabelle Angotti) bicycles into the glen,
the four gradually piling out of the car a bit like circus clowns, revealing
that they are all men.
Three other equally long-haired men soon
after exit from the back of the rectangular trailer.. We now might imagine that
these are aging band members on their way to a concert, whose mother has just
arrived by prearrangement. But, in fact, the woman, in her puffy purple vest,
is there to check their car, evidently—given the vast number of engine parts
she tosses out into the “snow”—in bad need of repair. As she crawls into the
engine to further inspect, followed by a quick telephone call, she reports to
this group of strangers that new parts will not be available for another week.
Were these 7 heavy-metal dudes actually
on their way to some gig, the news might have resulted in a great deal
grumbling and even teeth-gnashing, but these are apparently very gentle men,who,
speaking English with slightly French accents, seem to be as placid and
slow-minded as tortoises.
When the Asian woman queries them about
their trailer, they respond that it is, in fact, a kind of amusement park, and
gently invite her to become the
onstage audience of their show. Lifting up the felt snowpad, as if it were the
most natural thing in the world, they plug in a cord which lights up the
trailer to reveal it is fronted by glass, and holds within a selection of wigs
all held on rings, as if suggesting the existence a group of like-minded hirsute
men. One explains that they also have video projector to project words on the
side of the trailer, helping to explain the objects and their actions.
Another bemusing displays of a small bubble
machine, and yet another shows a small fountain that shoots water into the air.
One of their group takes out of the car trunk a carton of books and, setting
them up within the trailer, creates a small library of everything from
monograms on art and pop-up children’s books to works by Antonin Artaud, Freud,
Nietzsche, and numerous others great authors, so they tell her, who have influenced
their activities—although, given their doltish use of language, it is hard to
imagine any of them having actually read these books.
A bit later, one of their kind displays a
small snow-making machine, suggesting that the winter wonderland around them,
in fact, has been of their creation. Presenting her with a pair of skies, the
men take her through a ski run by lifting up and rolling the felt padding so
that she might pretend to ski down
slopes.
Their small trailer also contains a fan,
which they soon put to use by blowing up a large white plastic bag, carrying it
ritualistically through the landscape. With lighting and projections, they
change the colors of the landscape and suggest possible names for their cabinet
of curiosities-amusement park.
Throughout all of this, the car repair
person seems genuinely amazed and absolutely delighted to have been able to
immerse herself in their surprising world. Bringing out champagne and glasses,
these 8 individuals—who may be, after all, not as simple as they appear—celebrate
their success, quickly promising one more grand amusement: shortly after they,
one by one, blow up four even larger black plastic bags, uprighting them to
look a bit like a black forest of, very possibly, the melancholy dragons of the
play’s title, which ends both their entertainment and the “drama” we have been
observing—restating what he have recognized all along, that the work’s actions
and significance are one in the same.
The message here, a quite simple one, is
that a wondrous and charming theater can be created out of the most simple elements
of technology and imagination. As the program notes of Quesne’s Theatre of
Vivarium Studio: the author-director’s stagecraft uses “a kind of mechanical
research,” is “a technical theatre lab which cleverly modifies the conventions
of genre.”
If all of this is meant to sound like a
radical intellectual redefinition of theater, at least as French critic Sara
Sugiharabio would have it, in fact, it is rather too simplistic. While La Mélancolie des dragons presents us
with the wondrous childlike roots—the innocent amusements—which are at the
heart of all theater, as a play it is not that profound. If this is how theater
begins—and it is good to be reminded of that—Quesne’s play eschews all the
deeper and richer possibilities of dramatic literature, arguing rather that art
is most transformative at its simplest.
The wonder of theater, as playwright Mac
Wellman has suggested in his early anthology of plays, Theater of Wonders* is that the greatest of its marvels are often
arrived at through the most linguistically challenging and thematically complex
of issues, some of which are inexplicable. While elemental theater surely
reveals the genre’s charms, it may be at its best as a more highly artificed
combine.
La Mélancolie des dragons, however, is
significant enough that I look forward to seeing other works by Phillippe
Quesne and his Theatre of Vivarium Studio, and joyful that Redcat has brought
his work to Los Angeles.
Los Angeles,
September 24, 2015
*Mac
Wellman Theatre of Wonders: Six
Contemporary American Plays (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985),
