All inventors are a bit whacked out. To do their breakthrough work, they have to be innocent, courageous and arrogant — a heady brew when it works and pretty irritating when it doesn’t.
This is particularly true when theatrical inventors are toying with
stage conventions, as co-playwrights Raymond Bobgan and Chris Seibert
do in the often-stunning Cut to Pieces, now at Cleveland Public
Theatre. By taking an age-old trope of several people convened at a
spooky mansion and twisting virtually everything thereafter, Bobgan
(who also directs) and Seibert (who also performs) come up with a
bounty of inspired moments, along with a few clinkers.
On a bare stage dominated by a large video screen, we meet C.C.
Bertie, a sweet and self-effacing young woman who tells us she is about
to present her play. After an overture, which she hums, the screen
shows a fireplace in the mansion’s library, where six people have been
gathered by the owner, Mr. Hades. He claims he is dying, and the
guests, who mostly don’t know each other, are there for the reading of
the will.
If you find the Hades symbolism less than subtle, just wait. There
are enough feints and mysterious digressions in this two-hour
production to satisfy anyone. Bertie disappears into the other
characters, and when video carnage takes place, resembling the trailer
for a slasher movie, we are told that a female guest has been raped and
dismembered, but her various parts have vanished.
It is left to the others, including a Nervous Girl, a young man who
visits a witch and/or widow across the road and the killer himself to
sort out the convoluted details. But don’t expect any easy plotting
trajectory here. This is weird but wonderful theatrical creation, and
it is most fascinating when it is least understandable.
Director Bobgan uses an avalanche of different staging tools —
including live and often distorted video feeds (some from a table-top
camera), typewriter type on the large screen, original music, and
plastic and paper dolls. The videos, some designed by Tom Common, are
strangely insinuating and allow Seibert to interact with them as if
they are live performers.
As the story unspools, the playwrights hitch onto the Hades and
Persephone myth as they deal with the concepts of death and rebirth.
Persephone embodies both, since she had to spend one season each year
in the underworld.
As the only live actor, Seibert is a marvel. Dressed in black with
her hair pulled back into tight little knots, she plays all the parts
and draws several telling characterizations, especially a strange
TV-game-show host and Bertie herself.
Some of the play’s flow is hampered by Seibert announcing which
character she is before delivering her lines. And the individual
who should be dominant in this gathering, Hades himself, is oddly the
most forgettable. From a production standpoint, a few of the whiz-bang
effects could have been edited back, since there is a feeling of
sensory overload.
But ultimately, Cut to Pieces has an innocent arrogance and
an energetic spirit of invention that makes it a thoroughly memorable
experience.
This article appears in May 20-26, 2009.
