SLIPPED DISC NEEDS A STRONGER SPINE
The mission of Green Card Theatre is to expose Los Angeles audiences to plays and playwrights from around the world. Their inaugural production entitled Slipped Disc: A Study of the Upright Walk by renowned German scribe Ingrid Lausund with translation by Henning Bochert is a mixed bag of workplace mayhem and philosophical musings that proves to be too overwhelming in scope to be a satisfying theatrical experience.
The setting (set design by Regis Favero) is the stark and sterile office of an unnamed corporation furnished with cold impersonal metallic industrial style furniture. In the rear of the room is a precariously steep ladder that climbs up to a perilously narrow platform leading to a mysterious door. We are soon introduced to five employees who are more than willing to subject each other to any and all forms of workplace abuse. You need a spine to get ahead; in this dog-eat-dog environment, all bets are off—it is survival of the fittest. As the backstabbing and undermining escalates to absurd dimensions, the workers form bonds and alliances that will soon be broken—only to be realigned and then broken again. Periodically red lights flash and a siren blares summoning one of the unlucky employees up to the mysterious door behind which untold (and unseen) horrors and humiliations are thrust upon them by upper management. No one is safe and at some point each of the five will be called to suffer the indignations of their inquisitor.
The cast—led by director Christopher Basile with Katelyn Gault, Jim Kane, Alexander Price and Nina Sallinen—forms a tight knit group that plays off each other well. As the story unfolds in a series of vignettes, the actors are called upon to employ different tactics to achieve their goals. In one particular section the performers must alternate between saying a line and then immediately following that line with what they are really thinking internally without even the slightest of pauses. The actors speak simultaneously and the end result is a cacophonous drone that is both mesmerizing and fascinating to hear. It is a tribute to the focus and commitment of the actors that this scene succeeds. In less accomplished hands it would have surely been nothing more than noise.
Director Basile keeps the action moving at a brisk pace for the 90 minute one act, but inevitably the outing is undone by the script. Perhaps something is lost in the translation, but there are so many ideas tossed around—from the real to the imagined to the metaphysical to the philosophical—that nothing really sticks. The end result is a feeling of arbitrary inclusion with no real design on consistency of tone, style or message. In an effort to be all things to all people, and to make a statement of profound importance, the script suffers from the pangs of a slipped disc when a strong and certain spine is what is called for.
photos by Beth Payne
Slipped Disc: A Study of the Upright Walk
Green Card Theatre at Son of Semele Theater
scheduled to end on December 23, 2012
for tickets visit Son of Semele