ACTS, REPETITIONS AND REPRESSIONS
There’s a new theater in town, Los Angeles, aptly named New Theater Hollywood, run by artists Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. I discovered it quite by accident in an article in the LA Review of Books, which described it as “sceney.” I simply had to go. I checked out the first show available, Price: Repressed Repertoire (sequences), headed by Price the performance artist (who works mostly between Europe and Brazil), and also featured Marcel Alcalá, Cecile Believe and Sophia Cleary. With just a two-night run December 18 & 19, what I saw there was unconventional, different, and quite good. Housed in the 2nd Stage Theater in Hollywood’s Theater Row, the tiny 45-seat house was enlarged to 65 seats, some of them folding chairs “courtside” on stage right or left.
If, before the show, you use the tiny dark toilet backstage, as you wait in line (you invariably will), you will become conscious of the dressing room right next to you. Actors’ conversation, warm ups, all charmingly available as paratextual treats. The whole intimate material apparatus of theater is engaged to a terrific extent by this space.
At points throughout, there was an entrancing, overpowering soundtrack, for which Believe and composer Renato Grieco on the viola, deserve praise. As I waited for the bathroom before the show started, the lady behind said of the music, “It’s getting faster.” And later, particularly in Cleary’s rapturous solo dance, the music is not merely effective, but even more enveloping than the sensorial encompassings of cinema.
The set; a white cloth-covered dining table, plopped down diagonally on center stage. On this table, dishes, pearly glass vessels of talcum powder, a microphone. The white table cloth on one end of the table trails down to the black floor and up to the balcony-esque second level, covering a human figure. A ghost. Trembling from time to time. WOOoooo.
The “play itself” begins with Sophia Cleary walking slowly down the brief aisle to the stage with a bowl of talcum powder, a kind of initiatory emblem. Price emerges with a creepily hilarious languor, sitting with Cleary at the table rehearsing a series of stilted movements and exchanges, the latter of which consist wholly of lines taken from well-known films. They stick the mic in each other’s faces when it’s their turn to speak, though the relationship of each individual to what they say is anything but simple. The actors’ breathy hesitations in the mic, the overall disregard for “natural representation” (including through the use of scripts, and not just any use, but a halting, seemingly clueless and arbitrarily recitative use), and most of all, the repetitions and slippery contexts of quotation, are all part of the strategy of this unforgettable project.
Before long the ghost up top begins to lose his shit. He drops his sheet revealing Marcel Alcalá in one of the memorable costumes, for which credit likely belongs to Blaine O’Neill, credited for the production in the playbill. The light work by Connor Moody is superb; harsh, sudden, and Sirkian, it heightened and commented on the Gothic melodrama of this cosmos, the balcony steps of it all.
Trembling, literally vibrating out from shoulders, arms and fingertips to his legs and feet, issuing fussy yelps of exceeding sorrow, as Alcalá came down the stairs I thought, is there anything so melodramatic as a ghost? I mean, die already.
The Cast of Repressed Repertoire (sequences)
Beyond ghosts, the play gets more melodramatic mileage out of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours: “You don’t have to go to the party, Leonard. You don’t have to do anything,” says Sophia as she stands over Price, cradling his bowl-cut head. Alcalá at the table voices his own anxieties about the party: “I don’t know if I can face this. You know. The party and the ceremony, and then the hour after that, and the hour after that.” What is “the party” in the context of these stage phantasms?
The sometimes disembodied and benumbing repetition of such lines as the above seemed to say that buried inside modern subjects are not secrets that define the individual but internalized dialogue and emotional movements from those symbolic and binding scenes of popular culture, the memory of film, of music.
This play “does” our relationship to objects so well, from the evocative talcum to the cultural memorabilia of movie lines, and how we are reproduced repetitively, as seeming identity, through those relationships.
Price (photo Anja Wille Schori)
The talcum powder is blown by these performers at select moments, swirling gorgeously in stark beams of light. The most extraordinary sequence along these lines occurs late in the play. This was Sophia Cleary’s queer solo dance with the bowl of powder, again borne up by her hands like some emblem of ecstatic release. Though there were seemingly familiar signifiers of sex in Cleary’s movements, it felt like the staking out of a new, or newly commanded, sexuality. It was at once erotically overwhelming and ambiguous. She moved through the tiny aisles of the theater, stopping to execute some truly stellar moves, twisting and flicking her pelvis, sawing the air with rhythmic precision, a tribe of one paying homage to being the body in performance as it takes on inscriptions moment to moment, challenging audience readings through the stilling and stirring actualities of unself-conscious erotic motion.
The other side of Cleary’s performance, her clownish, absurdist choreography, deserves mention. She takes the crown for the most drawn-out and elaborately inept risings from off the floor (she falls a number of times for no discernible reason), including her last when she battles with a chair before getting it (and herself) upright and back to the table (though no one explicitly wants to, all inexorably come back to the table).
All four performers are multi-disciplinary talents who know how to use their bodies, which means they can disrupt their skill with an effective messiness and looseness, a threatened unruliness, which makes the work all the more fun and dangerous to behold.
This show also is a triumph of sound. There was a mesmerizing interlude when Price and Believe (who joins the table without her guitar, here retrieving it) sang Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose,” Believe at one point straddling the bewilderingly charismatic Price, always in character, at this point his face and lips whitened by the powder. Like each presence in this play – assemblages of received utterance and inexplicable gesture – who Price “is” can’t be stated definitively, but he is seductive, awkward, baffling, at certain points staring at the audience with a kind of glazed naughtiness, a drugged complacency, purring into the mic with falling thudding line-readings, the dull but loud heartbeat of melodrama.
When it was over, there was no bowing, but the performers with their arms around each other swayed ever so slightly, grinning almost sheepishly, we all clapping wildly.
Nothing is normal about this play, including the outfits which consist partly of suit jackets tied around the legs. But what could ever be “normal” about performance, about speech itself, that irrevocable drift from silence to utterance?
In the retrieved lines that comprise this production’s dialogue, in the esoteric causalities of every movement and moment, in its reminder of everyday ghosts, clowns, and the absent or unstable meaning in precisely those statements and sentiments we have most internalized, The Repressed Repertoire unearths the process by which performers and audience mutually will strangeness of being into shared intelligibility; the repertoire of everyday performative consciousness is here brought to light, and the subconscious realm inhabited by these bodies is, like those same parts of ourselves, unforgettably strange, and darkly hilarious.
Price: A Repressed Repertoire (sequences)
New Theater Hollywood
2nd Stage Theatre, 6500 Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood
played December 18 & 19, 2024
for more info, visit New Theater Hollywood
follow Price on Instagram
