A Thursday Night <em>bash</em>

“Can I speak?” asks Kate Donnelly, playing “Woman,” as she lights a cigarette. As she speaks, smoke rises up in a towering cloud, stretching hazy and dark towards the single stage light that illuminates her from above. Despite the deliberately tiny performance space (a platform that’s 10×15 at the most), the smoke is not intrusive, though Donnelly lights up at least five times over the course of her half-hour-long monologue. It taints the air with a stale stench that only adds to the extremely pressured atmosphere that the production has created thus far.

This is probably the best way to describe Theatre on Fire‘s production of Neil Labute’s bash: pressured. I really tried to think of another word–really, I spent a long time on it (I don’t even think you can use ‘pressured’ as an adjective, but you know what, this is my blog and I’ll make up words if I want to). But ‘pressured’ just feels right.

Let me try to explain what I mean.

Theatre on Fire is in residence at the Charlestown Working Theater, a small, industrial-looking building on a residential section of Bunker Hill St. in Charlestown. The theater itself seemed to me like a dance hall built into what used to be a factory: an expansive wooden floor stretching wall to cement wall with one large wall jutting into the center of and cutting off the space. With a capacity of about 80, the space is large enough to be an average-sized black box, but the setup for bash is more limiting, and extremely surprising. As I said, the room is mildly large, but when we walked in, we found a tiny rectangular stage shoved completely into the back corner of the space with two sets of risers bordering the stage on two sides, essentially trapping the stage into its corner. As ToF Artistic Director Darren Evans told me after the show, the performance is “right in your lap,” and it is in this way that the space puts a large amount of physical pressure on the audience. The space is so small and the audience is so close to the extremely tenuous action onstage that any movement they might make, any sound they expel, is jarring; when a friend of mine cracked his knuckles on the other side of the row, I heard it. I was almost afraid to chew my gum. Because of this, the audience (or at least my friends and I) feels extremely pressured to stay perfectly still, even when everything inside of them is aching to jump up onto the stage and punch one of the actors, which almost all of my party, including myself, expressed the need to do at some points in the performance.

But more on that later.

My first foray into directing (for the Independent Drama Society, my growing theatre company) was with one of Neil Labute’s more popular plays, The Shape of Things. (It was made into a movie with Rachel Weiss and Paul Rudd… wasn’t very good, or so I hear. I’ve been meaning to get my cast together to watch it at some point; you may see a movie review on this blog sometime soon.) Labute’s work is absolutely delicious for actors and directors because it is laden with subtlety and difficult questions. It is also extremely shocking, which is always fun; it’s great when an actor drops a bomb and you can hear the audience’s little choked gasps or strangling silence. Later, Dave, who likes Labute, cynically described the playwright’s process as “sticking his hand into the shitter and pulling out shit”… which means that Labute pretty much writes about humanity’s worst sides. In my experience with Labute, this is mostly true–and it is certainly true for bash.

bash is a collection of three disturbing one-act plays, each ranging from a half-hour to about 45 minutes long, and each somehow having to do with death. Two of the one-acts are directly inspired by classic Greek plays, as reflected in their names–though ToF doesn’t name them in their program, and I won’t name them here to respect their desire to surprise the hell out you. Each one-act is a monologue, one of them two monologues going on simultaneously. If you are an actor or have any experience with speech memorization, you know that the prospect of a 45-minute-long monologue is downright terrifying, especially when that monologue is written to be as realistic and meandering as possible. I knew a little about the play beforehand, specifically about its monologue-nature, and being an actor myself, I was admittedly a little nervous for the actors I would see that evening; there is nothing more awful than watching an actor lose his lines onstage. But, as the performance began, my worries were completely forgotten.

The house lights go dark, and Billie Holiday’s cocoa voice filters through the black room. Footsteps echo through the space, and the lights dim up on the Young Man in business attire, seated onstage in a lonely chair and cradling a glass of water. Marc Harpin, a ToF newcomer, begins to speak in a twitchy, nervous manner to an invisible stranger, and doesn’t stop for 45 minutes–and my attention is completely glued.

While all four of bash‘s actors are good at what they do, Harpin is incredible. From the moment he steps onstage, he creates a realistic, intricately fleshed out character with distinct voice and mannerisms, and is completely mesmerizing to watch. The monologue is written in a vaguely rambling manner, the character often diverting from his course to compare some situation or another to a television show, or to qualify his verbiage with a side story that is completely unrelated to his main point. Harpin segways into each of these digressions with entrancing realism, as if he were thinking of these things instantaneously instead of recalling the words from a script. Although his story unfolds at an absolutely grueling pace, Harpin keeps the audience transfixed, waiting on the edge of their seats for the next punch. And believe me, there are several punches in this piece, all straight to the gut. Next to me, Dave begins breathing heavily and clutching my hand in a vice-like grip; my eyes begin to sting, as I’ve forgotten to blink. Remember when I said that we wanted to jump up an punch the actors during the show? This is one of those times. And even with that overwhelming desire in my chest, Harpin is still frighteningly realistic, and sympathetic, which is the most amazing thing for me considering the words coming out of his mouth. As the monologue ends and the lights go out, I can hear a sigh roll through the room as the audience collectively stop holding their breath, and we wildly applaud while Billie Holiday sings through the scene change.

The lights come up on Emma Goodman (Sue) and Michael Underhill (John), seated in chairs pushed far back against the walls of the stage. The setup is great: two attractive young actors dressed in attractive clothes telling an attractive story, neither acknowledging the other even as they relate the same events from differing perspectives in simultaneous monologue.  Individually, each actor plays the part of the over-privileged, self-involved, falsely religious, and critically unfair yuppie Christian stereotype that Labute has written as well as can be expected.  I don’t doubt that people like these characters do actually exist, but placing them beside the truthfulness that is Marc Harpin’s Young Man makes Sue and John appear vapid, unbelievable cardboard cutouts of people. Yes, their story is still viscerally upsetting in ways that I won’t reveal, but I found that I was not nearly as affected by it as I was by bash‘s other two pieces.  Having directed a Neil Labute play, I know that Labute sometimes writes intentionally one-dimensional characters.  In my production, I coaxed my actors to create depth in their characters where there apparently was none.  Maybe this was the wrong way to go about it; maybe the characters’ lack of depth adds to the cruelty of their stories.  Either way, Goodman and Underhill show no depth or any sort of interesting inner life, though they do a lovely job of portraying very pretty pictures.

Furthermore, Goodman and Underhill never seem to connect over the course of their time together onstage.  During their monologues, as written in the script, the two actors interrupt each other or pick up speaking where the other left off pretty frequently, an aspect that should have created a good flow between them. It could be the fact that they never interact, as the script does not appear to allow for any character interaction. It could be that they don’t know their lines as well as they should, as revealed by a few noticeable flubs. Whatever the case, the actors exchange no energy, and the piece suffers and drags because of it. Fortunately, Labute’s near demonic ability to craft devastating situations keeps the piece engaging and rage-instilling, not to mention Underhill’s frighteningly smug delivery and Goodman’s infuriating obliviousness.  Though I personally did not feel the urge to jump up on stage and attack Underhill, others in my party really had to work to calm themselves during the climax of his graphic monologue.

“Can I speak?” A cigarette sparks to life in the dim stage light, and finally it is Kate Donnelly’s turn.  Of the four-person cast, Donnelly is the only ToF veteran, which she proudly proclaims in her bio–pretty much the only thing she proclaims in her bio, which was disappointing for me because I immediately wanted to look up her performance history. As I said, Marc Harpin’s Young Man is incredibly strong; the lights come up and the character is there. When Donnelly’s Woman did not immediately pop out at me, I thought, well, they threw their strongest actor out at the top of the show, I guess it’s a great way to open. But, as Donnelly continued to speak, I found that I was inexplicably drawn to her, mysteriously intrigued. There was something about her performance that was intoxicating. Harpin’s Young Man is strongly characterized in his physical mannerisms, his loud, ticky behavior. As I watched Donnelly, I realized that her Young Woman is just as strong, only much more subtle. It’s the way she speaks with a slight Midwestern accent; it’s the rational, matter-of-fact way she describes shocking events; it’s the way she smokes like a chimney, like she smokes 3 packs a day and the cigarette has become an extension of her hand. Donnelly’s performance is incredibly organic, rich with intelligent choices. It is clear that she knows this character from the inside out, and is thus able to make effective spur-of-the-moment decisions that make her performance remarkably realistic. I don’t like to talk about specific goings on in a show to keep from spoiling readers, but this is so minor and it so greatly affected me that I have to mention it. Donnelly’s physical mannerisms, while subtle, are wildly effective. There is a moment during her monologue where she lazily begins to trace a finger over the tape recorder set on the table in front of her. And then, as natural as can be, as if the words had popped into her head just that moment, she says, “This thing is running out.”

Donnelly’s monologue was the only one of the three for which I did actually know the ending. That didn’t stop my heart from skipping a beat when she mercilessly dropped it on us with a stone-cold expression and rational tone. When she is done, the light flicks off, and the audience sits silent in the sudden darkness, unsure of whether applause is the appropriate response.

bash is not for everybody, which probably explains the relatively small turnout (or it could have been because it was a Thursday). It is not for people who love soaring musicals with sweeping sets and special effects. It is not for people who can’t deal with being shanked in the stomach several times over the course of an evening. It is, however, an absolute paradigm of acting, imaginative directing, and powerful script: a full package that theatre aficionados will love.

bash plays one more weekend: October 15th, 16th, and 17th at 8:00pm at the Charlestown Working Theatre, located at 442 Bunker Hill St. in Charlestown. Believe me, this is something you do not want to miss.