Culture Vultures

(Our weekend in Los Angeles... continued.)

We were looking forward to a fine theater experience on Saturday night--that is, until we got there. But more of that in a moment. On the way over to Westwood, we stopped at a couple of galleries we had missed the previous day. First stop was Suzanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, where we found an entertaining installation of objects and wall pieces by Sean Duffy. Riffing exuberantly on American culture of the 1950s, Duffy mixes sound, iconic object and image to update formative memories--presumably from childhood--and give them a new context in the contemporary world. Among the highlights are an old-style vinyl long-playing stereo player...

... rebuilt with three pickup arms to play the same record (Dusty Springfield) three times simultaneously at fractional intervals--with surprisingly mellow results! It's as though the song is echoed twice, lending the music an eerie quality of depth and resonance, like memory itself. The surface of the player was used as a palette for the paint used to make a three-dimensional "painting" of this wrecked car engine...

... whose every surface has been scrubbed, gessoed, and meticulously repainted to reproduce the original stained and rusted surfaces. The piece is about recycling, reinvention, entropy and renewal--the stuff of human experience. I'd be remiss to omit mention of a piece de resistance, installed in a separate, small gallery space--a large, gleaming disco ball constructed entirely out of spinning fans, lights, and colored plastic ties...

... to create the suggestion of a hectic, overworked globe struggling with the winds of change. Curiously, with so many fans working in conflicting directions, the winds succeed in virtually canceling each other out, leaving nothing but a persistent, gentle whirr. Duffy's work is a charming and engaging blend of nostalgia, fantasy, imaginative exuberance, and sly cultural observation.

Sharon Lockhart, by contrast, at Blum & Poe's palatial new quarters on La Cienega, offers a sober reminder of the plight of the worker in today's recessionary times through the unsparing lens of her film and still cameras. "Lunch Break," the title of the show, combines two film installations with three related series of photographs documenting the activity in a shipyard in Bath, Maine. In one set of photographs, stand-alone lunch boxes, left open...

(sorry, I have no pictures other than this online gallery announcement, but I'm sure you'll find others if you visit the site) ... double as portraits of their owners; in another set, workers are seen at lunch around institutional dining tables. The whole collection is an uncompromising, quasi-anthropological investigation, a study of the bare-bones dignity and individuality of those who labor on society's behalf, for little money and often in heart- and soul-less environments. All of which led me to reflect on the odd and, yes, striking contrast between the life depicted in these powerful photographs and the high-end gallery environment in which they come to our attention. The new Blum & Poe space is cavernous, spectacular in its immaculate whiteness...

... a veritable temple to our society's best substitute for religion: art. There's a certain poignancy in the juxtaposition of the two.

Okay, theater. We had, as I said, been looking forward immensely to seeing "Equivocation," the current offering at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood. We had heard wonderful things about the play from friends, and came with high expectations. And were disappointed. That, actually, in an understatement. I always say that every theater experience is a good experience, if only because of the social interaction that takes place between stage and audience, and amongst the audience members themselves. I may have to revise my adage. My instinct prompted me to leave this one at intermission, one hour and fifteen minutes into the event, and with another hour and a half still to go. We stayed, hoping to be proven wrong in the second part--and regretted our decision.

I really did want to like the play. Here's what it boils down to: lies--the "equivocations" of the title--often tell the truths that the truth is unwilling or unable or dares not tell. The play posits the fictional commissioning of Shakespeare ("Shag") by James I of England, through the agency of the (equivocating) courtier, Sir Robert Cecil, to write a historical drama documenting the Guy Fawkes plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament--and with them, the king himself along with his family; and conflates this plot line with the contemporary real life tragedy of the destruction of the Twin Towers and the subsequent equivocations resorted to by the boy "king," George W. Bush and his administration to justify torture, revenge, and further bloodshed.

It's an interesting conflation of metaphors, surely, but it all gets into a dreadful wordy, pedantic muddle in the play. The headiness of the play's central conceit is compensated by over-the-top emotional conflict between the actors which, for me, never quite rang true. The whole thing is further muddied by a heavily Freudian sub-plot having to do with the character of Shakespeare's daughter and his guilt over the death of her twin brother, his son. It all gets to be too much, too complicated, too fraught with false emotion, too noisy with set-up conflict. The graphic torture, disembowelment and execution scenes do nothing to relieve the agony of argument. Homage to Shakespeare it may be; Shakespeare it is not.

I do see where this kind of drama fits in the modern-contemporary tradition of theater of cruelty and theater of the absurd, of Brecht and Artaud, Genet, Ionesco, Piaranello and Beckett. It's as close as we can come to tragedy, some have argued, in a world abandoned by the gods whose wrath made sport of human fate even as they gave it universal context. I know about post-modernism and its love of fractured narrative. Even so, I have always believed in the theatrical concept of tragic necessity--that sense of inevitability that promotes the suspension of disbelief, a kind of karmic logic--and I could not find it here. It felt like what it is--a clever conceit, extended far beyond dramatic necessity into intellectual play.

I'd be interested to hear from others who may have seen the play, and have had a quite different experience from my own... For me, the magic of the theater simply didn't happen.