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| Use
your allusion: Fovea Floods’ Paul Pry. |
Dream
Until Your Dreams Come True
By John Rodat
Paul
Pry
Written
and directed by Josh Chambers
Boces/New
Visions Studio Theatre, through march 30
Saratoga Stages’ presenta- tion of the Fovea Floods production
Paul Pry deserves praise for accomplishing one of the
rarest feats in performing arts: living up to the publicity
material.
The promo stuff claims that the “company’s epic work employs
cinematic techniques and sensory bombardment to produce shows
that are visual, explosive and literate,” and, sure enough,
Paul Pry fit the bill. The production is so richly
visualized, so textured and so potently—if obscurely—imaginative
as to be overwhelming. And the troupe, under the direction
of the show’s author, Josh Chambers, performs Paul Pry
with such surety and physical precision as to give the
effect of a Cirque du Soleil performance. The play’s 15 scenes
unfold into one another, symbol giving way to symbol, with
a frantic dreamlike logic. The viewer hardly has time to process
one tableau before another is presented: phalluses and flowers,
skulls and spray paint, surgeons and spectral spouses. It
is a show designed, seemingly, to kick the viewer’s ass. And
on the whole, it succeeds.
But is it good?
On my way out of the BOCES/New Visions Studio Theatre after
the play, I heard one attendee complaining enthusiastically,
“That was terrible! That was one of the worst things I’ve
ever seen!” as her companions tried to explain to her that
it was avant-garde, that it was meant to be challenging. I
think she remained unconvinced. And, I suspect, other less-vocal
theatergoers may have had some similar internalized confusion:
“Wow, that knocked me out—I don’t get it.”
The story on which Chambers’ vision is draped is that of Hans
Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, in which there
are malevolent goblins, conjuring women, a frog king, the
titular Snow Queen, mirrors of demonic manufacture and all
variety of threats, oddities and obstacles strewn on the path
between two separated siblings. Chambers and Fovea Floods
animate these elements gorgeously, and choreograph them to
an eerie, pulsing, mechanistic guitar-and-sound-effect soundtrack
that heightens the tension to fitting brittleness. At one
point, the sister searching for her missing brother is herself
captured and spends an amnesiac year in the company of the
Woman Who Conjures. To illustrate the passage of time, Chambers
has positioned his actors behind sliding doors, which open
and shut rapidly to reveal his troupe posed in seasonally
themed friezes, each as defined, intricate and enticing as
a Caravaggio.
The problem was that these scenes had immediate impact, but
little cumulative effect in terms of the story’s advancement.
The choice of fairy-story framework makes sense for a play
lacking dialog, as most of us are familiar enough with the
genre’s conventions to know implicitly that the evildoers
will receive their comeuppance and the siblings will reunite
to, more or less, live happily ever after. However, the density
and laudable force of each individual image raised expectations
that message would match medium. With the exception of some
introductory parodies of psychopharmaceutical ads played on
overhead plasma screens, there was little added to Andersen’s
tale in narratological terms. And even those amusing bits
seemed extraneous by play’s end; if they were meant as clues
to a theme or superimposed subplot, I could not follow them
through the (visually exciting) tangle of imagery.
The overall effect was indeed dreamlike, but it was someone
else’s dream: fascinating, intriguingly weird, often beautiful
but, ultimately, short on significance. The play impressed
me, but it did not move me.
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