INTERROGATION (B12): COMMEDIA DELL'ARTEMISIA

Little can be said about the Stolen Chair Theatre Company aside from: give me back my damn chair! Director Jon Stancato, while infuriatingly mum on the subject of furniture theft, is most articulate on the subject of Commedia Dell'Artemisia, which opens this Sunday, June 17. (The damnedest thing was how comfortable it was... I had the blessed thing for years. It was like a member of the family - a soft, cushiony member of the family that had a few Scotch stains, sure, but that doesn't matter because after all it wasn't for the world but it was mine, dammit, MINE!)

What exactly makes your show so damn pretentious anyway?
While we feel that enumerating one's pretensions violates the very spirit of pretentiousness, one must be prepared to make sacrifices for one's art. Our show is pretentious for no fewer than 3 discrete reasons:
1) It is based entirely on obscure 1612 trial transcript for a case of "stupro violento" (violent defloration) that the Carravagioesque painter Orazio Gentileschi brought against the perspective specialist Agostino Tassi in the name of the former's daughter, Artemisia Gentileschi, claimed by art historian Mary Garrard to be the first great female painter.
2) The script is in rhyming couplets fashioned after the style of Jean Baptiste Poquelin (known, to some dullards, only by his stage name, Molière).
3) It is performed in the style of Commedia dell'Arte, the masked Italian professional comedy which descended from the Roman phallophores and was popularized in the 1500s.

Name some obscure influences on your work – extra points for unpronounceability.
Well, in addition to the obvious influences of Artemisia Gentileschi, her first biographer Mary Garrard, JBP Moliere, and his chief English translator Richard Wilbur, our work draws theatrical inspiration from Jacque Lecoq, Antonio Fava, Ariane Mnouchkine, Charles Ludlam, Mel Gordon, Pierre Louis Ducharte, Maurice Sand, Agnes Merlet, and Flaminio Scala, and theoretical inspiration from Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida (of course!), Jan Kott, Katherine Liepe-Levinson, Fredrika H. Jacobs, and John Berger. Our chief influence, however, has always been ourselves.

The late Roland Barthes once wrote "For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with shortarms can never, never make a fine gesture." Explicate.
Too many artistes take the current artistic climate at face value, somehow naturalizing the stylistic idiosyncrasies that define it. These short-armed simpletons somehow believe that naturalism is actually natural and that realism is real. Stolen Chair uses its long arms (collectively, our company's arms span approximately 60 feet) to reach deep into the past and around the world to remind ourselves that style is always a choice.

In what ways do you plan on alienating your audience? Cite an intentionally opaque or confusing moment within your production.
In choosing to create a comedy about rape, our project's very mission is alienation. The most confusing moments will not be found on stage, but will instead be found in the psychic drama that each audience member will experience while attempting to reconcile the cognitive dissonance their sick and inappropriate laughter has engendered.

Which other Pretentious Festival show will you declare as your sworn ideological enemy, and why?
We will take on both Hamlets as our ideological enemies as the players' scenes therein bastardize the tradition of Commedia dell'Arte which we are dutifully reconstructing.

Please give us the gist of the acceptance speech you would use were you to win one of our Pretentious Awards.
To accept an award of any sort is to become a slave to the awarding institution's ideology, thereby precluding the Nietzschian re-valuation that all artists must face to embrace their Dionysian power.

EXPOSURE ROUNDUP

Okay, this is just getting silly; there's so much out there that we can hardly be expected to keep up. We should really hire a secretary to keep track of all this, but would we really want to exploit the proletariat in that fashion? On the other hand, one should always have a retinue on hand to elevate one's stature. *sigh* I suppose it all depends on what genre of pretentiousness you subscribe to.

• New York Magazine features Macbeth Without Words, Compression of a Casualty/Fox(y) Friends and Every Play Ever Written in its weekly theatrical Short List, both in print and online.

• Paper Magazine highlights the Festival in this charming little profile.

• The Brooklyn Rail offers a much more comprehensive profile (blowhards!) in their print and online versions, under the nigh-insufferable title "Having Their Cake and Meaning It Too."

• Nytheatre.comhas posted several more reviews of Pretentious shows, many of which are still running strong.

INTERROGATION (-IV): TUNNEL VISION

Carla Stangenberg, writer/performer of Tunnel Vision (which emerges onto the Brick stage Thu 6/14) is a woman of few words - so few, in fact that she declined to answer several items on our questionnaire. How pretentious is that? The show, which is directed by the equally laconic Mercedes Murphy, also features video by the less than garrulous Katurah Hutcheson.

What exactly makes your show so damn pretentious anyway?
This show is so high brow we have to pluck the main character's nose hairs not to mention the fact that one of our artists has a painting in The Philadelphia museum and a contributing cinematographer shot in Michael Moore's SICKO.

Name some obscure influences on your work – extra points for unpronounceability.
Napoleon Hill, Noam Chomsky, Pink Floyd, and Paramahansa Yogananda.

The late Roland Barthes once wrote “For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.” Explicate.
[Declined to answer]

In what ways do you plan on alienating your audience? Cite an intentionally opaque or confusing moment within your production.
[Declined to answer]

Which other Pretentious Festival show will you declare as your sworn ideological enemy, and why?
Three Angels Dancing On a Needle we were told we would be the only show using
Angels. Suffice to say ours are more precious.

Please give us the gist of the acceptance speech you would use were you to win one of our Pretentious Awards.
"Thank you to the pseudo psycho gurus who gave me the tools to visualize my way off the couch and got me in touch with the key. There are no more secrets left. Glory glory hallelujah."

EXPOSURE (CCC): THE NEW YORK TIMES

After an increasingly embarrassing spiral of wheedling, cajoling, and outright begging, I finally consented to grace the Times with an interview - but only on condition that it revolve around my own production of Macbeth Without Words. I was quoted in the company of such tyros as Jack O'Brien and Bartlett Sher, among others. Do you think what I said had the good manners to be uncontentious? Naive! Below is the excerpt featuring my musings; read the full article HERE and the accompanying data HERE.

For Jeff Lewonczyk, co-artistic director of the Brick Theater in Brooklyn, whose Pretentious Festival this month leans to the arch and self-referential (sample title: “Every Play Ever Written: A Distillation of the Essence of Theater”), there was at least one playwright he wanted to avoid.

“I’m sick to death of Shakespeare,” Mr. Lewonczyk said in an interview on Wednesday. “I’m sick of seeing other productions, and I’m sick of having him held up as the sole bar for quality.” (He had also been deterred by taking on “The Tempest” at a premature age, he added.)

But all it took was seeing a good “Comedy of Errors” for Shakespeare to infiltrate his creative thoughts, and soon Mr. Lewonczyk was directing a mute Macbeth and programming two other adaptations for his festival: “Ian W. Hill’s ‘Hamlet’ ” and “Q1: The Bad Hamlet,” based on the error-ridden first quarto of the play, reviled by most scholars.

Notice how I insult my fellow Shakespeare productions, and then pull back by allowing them to be mentioned in the space that should rightfully be MINE? This is called Machiavellianism, friends, and I advise you all to study it. Also observe the playwright's death mask in the photo above. He is dead, and will remain so indefinitely.

INTERROGATION (XLI): THE MERCURY MENIFESTO

Rather than write my own preface, the staff of The Mercury Menifesto demanded I use their canned material to introduce their show. Here goes:

In the late 90s, after being fired from his job as Santa at Sak's Fifth Avenue due to an incident with Mayor Giuliani, John Del Signore began standing in the subway dressed in a silver unitard. Passers-by would crowd around and debate whether or not he was "real"; it was only when money was dropped into the bucket at his feet that he would "come to life". In due time, Del Signore and his collaborator Victor Wilde became known as The Mercury Men and their stationary artistry was sought after for events at such decadent venues as The New York Stock Exchange and a Mark-of-the-Beast-themed nightclub in Times Square called Bar Code.

Del Signore's Pretentious Festival show, The Mercury Menifesto, is presented as a motivational seminar for those who dream of one day performing in the subway but lack the right confidence and technique. Along the way, the twisted story of The Mercury Men will be vividly re-enacted during the seminar with the help of actor Jeff Seal, puppeteer Mary Kate Rix, video artist Mikella Millen and - live via satellite from L.A. - Victor Wilde.

What exactly makes your show so damn pretentious anyway?
Just look at the title. What could be more pretentious than a manifesto? How about a MENifesto.

Name some obscure influences on your work – extra points for unpronounceability.
I see where this is going - your next question's going to dredge up all that rubbish about how I "stole" my act from the gold guy in Times Square. Well, I refuse to be tried in the court of public opinion! Interview over.

The late Roland Barthes once wrote "For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture." Explicate.
I suppose I have time for one or two more questions. Roland and I used to be quite close, as a matter of fact. Regrettably, we had a falling out when I spotted him leaving a matinee of Animal House and, grinning from ear to ear, rushing to buy a ticket for the very next screening! He tried to tell me he was researching a theory about the semiotics of toga parties. Well, I let him know what a disgraceful philistine he'd become, and he promptly belched in my face! Barthes was a vulgar fraud! What was the question?

In what ways do you plan on alienating your audience? Cite an intentionally opaque or confusing moment within your production.
Woah, woah, woah. Are you suggesting that the general public will be admitted into the theater? Absolutely not - I won't have them stinking up my production with their "popped corn" and their "heated dogs". My actors and puppets perform for a pristine, empty house - or no one! (Of course Industry and press are most welcome.)

Which other Pretentious Festival show will you declare as your sworn ideological enemy, and why?
My staff informs me there is another show set in the subway called "Tunnel Vision". While the title is certainly clever - if one goes in for that sort of thing - anyone who has ever taken the New York subway knows it's MY turf. That I wasn't even consulted by their production team was truly a slap in the face.

Please give us the gist of the acceptance speech you would use were you to win one of our Pretentious Awards.
I will accept my awards on behalf of all my marginalized silver brothers and sisters who are still - in 2007! - denied a seat at the table. The entertainment industry will come in for a particularly scathing indictment for their degrading portrayal of silver people as nothing more than bug-eyed, robotic street minstrels. It's high time we started seeing people of silver in roles as rock stars and crime-fighting aristocrats. (My headshot and resume available upon request.)

Photo by Haik Kocharian

EXHORTATION: THREE ANGELS DANCING ON A NEEDLE

Most of the production in this year's Festival originated in New York City; however, we have one entry that has come to us all the way from that bastion of American pretentiousness, Miami, FL. It is Three Angels Dancing on a Needle, written by Iranian expatriate author Assurbanipal Babilla and directed by the Peter Brook of Dade County, Michael Yawney. On the eve of the company's arrival in New York, it was revealed that they swept the theatre category of the Miami New Times Best Of Miami Awards. The valedictory blurbs are reproduced below. Show these Southerners some Northern hospitality and come out to support their show!

Best Acting Ensemble Three Angels Dancing On a Needle, Square Peg Productions
Assurbinipal Babilla called his play Three Angels Dancing on a Needle, but Merri Jo Pitassi, Odell Rivas, and Miriam Kulick did a lot more than dance on that needle — they got skewered on it. If you were lucky enough to be hanging out in the Deluxe Arts complex this past January, you'd have seen one of the most jaw-dropping displays of dramaturgical virtuosity to hit Florida in ... well, who knowsç Three Angels was a play that brooked no real comparisons. Playing characters of pornographic ugliness, reeking of spiritual decay and utter moral desperation, the three actors urged each other on to operatic heights of shame and degradation before small audiences who, by play's end, didn't know whether to clap, puke, or kill themselves. Maybe Three Angels wasn't the most fun way to spend a Friday night, but these three actors didn't give a shit: They were playing for higher stakes than that. What those stakes might have been, the rest of us are still trying to figure out.

Best Actor Odell Rivas in Three Angels Dancing On a Needle, Square Peg Productions
In Three Angels Rivas's part consisted primarily of a monologue called "God's Greatest Invention," in which his character confessed to being madly in lust — not love, just lust — with a man. The whole performance was one long scream of trembling, jittering need, with lots of big, declamatory statements and huge, sloppy emotions. But out of that tempest came a handful of lines that possessed a weird grace and some kind of defeated composure, summoned from who knows where. One of those lines was this: "You said you don't mind doing it with boys. Well—what in God's name keeps you from doing it with the boy in meç" There are more than six billion people on this earth, and most of them have asked that question in some form: Why not meç When Rivas asked, the bottomless dignity in his face and in his voice told their stories as much as his own. This year no other actor even came close.

Best Actress Miriam Kulick in Three Angels Dancing On a Needle, Square Peg Productions
The third actor to accost the audience in Assurbanipal Babilla's Three Angels Dancing on a Needle, Miriam appeared as the wife of a man who'd killed himself by jumping off a bridge. She hated him a lot, and his death had done little to soften her rage. For an interminable time — truly interminable; she could have held the stage for instants or epochs — she stood there, body and voice trembling, all her communicative faculties short-circuiting at their inability to process the vastness of her anger, tracing the shape of her hatred with horrific blind references to episodes which are never quite illuminated, allowing the audience's imagination to extrapolate at will and guiding that imagination into very weird terrain. Walking fifty-seven blocks to the morgue to identify her husband's remains, she danced all the way — like a whore, she said, just like her husband's mother. When she did the dance onstage, her hips were like war machines, and her face was like nothing you've ever seen before — a writhing tableaux of electric evil so pure that, if you encountered it in life, it would almost certainly be the last thing you ever saw. Even within the relative safety of the theater, audiences felt an actual, physical revulsion. One spectator said, "If she came any closer to my seat, I was going to scream," and that's about right. It's worth mentioning: According to all reports, Miriam Kulick is a very sweet lady when she's not scaring the hell out of you.

Best Theatrical Production Three Angels Dancing On a Needle, directed by Michael Yawney for Square Peg Productions
There was a handful of productions this year that will stick in audience's memories for a long time, but Three Angels is probably the only one that will have those audiences doubting their memories. Scant days after the fact, it already felt like a dream: the kinky Catholic-voodoo-gothic rituals that sandwiched the scenes; the brutal speed of the monologues; the unearthly poetry of the writing; the unholy passion it inspired in the cast; the purely holy passion with which the actors endowed exiled Iranian writer Assurbanipal Babilla's ugliest, most fevered musings not with dignity, but something dirtier and infinitely more pitiable. After the cast received its standing O's, people milled around, wanting to talk about what they'd seen but not sure what to say. Given a dozen or so weeks to think about it, they might have come up with something like this: By showing us three people who've moved beyond desperation into utter, predatory insanity, and by giving their voices a chance to be heard, Square Peg made it apparent that even monsters can be human. The unavoidable subtext was that if monsters are human, the rest of us must be, too.

EXULTATION

The first weekend of the Pretentious Festival has passed with supercilious fanfare, and there is much to share with our slavish admirers.

The Pretentious Opening Cabaret was stunning in its success. I myself hosted, accompanied only by an anthology of 20th-century French poetry and my own enviably plummy baritone. The featured acts (including a surprise appearance by Trav S.D. as Nihils, who I will never forgive for out pretentiousing me in front of everybody) all garnered new legions of followers, and much fermented beverage was imbibed.

The opening readings and performances of The Sophisticates, Dinner at Precisely Eight-Thirteen, This Is the New American Theatre, Between the Legs of God, and Intervew With the Author all played before teeming audiences of fawning minions, all of whom would not surrender their indelible impressions for all the opium in Afghanistan.

Dinner at Precisely Eight-Thirteen is the first show to receive a review from nytheatre.com - read Martin Denton's esteeming appraisal HERE.

Brick-a-Brac played before a sold-out house. Video augmentalist Jonathan Latiano shamed the audience with his opus Un film présomptueux et bon d'art de pensée dehors and its accompanying audience talkback, after which one will never view William Howard Taft or steamed fish the same way again. A late addition to the bill, Nate Lemoine presented Bestward Ho, a riff on a Samuel Beckett story that left the original looking tepid and compromised. Finally, we experience the premiere of Grand Opera at The Brick with Cardium Mechanicum's Mother Is Looking So Well Today, featuring four (professional) musicians, a cast of nearly thirty (!) , and honest-to-god cupcakes that the audience was allowed to eat afterwards. The spectacle bordered on being populist, but was saved at the last moment by the singing of the final lines in German. Nice save, guys.

Finally, late Sunday night brought The Impending Theatrical Blogging Event, which was one of the more metatheatrical events ever processed by the human brain. Bloggers both onsite and off blogged and had their postings and comments projected on a screen and read aloud by the redoubtable Berit Johnson. Part happening, part installation, part probing analysis of a rising theatrical subculture, part intellectual circle-jerk, and part happening, it will be written up in academic journals for years to come. You can read the full transcript (replete with inadvertent time-zone discrepancies, inside buffoonery, and cryptic missives from "THE AUDIENCE") at the official Blogging Event Blog.

Also of note is our inclusion (along with band Animal Collective and "film" Knocked Up) in Friday's edition of New York Magazine's Vulture. Though we find the Indieist's evaluation somewhat glib and hackneyed, we cannot deny its essential truth.