The Plastic Bags of the Universe - the powerful hope you won't notice...
A Communist interrogator grills Tony Estrella's Jan, sweating him for information...Jan, like the blessed anti-heroes of 'Dazed and Confused' just wants to rock and not be bothered with signing loyalty statements and ratting on friends. Of course, authority cannot understand such simplistic ideals. The accusation is levied: You're either very simple...or very complicated. Which is it?
And that is the overriding question regarding the Gamm's production of Tom Stoppard's breathtakingly long-winded and, eventually, gorgeous production of 'Rock n Roll', running through May 30th.
The temptation with a show like this would be to show how clever the reviewer is by being able to pick through all of the intertwining strands of metaphor and discuss the leitmotifs and the thematic recurrence of Syd's innocent, Joyce-inspired "Golden Hair" and the 'Bring 'em Home' wail of Vera Lynn as echoed via Roger Waters' anti-war paeans. As Syd's poetic visions gave way to Waters' bloated corporate rock, so did the idealism of the Prague Spring lose the plot once it became more profitable to shut up and listen to the marketplace dictate freedom. But anyone who graduated college before 1995 will pick up on all this and more as synapses delightfully fire through Max's pinball machine of the mind and place Sappho's yearnings and Eleanor's sufferings in their rightful niches alongside Ferdinand's compromising struggles to shoot for the middle and Jan struggles mightily with the biggest decision of all: Fugs or Doors?
More Teeth loves the fact that 'Rock n' Roll' has the ability to send a shiver up the spine more than once and leave you asking more questions than are answered. But what we're really interested in is whether or not YOU should go see this show and what you can expect if you do.
Which brings us back to whether or not this show is extremely complicated (and, on paper, it absolutely is) or extremely simple. Can you file into the slaughterchute of the Gamm's black box playing space, wine or beer in hand, without knowing about the occupation of Prague or who Syd Barrett was? You could. There is more than enough exposition via the dialogue and the videos and the captions projected on the walls to spoon feed enough trivia to get you through and simply concentrate on the performances (which are mostly stirring). And then there's the music...
Whatever pretensions 'Rock n' Roll' carries about the struggle of the proletariat or Brain vs. Mind, this play is about the power of music to express emotion, feelings and ideas that words fail to convey. You can lock me up, but I got my rock and roll. Sounds simple. Stupid even...but the power in that simplicity is what carries Jan and his ilk through the years from struggle to compromise and everywhere in between. So, More Teeth expected a killer sound design, one that embraced both the obvious and the implied. Stoppard's script dictates certain givens in-between scenes such as the obligatory relevant Pink Floyd, Velvet underground and Beach Boys choices, but there is leeway, especially in preshow and intermission choices. However, what we are served as we join the firetrap pileup of bodies bustling in and out of the theater is the worst excesses of corporate radio rock.
Sound Designer Charles Cofone gives us the first example of the underlying paradox of 'Rock n' Roll' before the show has even started: What resemblance does the radio-friendly riffage of Aerosmith, Billy Squier and even Wild Cherry bear to the progressive, anarchist strains of early Floyd, Velvet Underground (and even Kraftwerk, which gets a nod in the script later in Act Two)? The answer is: Nothing. Or Everything. Is Cofone telling us, that, just as Czechoslovakia will celebrate its newfound freedom in 1990 by exalting in the desiccated opulence of the washed-up, hardly revolutionary Rolling Stones dragging their bones into the Strahov, that safe, ad-friendly mass-marketed radio rock is all thats left of the dream? Even the appearance of the once-relevant REM in the soundtrack misses the opportunity for "Radio Free Europe" and settles for "It's the End of The World As We Know It..." Brilliant? Or does it miss the point entirely? The effect was that of someone skipping tracks on a Time-Life Rock Classics compilation playlist until it came time to segue into the music of the opening video, which jarringly includes the actual music of the Plastic People of the Universe and tracks slightly more aligned to the message. When The Stones play live at the close of the show and the entire audience joins the performance, the song is not quite of the period - artistic license has the band playing a song released in 1994 at a show in 1990. But does it matter? To most of the audience, probably not. But for a script that exalts in the minutiae of extremely esoteric Syd Barrett trivia such as his final performance at the Corn Exchange in Cambridge, one could assume that every detail is deliberate.
Which brings us to the plastic bags. Or is it just one bag? (Max would call it one sack, to be sure). More Teeth had a lively debate after the show with anyone who would listen. Not about the slow dissolution of freedom under any "-ism" or how the mind (or soul) yearns to express or how Art is worth getting angry about...but about plastic bags. Were plastic bags widely available in Prague in the early 70s? (Supermarket-style plastic bags that are now going out of favor except to pick up after your dog in the park.) A fact check shows they existed, yes, but were not common. So was the ubiquitous appearance of this bag (usually covering an illicit rock album or a bottle of Scotch) a careless anachronism? Or was it the one bag they had...a luxury to be used and reused as it served the dual purpose of portability and camouflage for the musical contraband underneath? This cast were taking great pains to show the bag and take care of it in each scene it appeared. It became a character in and of itself. Were we supposed to notice it? Question its appearance and marvel in the fact that Jan and Ferdinand were able to score this item alongside a copy of "The Madcap Laughs"? Oh, but then, that too was an anachronism. Scenic Artist Katryne Hecht is in cahoots with Cofone by giving us a maddening puzzle. For a play so strict about its Syd Barrett-ology, why would Jan's copy of Barrett's iconic 1970 solo debut "The Madcap Laughs" NOT be the actual album? The real album is immediately recognizable for its picture of Barrett on a striped floor in his apartment with his naked girlfriend languorously draped over a stool behind him. What Jan pulls out of said plastic bag is a double compilation LP not released until 1974. Every other album in the show (and many are whipped out and placed on the turntable which precariously balances on the verge of tipping over for most of the show) is the original, actual release. Esme's note to Jan is to "play track 8" so he can hear the fully realized "Golden Hair" that a mythic Syd sang to her in the garden back in 1968 long before the song was even recorded. As an LP is two sided, there is no such thing as "track 8" aside from turning it over to the second song of the second side. On this compilation LP, "Golden Hair" is indeed Track 8 - if youre listening to a CD. And great pains are taken to get the 1990 outtakes album "Opel" correct. So...sloppy research? Or a nod to the timelessness of the Barrett legend?
Why are we harping on these facts? We do so, because this production is marvelous in so many ways, which makes these artistic elements disturbing and distracting. Unless they're purposeful and that would merely be maddening. It would seem that the creative team assumes that an audience won't know if "The Madcap Laughs" album cover is incorrect just as they won't notice or care that every single song played by Jan on his turntable seems to consistently be Side One, Song One - no matter what...even if its supposedly Track 8.
Director Judith Swift is tasked with the burden of making a set consisting of one table in the center of the floor a dynamic environment and she overcompensates by not trusting her actors to stay still. Stoppard's words ring true and have more power when we are allowed to listen to them without wondering if Max or Eleanor would kick Lenka off their dining room table. As beautiful as it is to look at the simplicity of this table in the amphitheatre-style full round setting before the show begins, it's a rat trap for the performers who must overcompensate for this boundary and not upstage themselves for too long in any one position. Like the bag, the table is a character to be pounded on, clamber over and otherwise beat into submission lest it overcome the frail humans who bang their hearts against it like a Berlin Wall...or a Pink Floyd one. Every chair *will* be used, moved and then moved back. This cast is overwhelmingly talented and we are left with the impression that they cannot be trusted to sit still and speak, or worse yet, that the audience cannot be trusted to listen.
Despite these obstacles (not to mention wigs that could be horribly distracting if the actors wearing them did not have the ability to rip our attention away from staring for too long), Tony Estrella, Jim O'Brien, Jeanine Kane and Steve Kidd easily engage and suck us in to their struggles. Shaky British accents level off early on and we are drawn towards the contrast of Cambridge and Prague. Silent suffering and wild abandon struggle with each other on both ends. Tom Gleadow seems miscast as Nigel, the fetching Esme's ex-husband, but he carries the role with such flair that we go back to pointing at the artistic team for that decision, not him. Casey-Seymour Kim delivers with subtlety and bombast all at once and reminds us of the intricacy of her performance in Gamm's 'Scarlet Letter' from last season. Aside from chewing more scenery than her frame would seem to allow while noisily pondering the mindset of Sappho (and flirting with O'Briens Max), Kim is a performer you'll watch no matter what the subject. Karen Carpenter and Amanda Ruggiero handle their multiple roles with more than adequate differentiation in character and do so with the added challenge of 80's period costuming that assumes people only wore one cliché the entire period. Also unfortunately attired is Kyle Blanchette who musters up what he can but is outpaced by a clearly far more seasoned cast. One feels that he was the best in college but now has to relearn the craft in an Equity setting.
So the question still remains. Does this team trust the audience to think for itself? Is 'Rock n' Roll' too complicated, too weighty and too overarching to trust to an audience without hammering them over the head with purposeful anachronism and constant fidgeting to keep the eye moving? Perhaps we're meant to be distracted from the omnipresence of the characters Bag and Table who are unrelenting, omnipresent and omniscient. If we notice them too much, we'll question and rebel. Ah...now we get it. It *is* on purpose. Or maybe not. Either way, we're caught thinking.
The Plastic People only wanted to make music. But they got co-opted as a political symbol which actually served to bring down an entire system. Syd Barrett just wanted to make music but his music got co-opted into a system that resembled politics. We went to see a play about the politics of thought and got co-opted into thinking about Plastic Bags. Is it worth it? If you're a music geek in general or a Syd Barrett geek in particular - No. You'll be frustrated beyond repair. If you love seeing a talented cast deliver captivating and dynamic yet unnecessarily athletic performances, then Yes. And if you want to go home with something -anything- to think about, then this is your sack, er, bag.
'Rock n Roll' runs at the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre in Pawtucket through May 30th. Tickets can be purchased online at gammtheatre.org or by calling 401-723-4266. Parking is tough and the car-jockeying postshow is nightmarish. But there is a liquor license and decent coffee so arrive early and leave late.
