STAGE REVIEW
Imagery of 'Still On My Back' dazzling
| 'Still on My Back' • Presented by Monkey and the Waterfall |
Last year's production of "Monkey On My Back" was an exciting blend of concept and context, where masks and movement meshed perfectly with the street side performance space in the ARTS at Marks Garage. The result was new, audacious and fun.
This year, the company returns with "Still On My Back" and tests itself against a repeat audience that won't be as easily beguiled. If last year's theme was to examine compulsions, this year's sequel might be to search for balance — most directly expressed during a sequence on a park bench in which two roughnecks repeatedly try to topple a gymnast.
Clearly, the biggest challenge in the new performance piece is to keep its focus sharp and fresh.
Several production elements are still powerful, but no longer have their surprise value. The audience sits at the rear of the space, looking past the featured performers and through a wall of plate glass at more performers in the street. Much of the fun comes from watching the supporting cast mingle with traffic and passers-by, and sorting out who's who.
Indeed, this year's performance has so much going on outside, it's a challenge to keep track of all the action.
Black-clad stagehands highlight performers with portable spotlights, and recorded music underscores the pantomime, sometimes directly supporting the message, sometimes seemingly disconnected from the literal stage action. Dialogue is rare, minimal, and almost non sequitur.
What "Still on My Back" may lack in surprise, however, it makes up for with increased continuity. It has a definite beginning and ending, and a middle that's somewhat more than a muddle of vignettes.
The overture is stylish, with sleek black outfits designed by Gary Fujimoto. The cast is unmasked, and the evening's "faces" are arranged atop free-standing poles as a macabre backdrop. The cast moves them about, as if challenging the audience to see something of themselves in their lifeless expressions.
A woman in white manipulates a small puppet of a faceless boy. He puts on a miniature mask that seems to suffocate him. He is loaded into a child's red wagon and pulled away.
A real boy perched on a pedestal watches the entire scene. The boy appears sporadically during the rest of the performance — sometimes in the theater, sometimes on the street outside — and is the only cast member to speak words. Is he an innocent prophet about to drive us all from this temple with a whip?
The final scene repeats the opening, but this time it is the real boy who collapses and is wheeled away, while the stylish cast dances to Peggy Lee's "Is That All There Is." Is innocence doomed to be overwhelmed by experience?
It's a sobering ending, but everyone is resurrected on the street outside, taking a careful curtain call along the median strip.
In between the death scenes, an old man becomes enmeshed in his own chewing gum, dolls and books are torn apart and repaired, and a butterfly flutters by on roller skates.
A troll-like woman applies make-up, vamps the audience, and rips off her wig in despair, while her partner provides counterpoint by trying on an invisible dress, and is defeated by the perfect torso of a store mannequin. She is vanquished and leaves behind her mask and wig.
Perhaps the strongest scene is done to the accompaniment of country gospel and medieval chant and features a priestess figure and an electric fan. She tenderly cradles the appliance as if it were an infant. Squeezing it too tightly, its protective grid falls away. She dances with it in a strange ecstasy. She plugs it in and, like a moth drawn to a flame, puts her fingers into its spinning blades.
The entire evening seems to walk a fine line between trial and failure. The small boy is defeated. The old man is stuck. Women give in to despair, and rapture only leads to bloody fingers.
While it is not a happy or optimistic piece, the performance has moments of irony and delight. A bumpkin pulls yards of magical silk scarves from the fly of his overalls. Living wedding cake dolls become trapped in their traditional pose. A man in a monkey mask dangles from a sidewalk tree.
Still, if "Still on My Back" truly holds a mirror up to the human experience, it finds us still flawed and groping toward elusive happiness.
