Unblinking
The Thirty-third Year - Playing Life
Theatre ASOU at Mabou Mines, PS 122
Theatre ASOU, from Graz, Austria, visited Mabou Mines recently (at PS 122, New
York), with a sort of performance piece called The Thirty-third Year - Playing
Life. The company uses projections, costume changes, and a disembodied,
amplified voice to create a set of characters, all manifestations of the sole
actor. Indeed, the script was devised from the actor's life through interviews
with the author (Robert Riedl). It's a probing exposure of character, and it
doesn't shrink from life's worst experiences - death and grief.
Throughout, the actor is engaged in conversation with an alter ego. "What
is it that you want from me?" he asks his other self. "Just shut your
mouth," comes the response. But this disembodied voice (who is the director)
can be reassuring as well, "Just be you", he tells our man. There's
a great deal of Pirandelloing around here. The best bit is a visual pun on the
word "cast", as the actor enters with his leg in one of those plaster
things - he's in the cast today.
We admire the expression of loss and guilt that Theatre ASOU gives us. However,
the repartee re: acting vs life goes on well past its welcome, and the production
fails. It depends too heavily a concept that isn't developed, merely repeated.
An upstage screen keeps throwing the actor's soulful eyes at us - sometimes
his soulful eye - and, like the script, it doesn't blink. But this means it
never changes, and the self-examination isn't stageable.
The production owes much to the honest, fluid emotional life of its actor, Gernot
Rieger. His technique is sharp and sure and polished. When he addresses us,
in the play's best moment, he's direct and disarming. "Would you like a
relationship with me?" he asks. But still, the answer is decidedly "No".
Who'd want to deal with his self-absorption? And when he says "Maybe this
is a kind of therapy," we've had enough.
We'd like to see this company again, with its unblinking honesty, when its talents
are channeled through a pithier vehicle.
- Steve Capra