Moments of introspection come in all shapes and sizes. Whether a villain in a Victorian-era melodrama reveals his duplicity in a spoken aside or a character in a musical performs a full-out showstopper in which inner conflicts are laid bare in front of the audience, the dynamics of confession can range from the lonely, late-night rambling of a drug addict like Mary Tyrone to the full-blown fantasies of deeply conflicted and woefully unhappy spouses. Consider these two musical numbers from Stephen Sondheim's 1971 masterpiece, Follies.
There are times when merely getting inside a person's head is not enough. The popular Russian souvenirs known as Matryoshka dolls are famous for the way they nest or embed.an entire family of dolls within each other. Some sets of Matryoshka dolls are painted in the same style while others may have each member of the doll's family painted in different colors. Other dolls may contain a set of related characters that nest within each other.
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| A set of Matryoshka dolls depicting Russian politicians (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons) |
Understanding the craft that creates and fashions Matryoshka dolls can go a long way toward explaining how the phenomenon is similar to the nested or embedded narratives devised by some playwrights.
A powerful theatrical device, the "play within a play" is believed to have first been used by Thomas Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy (1587). Shakespeare made excellent use of the device as well. In The Taming of the Shrew (1594), a play within a play is performed to confuse and trick a drunkard named Christopher Sly. Cole Porter's 1948 musical adaptation (Kiss Me, Kate) took the gimmick one step further by imagining Fred Graham and Lilli Vanessi as a married couple (whose backstage fights were inspired by Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne) starring in a new musical based on The Taming of the Shrew.
In Love's Labour's Lost (1598) an attempt is made to perform a masque resembling The Nine Worthies. In A Midsummer Night's Dream (1600), Peter Quince and his friends perform a ridiculous version of "the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe" at the wedding of Theseus, Duke of Athens and Hippolyta, the former Queen of the Amazons. And in Hamlet (1602), the Prince instructs a troupe of traveling players on how to perform his version of The Murder of Gonzago, stating that "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King."
The use of a "play within a play" works equally well in musical and operatic formats.
- In Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951 musical, The King and I, the slave girl Tuptim stages a ballet entitled The Small House of Uncle Thomas inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
- In 1965's Man of La Mancha, a group of prisoners trapped in a dungeon during the Spanish Inquisition help Miguel de Cervantes act out the story of Don Quixote as part of a mock trial.
- In Ruggero Leoncavallo's 1892 opera, Pagliacci, a jealous husband suspects that his wife is cheating on him with a younger man. Because the couple are the stars of a touring commedia dell'arte troupe, Canio uses the script so that, as he threatens Nedda onstage, her lover will emerge from the audience and come to her defense.
Michael Frayn's 1982 play entitled Noises Off is a rip-roaring farce, While not necessarily on a par with three-dimensional chess, it offers theatre lovers a master class in how to create, plot, and populate an old-fashioned, door-slamming evening of physical comedy. Using the old device of staging a play within a play, Frayn has concocted a cast of ridiculously conflicted characters (as well as a group of randy fictional actors who portray those characters) and let everything that could possibly go wrong -- go spectacularly wrong.
Frayn was inspired to write Noises Off after standing backstage and watching Lynn Redgrave perform in a British farce. Realizing that the audience had no idea what kind of chaos occurred out of their sight, he structured Noises Off so that each scene shows the first act of a play called Noises On unraveling in a different (fictional) theatre.
- The first act of Noises Off takes place during a technical rehearsal at the Grand Theatre in the seaside town of Weston-super-Mare. At this point, the actors are having trouble remembering their lines and are constantly making mistakes involving the placement of various theatrical props which are required for certain bits of stage business.
- The second act of Noises Off takes place a month later at the Theatre Royal in Ashton-under-Lyne during a Wednesday matinee. However, instead of seeing the set as it appeared in Act I, theatregoers view the action as it takes place behind the set. By this point in the show's tour, the friction and resentment that has built up between cast members who are either drunk, late, spiteful, or sexually involved with each other, has reached a critical temperature.
- The third act of Noises Off takes place near the end of the show's 10-week run at the Municipal Theatre in Stockton-on-Tees. The director (who has been screwing both the air-headed ingenue and the now-pregnant assistant stage manager) has returned to check in on the show. He quickly learns what can happen on a night when bad timing is everything.
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In a joint venture with Golden Thread Productions, Shotgun Players is presenting the West Coast premiere of Guillermo Calderón's provocative play entitled Kiss, a dramedy that easily fulfills its goal of confusing and unnerving the audience. Unlike Frayn's three-act farce, Kiss is a one-act play divided into four scenes. However, if you look carefully, you'll discover that the first three scenes bear a surprising resemblance to how Noises Off is structured. Billed as “a mystery and political thriller dressed up as a love story,” Kiss steadily undermines the complacency of viewers who might not wish to step outside of their comfort zone. Think of it as what might happen if Agatha Christie had decided to muck around with Noises Off (keeping in mind that, during the fourth scene, the shit hits the fan).Like many narratives in which successive layers of awareness are peeled away with each introduction of a critical new piece of knowledge, it takes a while for the audience to catch on to what is unfolding onstage. The play begins in 2014 as a group of American actors are rehearsing a script they found on the Internet for a soap opera set in Damascus that was written by a Syrian playwright. As with some telenovelas, the characters lack depth and the style of writing is deliberately melodramatic. Just like Noises Off, the action initially seems a bit vapid and silly.
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| Elissa Beth Stebbins in a scene from Kiss (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
However, in the second scene, as the actors engage with the Syrian playwright via Skype, they learn that many of their artistic choices have been severely misguided because they lack an understanding of the political climate in Syria and the war zone culture in which people are struggling to survive. Strange things happen during the Skype session. Unlike Herman Hupfield's song "As Time Goes By" (originally written for a 1931 musical entitled Everybody's Welcome and remembered today for its use in 1942's Casablanca), the lyric claiming that "a kiss is just a kiss" takes on darker and more ominous reality when the actors learn the horrific reason why a cough is most definitely not "just a cough."
In the third scene, the actors rehearse the same material they performed earlier in the play. However, since then the actors (as well as the audience) have been confronted with a lot of highly sensitive facts about Syria. As a result, they have gained troubling insights which make it impossible to perform (or react to) the play as naively as they had previously done. In the fourth scene, hell breaks loose (sorry, no spoilers).
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| Roneet Aliza Rahamim and Wiley Naman Strasser in a scene from Kiss (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Working on a unit set designed by Mikiko Uesugi (with video by Kevin Landesman, sound designed by Sara Huddleston, lighting by Cassie Barnes, and costumes by Miyuki Bierlein), Turkish-born director Evren Odcikin makes no bones about the fact that Kiss was one of the toughest directing challenges he's tackled in his young and prolific career. In his program note, Odcikin (who also serves as Director of Marketing and New Plays for Golden Thread Productions) writes:
“Kiss focuses on a theatre company that makes a huge mistake in the most public way possible. The play proves the impossibility of cross-cultural communication because metaphor and subtext cannot be Googled. When the cultural context is removed from a work that speaks to current horrors, misunderstandings are a foregone conclusion. But the real gem in the heart of this play is much more complex. Good people make mistakes. Well-meaning people can cause trauma. Those of us from the Middle East working in the American theatre know this well. We make our work with artists, for audiences, to be judged by critics who all want to help us and ‘our people.’”
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| A Skype session between the actors and the Interpreter is a key dramatic element of Kiss (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
“In doing this work, mistakes are unavoidable, but the fact that you will make mistakes cannot be reason enough to look away and do nothing. The company of artists in Kiss does not. Neither can we. The possibilities of theatre are on full display in the bold ending Calderón has created. Worlds collide theatrically, and we find ourselves in Lebanon, alone with the one Syrian character in the play. Guillermo accompanies this image with words spoken by the Syrian refugee that inspired that character and who played the role in Kiss’s world premiere in Dusseldorf, Germany. For one moment, we’re given access (in the way only theatre can) to the heart and mind of one Syrian refugee.”
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| Phil Wong and Roneet Aliza Rahamim in a scene from Kiss (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Shotgun's ensemble features six strong artists, only two of which have the luxury of tackling a single character (Rasha Mohamed portrays the mysterious woman/playwright in the Skype session with Jessica Lea Risco acting as her interpreter). Roneet Aliza Rahamim doubles as the soap opera's Hadeel and the actress Andrea; Elissa Beth Stebbins doubles as the character Bana and the actress Laura. Phil Wong doubles as the character Yousif and the actor Daniel, while Wiley Naman Strasser doubles as the character Ahmed and the actor Martin.
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| Jessica Lea Risco appears as the Interpreter in Kiss (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Kiss is not an easy play to embrace (on opening night a lot of laughter was mixed with some nervous titters). It's a challenging piece of theatre which may leave some audience members wondering "What the fuck did I just see?" Performances continue through September 23 at the Shotgun Players (click here for tickets). Here's the trailer:
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