Among the celebrities and beloved artists who died in 2004 were Ann Miller, Jack Paar, Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, Estée Lauder, Ronald Reagan, Ray Charles, Marlon Brando, Fay Wray, Julia Child, Richard Avedon, Christopher Reeve, Yasser Arafat, Renata Tebaldi, and Jerry Orbach. New terms that entered our vocabulary included paywall, podcast, social media, waterboarding, and e-waste.
During the run-up to the 2004 Presidential election, Democratic candidate John Edwards placed a heavy emphasis on the growing effects of income inequality in the United States. “During the campaign of 2004, I spoke often of the Two Americas: the America of the privileged and the wealthy, and the America of those who lived from paycheck to paycheck. I spoke of the difference in the schools, the difference in the loan rates, the difference in opportunity," he notes. "All of that pales today. Today ... we see a harsher example of two Americas. We see the poor and working class of New Orleans who don't own a car and couldn't evacuate to hotels or families far from the target of Katrina. We see the suffering of families who lived from paycheck to paycheck and who followed the advice of officials and went to shelters at the Civic Center or the Superdome or stayed home to protect their possessions."
In his recent blog post on Daily Kos, Art Rosch offers a different perspective on The Two Americas. As the 2020 Presidential election looms on the horizon, the double standards wreaking havoc on American society (racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia) are transforming the previously welcoming face of America into a twisted mask of fear and loathing covered with the scars of hatred and zits of prejudice. Nevertheless, Senator Elizabeth Warren has persisted in keeping her message focused like a laser on the topic of income inequality while reminding voters that "America is working really well for the people at the top, but not so much for everyone else."
While it's easy to find plenty of action hero stories, melodramas, rom-coms, and documentaries to while away one's time, two recent dramas focused on people with minimal incomes who are struggling to get by.
* * * * * * * * *
Every now and then a brazenly independent movie is screened at a film festival wherein a daring filmmaker achieves two monumental tasks. Because it falls just a hairline short of cinéma vérité, the final cut makes it difficult for viewers to determine if they've been watching a documentary or a piece of narrative fiction whose sense of urgency grips viewers so intensely that any thoughts of abandoning the experience are quickly quashed. The promotional blurb for Give Me Liberty (which was screened during the 2019 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival) states that “When a riot breaks out in Milwaukee, America's most segregated city, medical transport driver Vic is torn between his promise to get a group of elderly Russians to a funeral and his desire to help Tracy, a young black woman with ALS.” |
| Tracy (Lauren 'Lolo' Spencer), Dima (Maxim Stoyanov), and Vic (Chris Galust) in a scene from Give Me Liberty |
Directed by Kirill Mikhanovsky (and co-written with Alice Austen), Give Me Liberty is about so much more than an urban riot. Most of the cast are residents of Milwaukee who are not professional actors. Some are from the Eisenhower Center, a local nonprofit that offers training and jobs for people with disabilities (the crayon art of Gregory Merzlak is featured prominently in the film).
 |
| Artist Gregory Merzlak draws with crayons |
The indefatigable protagonist is portrayed by Chris Galust (a handsome young actor and stunt driver who only had 10 days to prepare for the lead role). In the course of one insane day, Vic must cope with (1) an anxious dispatcher who needs his van back at the company office, (2) transporting a group of elderly Russians to a local cemetery for their friend Lilya’s funeral, (3) Tracy’s transportation needs and boyfriend troubles, (4) angry drivers filled with road rage, (5) a desperate need to find some money, and (6) his elderly father who struggles with dementia.
 |
| Vic (Chris Galust), his elderly father, and sister, Sasha (Darya Ekamasova), in a scene from Give Me Liberty |
Lauren 'Lolo' Spencer (who had never acted before accepting the filmmaker’s challenge) portrays Tracy, a young black woman with Lou Gehrig’s disease who requires a motorized wheelchair to get around. While Tracy may seem like the most active and organized member of her family, foolish people who cross her do so at their own risk. Though she can be quite caustic with Vic about his tardiness, her affectionate manner with the van’s other passengers demonstrates a warmer side to her personality (which is always on guard against anyone who attempts to compromise her rights as a disabled person). As Spencer explains:
“Tracy's very unexpected. I think there's this perception of people with disabilities and how they should respond to things, how they need to handle themselves or defend themselves in situations. But Tracy's the complete opposite of that perception of people with disabilities having to probably be timid, or you have to be careful and scared. She doesn't take nothing from nobody. She’s unafraid. She's fearless in so many ways but is still very vulnerable – fearless in her vulnerability.”
 |
| An angry Tracy (Lauren 'Lolo' Spencer) sits in the back of Vic's van in a scene from Give Me Liberty |
The large cast of characters ranges from Steve (Steve Wolski), a mentally and physically challenged man to Vic’s mother (Zoya Makhlina), an elderly voice teacher who has been scrimping in order to pay for her son’s education. Lindsey Willicombe appears as a frustrated young soprano attempting to perform a recital for a small, elderly audience while the room around her descends into chaos during a family emergency.
 |
| Tracy (Lauren 'Lolo' Spencer), another passenger, and Vic (Chris Galust) in a scene from Give Me Liberty |
While smaller roles are taken by Darya Ekamasova as Vic’s sister, Sasha; Ben Derfel as Vic’s dispatcher, Nate; Dorothy Reynolds as Tracy’s grandmother, and Sheryl Sims-Daniels as Tracy’s mother, much of the chaos is aggravated by Dima (Maxim Stoyanov), a Russian con man who arrives on the scene pretending to be Lilya's nephew.
 |
| Dima (Maxim Stoyanov) leads a group of people through the cemetery in a scene from Give Me Liberty |
As one experiences the unrelenting stress of Vic’s workday, there is no escaping the feeling that Mikhanovsky’s film is a true labor of love. As the project's sound mixer, Jeremy Mazza explains:
"The themes that drive GML's plot (empathy, inclusivity, tireless effort) were the same that drove GML's crew to create it. It was an act of love for cinema. It was an immensely challenging feat of teamwork which required us to have tremendous faith in the project as well as each other. As the finest film I've ever been a part of, I've now seen just how much truth there is behind its message. Sometimes the hardest parts of life are the most worthwhile. Sometimes you have to just climb inside the van, and go."As one watches Give Me Liberty, one can't help but be impressed by Chris Galust's breakout performance as Vic and the rare beauty of the disabled Milwaukeeans and elderly Russians who serve as character actors in Mikhanovsky's poignant film. Their presence brings to mind Norma Desmond's famous line from 1950's Sunset Boulevard: "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!"
* * * * * * * * *
Common knowledge among culinary-minded crustacean lovers is that the best way to cook a lobster is not to toss it into a pot of boiling water (which will only make its muscles tense up and cause its meat to toughen), but to place the lobster in a pot of water at room temperature and let the water simmer in such a way that the warmth relaxes the lobster and essentially puts it to sleep. That way it can die a cozy death before being served for dinner.Playwright Annie Baker uses a similar technique but with opposite results. In an era wherein many performers have lost the art of a slow burn, Baker has perfected the art of a slow reveal. Some of her plays proceed at a snail's pace as they examine lives shaped by a curious mixture of loneliness, poor communication skills, and monotony.
When Circle Mirror Transformation premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2009, the headline for Variety's review boasted that "Annie Baker has crafted a beguiling little play out of almost nothing." The following year, her script for The Aliens stated that "at least one-third of the play should be silent, uncomfortably so." CMT (which ironically also stands for "Certified Massage Therapist") went on to share the 2010 Obie Award for Best New American Play with The Aliens, which premiered at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.
Following the premiere of The Flick at Playwrights Horizons, Baker received the 2013 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the 2013 Obie Award for Playwriting, and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 2015, the playwright's four-character drama entitled John had very little action stretched over a running time of approximately of three and a half hours. She was subsequently chosen as a MacArthur Fellow for 2017.
While many people grieve over the toxic impact the Trump administration has had on American culture, Baker's tender dramedies go a long way toward proving that irony and subtlety are far from dead.
Over in Berkeley, Shotgun Players is presenting The Flick in a production directed with great empathy by Jon Tracy. A two-act, three-hour drama that occasionally seems like a diorama in which a trio of sadly underappreciated humans are trying to get in touch with their feelings, The Flick takes place in 2012 in a run-down movie theater which has the dubious honor of housing one of the last 35mm film projectors in the state of Massachusetts. Tracy recalls reacting to his first encounter with Baker's script as if he had just read a book of poems about people he knew:
“I grew up in a small city that felt like the entire world. I wasn’t given any great tools to navigate communicating with others, so I communicated through trivialities while jockeying for a place in it all. Any place. Inside, everything burned hot. Outside, I silently begged for a chance to really trust someone and continued to lower my standards in hopes of attaining some semblance of friendship. My memories of ‘epic moments’ from my teens and twenties are so small in the greater scheme of things -- that time she laughed at my joke, or anything that felt like camaraderie for even a split-second.”
 |
| Ari Rampy (Rose) and Justin Howard (Avery) in the projection booth in a scene from The Flick (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
“But those are my epic moments and they shaped me. Each of them drag me down while also making me long for a certain beauty of those times. To reconstruct them seems unimaginable; to make them present seems impossible. But The Flick did it through the construction of poems that, together, speak for a longing to connect through an inner music never played but (because of how technically the play puts it all together) a music we all remember. Perhaps an inner music that continues to burn hot.”
 |
| Justin Howard (Avery) and Ari Rampy (Rose) in a scene from The Flick (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Baker's low-key experience is populated with a handful of characters who have little opportunity to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." Other than Rob Dario, who portrays a sleeping moviegoer who has to be ushered out of the theatre after the final film credits have been shown (and reappears much later as a new hire), the theatre's three minimum wage employees are stuck in menial jobs with little chance of achieving any kind of upward mobility.
 |
| Ari Rampy is Rose in The Flick (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Rose (Ari Rampy) is the theatre's projectionist, who routinely siphons off some of the ticket revenue so it can be shared with her fellow employees under the guise of "lunch money." Midway through her twenties, she finds herself saddled with student debt and the complete lack of any social life. Rose occasionally breaks out in dance moves that may be her only expressions of happiness.
Sam (Chris Ginesi) is the head usher who is also in charge of cleaning the nozzles on the soda machine, sweeping the floor after each screening, disposing of the theatre's trash, and wondering what's wrong with his life. At 35, he lives with his parents, harbors a secret crush on Rose, but deeply resents the fact that she never showed him how to run the movie projector. Sam's pathetic male fragility causes him to assume that, because Rose has never shown any overt romantic interest in him, that means she must be a lesbian. A major event for Sam is taking a weekend off to attend his retarded brother's wedding to a mentally challenged woman.
 |
| Ari Rampy (Rose) and Chris Ginesi (Sam) in a scene from The Flick (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Avery (Justin Howard) is the newest hire at The Flick. A bespectacled, anxiety-prone African American college student, he is a dedicated film geek who easily rises to Sam's challenges to play "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" (a popular game based on movie trivia). Though he depends on his father (a linguistics professor) for transportation to and from the theatre, Avery's heavily academic idealism runs into a severe reality check on the job that tests the limits of his "shitphobia." Luckily, Sam comes to the rescue with a mentor's acquired wisdom and janitorial skills.
 |
| Justin Howard (Avery) and Chris Ginesi (Sam) in a scene from The Flick (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
Randy Wong-Westbrooke has built a unit set that resembles any number of sad and disappearing one-screen movie theatres around the country (this week's news included the demise of the beloved 71-year-old Paris Cinema), while the costumes designed by Nikki Anderson Joy reflect the joyless work environment of so many minimum wage earners stuck in entry-level jobs in the service industry. With sound and video designed by Kris Barrera and lighting by Kurt Landisman, Shotgun's production is almost painfully realistic.
The simmering emotions within Sam, Avery, and Rose offer a sharp contrast to the grandiose movie music which accompanies many of the breaks between Baker's vignettes. As the play progresses, repressed feelings lead to lots of pouting. Tension builds over rumors that the theatre's owner is looking for a buyer -- a move that would undoubtedly involve ditching the The Flick's 35mm movie projector and converting to digital projection (a severely misguided and catastrophic decision in Avery's mind).
 |
| Justin Howard is Avery in The Flick (Photo by: Ben Krantz Studio) |
To their credit, Justin Howard, Ari Rampy, and Chris Ginesi do a superb job of letting the daily insults of discontent, disillusionment, and drudgery entertain the audience in what seems uncomfortably like real time. While an audience's patience may be tested by Baker's play, it offers actors a wonderful opportunity to flesh out their characters with only the barest bones to guide them.
Performances of The Flick continue through October 6 at the Shotgun Players (click here for tickets). Here's the trailer:
No comments:
Post a Comment