Season of delightful local theater

by Marty & Martha Roth

    At the top of our list this month are two vibrant stage extravaganzas—one present (“Gulliver's Travels,” playing at Theatre de la Jeune Lune through June), one past (“Palace of Dreams”), and two films (“Yi-Yi,” “Amores Perros”) with more than a touch of cinema magic about them.
    Jonathan Swift’s satiric novel tells about a gullible lout who travels to strange lands in order to perceive what is strange at the heart of his own civilization. Jeune Lune’s adaptation reminds us again why we are so grateful to have them around to make art and entertainment for us. This agile and witty company plays the most amazing theater games on stage, delighting us even when (as sometimes happens) the material sags a little. In this production they also remind us of the madcap antics of Alfred Jarry and the sombre humor of Samuel Beckett—as befits an Anglo-Irish novel transformed through the French art of mime.
    The direction Kevin Kling chose for his Gulliver script—a meditation on the relationship between the slightly mad stay-at-home Anglican cleric Swift and his yearning, wondering alter ego Gulliver, as well as an interior drama of mental instability and breakdown—produced a somewhat awkward stage object. Nevertheless, as directed by Dominique Serrand, it’s enchanting theater: the Jeune Lune stage opens into magnificent space, the simple machinery should make the Guthrie grit its teeth in envy, and the acting company is, as always, splendid—Vincent Gracieux has never been better, Luverne Seifert plays the young Swift as a drunken Irish poet, and Nathan Keepers is a marvel of naive clarity as the young Gulliver.
    We’re sorry that most of you have missed Shawn McConneloug and Her Orchestra in “Palace of Dreams.” Loosely strung on a narrative cord of film clips that exploit some of the cinema’s most outrageous dance clichés, Palace consisted of more than a dozen acts that set the performers tapping, slithering, leaping and tangoing horizontally in a magnificently inappropriate variety of costumes. McConneloug is one of the Twin Cities’ most inventive and irreverent choreographers and her orchestra, the all-round best dance/performance troupe we’ve seen, are perfectly qualified to trash movie clichés from World War II aviators to “Hawaiian” kitsch. The performers gave their mighty all to this collective enterprise, without a weak link, but we must mention Susan Scalf, a living, breathing Betty Boop whose Fin Lady reduced us to helpless jelly, and Jennifer Baldwin Peden, a luscious soprano. Subtitled “A 21st Century Vaudeville,” “Palace” had the breakneck energy and variety of an old-time vaudeville show.
    At times it seems as if “Yi-Yi” will never end, but this Taiwanese film has a seriousness and a quiet poetry that we haven’t seen in film since “Magnolia.” Director and screenwriter Edward Yang tells the story of an extended Taiwanese family grappling with imminent death—of a beloved grandmother and of their own hopes and dreams—and such is the subtlety of the narrative that it makes perfect sense to rhyme the comatose matriarch with the weight of a sad civilization. Each family member wrestles with the obligation to talk to the grandmother daily to keep her in touch with this life, but circumstances stifle any personal utterance; one person reads the newspaper to her, another recites lessons, another shirks altogether. But a tangible Taipei is also the subject of the film: the city is always there. “Yi-Yi” shows us a Tapei and a Tokyo that are lost to anomie and quiet despair in the wake of U.S.-style capitalism, whose emblem is the Golden Arches. Characters are trapped in postmodern glass cubicles refracted through other glass cubicles. If a shadow hangs over Taiwan it must be at least partly the mainland, but there is no mention of the other China here, although a report on the United States persecution of Los Alamos scientist Wen-Ho Lee comes over the radio.
    Recent cinema has exploited the charm of magical child actors, and in Yi-Yi an enchanting Jonathan Chan plays Yang-Yang, the young son of the family (other members are called Li-Li, Ting-Ting, Yun-Yun): he has the same name as the director and thus serves as our point of identification in the film.
    The boy is obsessed with the partiality of vision, and the film also seems torn between the opposing claims of repetition and renewal, reflected in the husband’s firm’s indecision about whether to go with the work of a creative Japanese computer designer, Ota, or the work of a Taiwanese computer clone, Ato.
    “Amores Perros,” a Mexican film by Alejandro González Iñarritu, is a violent entry in the Quentin Tarantino sweepstakes that feels painted in harsh acrylic colors. But although it’s gritty and violent and loops through time like “Pulp Fiction” (a car crash links the three stories as first car, second car and onlooker), it is much more socially expansive and reflective in its embrace. The three stories are not related in intricate ways, as far as we can tell, but an obvious connection becomes apparent if you read the title not as the sardonic Love’s a Bitch (as American distributors would have it) but as the more literal Love Is a Dog.
    Nothing in the premise of Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” requires him to tell the story backwards, or does it? The film is exciting but hard to think through. A tough, sleazy insurance investigator (Guy Pearce) suffers short-term memory loss. Like an Alzheimer’s patient or a goldfish, he has no short-term memory and won’t remember anything by the time he completes his circuit of the bowl. One can imagine such a film moving toward its end in a perfectly linear fashion. Instead, Nolan chooses to punctuate the nihilism of such subjectivity through a major sequence of scenes that move backwards in time and some other floating scenes in muted color. To accentuate this rupture, Pearce’s body is overwritten with ornate tattoos that remind him of the crucial clues driving his investigation, and his body becomes cleaner as the film progresses backward to earlier times. The technique works well: The viewer gets both the abrupt shock of incoherence and an accomplished narrative line. The ending seemed random, however, and the suggestion of an alternate way of understanding things seemed to be overloading a good thing.
    “With a Friend Like Harry,” another French thriller in a Hitchcock vein, is creepily effective. At a road-stop washroom, old schoolmates Michel and Harry meet by accident after many years. Harry needs no reminding: His memories of Michel are fresh and strong, and he cherishes a boundless regard for Michel’s (almost nonexistent) literary talent. Camera work, rural setting and three more enchanting children combine to tighten the screws although—as in much Hitchcock—we’re never in doubt about the villain.
    “Spy Kids” is a sometimes entertaining feature by Robert Rodriguez, who (you should remember because you are endlessly told) in 1992 made “El Mariachi” for $7,000. In her Nation review of “Spy Kids,” H. Ruby Rich advanced the interesting notion that the film might be a subtle example of sincere Latino filmmaking folded into a mainstream Hollywood format (after all, the hero’s name is Gregorio Cortez). Unfortunately, such a sense of things only flickers at moments, and the film reflects more Tim Burton than Hispanic social reality. The kids, played by Alex Vega and Daryl Sabara, are fine, and Alan Cuming, evoking Pee Wee Herman, makes a delightful supposed villain.
    “The Dish” is a tepid feel-good comedy about Australia’s moment of glory when Ozzies helped the United States conquer space. Only not really—what they did was build a relay station Down Under for video signals from the moon—and the story and characters are so mild as to be almost nonexistent.
    We remember playwright S. N. Behrman as a charming name from the past, but after sitting through Park Square’s very competent revival of his comedy, “Biography,” we wondered why. Comedy works through the energy of surprises and unexpected turns and they mostly weren’t present in this weak script—a star vehicle without its star (it was written for the luminous actress Ina Claire). Under Wendy Lehr’s direction Linda Kelsey did a creditable job as a scandalously free-loving portrait painter who threatens a stuffy senator’s political career, but she’s just not grand enough to hold the evening together. The production did, however, include fine performances by two Stephens: D’Ambrose as a stiffly virtuous American and Houtz as an amiable Mitteleuropean composer.
    We were disappointed in the Guthrie Lab’s production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “In the Blood,” mainly because we so admired her earlier “America Play” and her screenplay for Spike Lee’s “Girl 6.” “Blood” has strong early scenes and excellent performances, and it took us a while to conclude that there was no idea driving the script, just a situation: A homeless woman brings up her children under a freeway, and all the helping figures to whom she turns exploit her for their own ends. This should have been a vivid illustration of the phrase “poverty pimp,” but the play’s focus shifts from race and homelessness to the plight of the single welfare mother to the abjection and mental instability of this particular woman without carrying a strong narrative through any of these areas. Parks calls her play a contemporary adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter,” interesting but not particularly relevant.
    Illusion Theater’s “Laramie Project” tells the story of director Moisés Kaufman’s attempt to dramatize Matthew Shepard’s brutal murder at the hands of two local toughs, but although well directed by Michael Robins, the script collapses in self-indulgent neutrality. In the interest of “healing” the Laramie community, the roots of murderous homophobia are never even touched. Illusion’s cast, especially Topher W. Brattain, Beth Gilleland, and Terry Hempleman, were wonderful as was Adam Granger’s live guitar accompaniment.
    We thoroughly enjoyed the Royal National Theatre’s “Hamlet,” a silkily stylish production that careened at breakneck pace through the play, eliminating that braggart Fortinbras and making the Danish Prince an ordinary bloke you might hoist a few jars with. However, Steven Epp’s brilliantly strange characterization in last year’s Jeune Lune production remains the millennium’s definitive characterization, so far.