Pig Iron's 'Love Unpunished'

Waiting to be mugged (by Bush & Co.)

ROBERT ZALLER

Pig Iron Theatre Company has concluded its tenth anniversary season with Love Unpunished, which it describes as “a dance-theatre meditation on love and grief inspired by 9/11, the war on Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina. This is a mighty mouthful, but the starkly minimalist 55-minute piece may be the most interesting work staged in Philadelphia this year.

It consists, mostly, of nine performers— a community of the damned— going up and down a staircase on Mimi Lien’s set. The stairs represent, of course, those of the World Trade Center towers, but also, as the performers reverse direction, the rising floodwaters of Katrina. To escape fire and descend into flood: the sense of universal calamity suggested by this almost Biblical predicament defines the unseen world of danger that surrounds the players and blocks their escape. It also suggests, by extension, the wider circle of victimization spread by the Iraq war, and thus asks us to consider the cycle of violence triggered by 9/11.

Ostensibly, we are looking at people ordered to leave a building; notionally, that building represents the towers and those immolated there on 9/11. But are the victims also, in some sense, perpetrators? By collapsing into a single image both the catastrophes we have suffered and the one we have inflicted, Love Unpunished invites us to consider the multifaceted tragedy we have experienced over the past five years, and the moral confusion into which we have plunged.

There will be some delay

The piece begins in an almost ordinary rhythm. A young woman descends casually, a cup of coffee in hand. Others, too, begin their descent saunteringly, as if interrupted in their routines by a fire drill; one carries a laptop. Normal life meanwhile continues simultaneously; a couple ascends toward a restaurant on an upper floor, only to be told by a smiling waitress that there will be some delay. The same people reappear, still unhurried, in a feedback loop.

Gradually, however, confusion and panic set in. There is a landing, upon which they stagger, stumble and fall, as on a listing ship: It is like a sudden interruption in an even beat, the syncope that indicates the onset of a fatal heart attack. But no one does die, at least yet. People get up, and fall again, still more violently. Or, they get up and resume their round of the staircase, as if nothing had happened or time had simply been reversed.

There is, in fact, no clear demarcation between past and present, between the disaster of fire and that of water (some people, finding their downward passage blocked, go back up the stairs— a beat with a counterbeat set against it). Snippets of dialogue are exchanged, people try to communicate by cell phone, good-humored shrugs at the inconveniences of daily life alternate with sudden cries of fear and surprise.

Two thugs in caricature masks, broadly suggesting Bush and Nixon, set upon one hapless and isolated “passenger” and beat him senseless. One presumes this is the reference to the mugging of Iraq; it is, however, dramatically gratuitous, the one discordant note in an otherwise perfect choreography of dread.

One false step

Iraq is certainly a worthy subject; few wars have been cloaked in such deliberate anonymity. But, while it is possible to depict an Everyman or Everywoman as the generic victims of modern disaster, it will not do to suggest an Everywhere. The stairs and the landing are grimly site-specific; they anchor the piece, and shifting the ground, even momentarily, is a false step.

That, however, is a minor quibble. There is a minimalist spareness and eloquence to what does not, at first, seem anything like a movement piece, but which builds in power and meaning through subtly varied and broken repetition until it reveals its full horror as a dance of the dead. The Tower staircases constitute an icon of our collective unconscious now, as the decks of the Titanic were for an earlier generation. By blending them (Katrina standing in, as it were, for the iceberg), director Dan Rothenberg and choreographer David Brick have touched the deepest wound in our modern psyche, the sense of exposure to arbitrary calamity in a world where no god looks on and no one, however innocent, is safe. It is the world we have created, compounding the inevitable disasters of nature with those of our own making, and as little in control of one as the other. That is to say, it is the world of the absurd. But Didi and Gogo, in Waiting for Godot, have the luxury of another day, and therefore of hope. Modern man waits simply for his turn to be mugged.

A dignified thetrical elegy

LEWIS WHITTINGTON

After seeing network TV compete for 9/11 remembrance dollars in the name of national grief and resisting CNN’s internet ‘real time’ of that day, taking in Pig Iron Theatre’s work Love Unpunished on this past September 11 was a dubious outing. It made the day even more surreal. You questioned the taste of a dance-theater work that takes place on the stairwells of the World Trade Center where people were trapped and annihilated.

Quietly, Love Unpunished is a visually arresting work that allows us to reflect, not react, to the profound events of the day. It reminded me of W.H. Auden’s poetic meditations during World War II. The WTC stairwell becomes a twilight zone that warps time, dimension and senses for the waiters, traders, custodians, businesspeople, messengers and fireman attempting to move somewhere. Repetitious sequences, each slightly altered, piece together private lives, while time-lapse sequences that compress profound events.

Director Dan Rothenberg and choreographer David Brick (co-artistic director of Headlong Dance Theatre) go for more than cinematic platitudes about life and death, instead essaying a communal character study of dignity, reason, humanity and courage in the face of death. Brick’s movement, which suggests moments of being punched trough another dimension, is reminiscent of Japanese Butoh, a minimalist style developed in the aftermath of nuclear carnage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The lighting, sound and production designs were all first-rate and avoided any shocking depictions. The cast of ten handled difficult material with precision and dignity. This is a brave, disquieting and eloquent statement by Pig Iron Theatre Company.