Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival

At first, you don’t know what to expect from A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Why, for example, are we watching dozens of tennis balls flying out of an automatic machine during the preshow? But American director Daniel Fish delivers on the promise of the title. Soon four actors enter wearing headsets, and one by one proceed to narrate audio-recordings from the writings of David Foster Wallace. These anecdotes offer an arresting range of topics, from an account of a luxury cruise, to a profile of a men’s room attendant in a five-star hotel, to a boy marking his 13th birthday and adolescent awakening, to the biography of athlete Tracy Austin (hence the tennis balls).

What makes these richly detailed anecdotes so compelling is not only their insightful substance, but also the quirky, detached, bemused manner in which they are narrated. It’s an unusual marriage of form and content, one that evokes the tradition of monologue artists Spalding Gray and Wallace Shawn.

Asynchronic history

O Jardim, Brazil’s touching Portuguese-language offering, written and directed by Leonardo Moreira, features another tantalizing preshow. Upon entering, you see ensemble members seated on, or circling around, dozens of boxes. Soon they configure the playing space into three separate areas, stacking rows of boxes as dividers. The audience, now divided into three sections, will watch three separate scenes, which rotate from one playing area to the next. The first features a breakup of a marriage; the second, 30 years later, features two daughters caring for their senile father (the husband of the previous scene); the third features the daughter of one of those previous sisters selling the family home.

What unifies the three fragmented scenes of one family over three generations is the garden in which they take place and the element of shared memory. “We would like to collect the past in scraps of paper,” one character says. In each scene, characters sift through contents of these boxes, examining memorabilia that evoke happier memories. Some of the audience will not see these scenes in chronological order, making this memory play even more evocative, not to mention Chekhovian (yes, there’s a mention of a cherry orchard). (Director Moreira employs the effective theatrical device of simultaneous playing spaces that we saw earlier this season in Ivo van Hove’s provocative Scenes from a Marriage).

Watching this moving family montage, we’re reminded of the quote from Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie: “Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart.”

Sassy satire

Like the aforementioned productions, Mariano Pensotti’s Spanish-language Cineastas offers multiple story lines, this time, cinematic. Everyone in Buenos Aires seems to be making a movie — at least that’s the impression you get from this film-obsessed ensemble. There’s Nadia, who is making a film about desaparecidos (the politically oppressed “disappeared ones”) while searching in real life for her father. There’s Lucas, a McDonald’s worker, who steals money from his employer to make an anti-corporate film. In it, his protagonist is kidnapped and forced to dress up as Ronald McDonald and eat cold hamburgers. There’s Mariela, whose film on the Soviet Union leads her (in real life) to seek out her roots in her grandparents’ remote Russian village. Finally, there’s Gabriel, who has only months to live and is filming all the objects in his life that have meaning. (His conclusion? Life doesn’t have any.)

Despite the downer theme of this last film, Cineastas is a smart, sassy satire on filmmaking and the blurring distinction between art and life. “Everything we watch in film is conditioned by what we’ve seen before,” says one character. We watch the ensemble, playing multiple roles, struggle with their personal lives on the lower floor of this multi-level set, while on the upper floor the cameras roll on fragments from their respective films. “Having two lives is more balanced than one,” confesses the filmmaker Gabriel. “Fiction lasts longer than lives,” says Mariela, who arrives at her grandparents’ Russian village, only to discover that it’s a movie set.

A shared message of these three productions? Whether fed through headphones, or written on scraps, or taken in snapshots, or shot on film, the stories we tell about our lives not only define us — they also outlive us.

A dysfunctional puppet show

Finally, there’s The Cardinals, the Festival’s pièce de résistance — a dysfunctional puppet show on the history of Western civilization put on by three Catholic clergymen and their Muslim stage manager. Sounds Monte Pythonesque, doesn’t it? That’s just what it is: a riotous absurdist pantomime (there’s no dialogue). Starting with Adam and Eve, the cardinals plow through the Old and New Testaments, enacting the stories with cut-out scenic elements on a puppet stage. On they race through the founding of the Church, the birth of Islam, the ensuing clash of civilizations, the Crusades, leapfrogging to the modern era, World War II, and the founding of Israel. The show lasts a mere 90 minutes, and it’s wildly hilarious, with the cardinals donning dozens of costumes over their scarlet robes. In between bits, they bicker in hushed voices with their Muslim stage manager, who at one point stops the show, takes a break, and prays. The miniature Biblical scenic cutouts (arks, deserts, palm trees, camels, etc.) are uproarious, with the cardinals’ heads bobbing in between them while Bach’s B minor Mass blasts on the stage manager’s boombox. Meanwhile, everyone gets into the act, Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike.

The Cardinals is a deliriously funny theater piece…until it’s not. The last scene features the Apocalypse, and the rug is pulled out from under an audience that has been seduced by the silliness and now finds itself facing the same frightening images of violence that we’ve been seeing on television from Paris this past week. It’s a unique piece of satirical theater, ingeniously devised by Stan’s Café, a Birmingham, UK-based theater company that should be commended for its daring and creativity.

This past month, we’ve witnessed seismic responses around the world to political and religious satire (The Interview and the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo). In the case of The Cardinals, its creators have achieved a remarkable balance of humor and insight with which to deliver their satirical message about religion, history, and, yet again, the consequences of those stories we keep telling ourselves.

Above right: Cineastas. Photo by Carlos Furman.

Above left: The Cardinals. Photo by Graeme Braidwood.