"small metal objects' at Live Arts Festival

The intimate theater of the outdoors work small metal objects, an Australian import of the Back to Back to Back Theater Company and its director Bruce Gladwin, enjoyed a justifiably prominent presence in the Live Arts Festival. With the skillful employment of headphones for each audience member who sat in bleachers on a Penn campus green, we were introduced to an ordinary cityscape and then an evolving conversation, the origins of which had to be visually discerned among passing pedestrians. Only eventually did a four-member cast appear before us on the sidewalks and street.

Two characters, Steve and Gary (Sonia Teuben and Simon Laherty, actors who might be perceived as mentally challenged), share an intimacy of friendship that reveals their troubled isolation and loneliness— an aspect of their "otherness" that's projected to the audience. Soon they are interrupted by a lawyer (Jim Russell) anxiously seeking them out to score drugs— a man unable to empathize or feel their "otherness." As Gary, the slighter of the two characters, movingly expresses his desire to be "a whole person" and insists on his need at that moment simply to be quiet and stationary, the frantic lawyer, faced with Steve's protective fidelity of his mate, calls in reinforcements from his psychologist friend Caroline (Genevieve Picot), who abuses every therapeutic strategy to persuade Gary to accede to the drug deal.

The drama presents the authority of money and class confronting the immutability of human dignity and self-respect. The headphone conversations are accompanied by a sound design that doesn't overwhelm but subtly reinforces the dramas before us.

As the work developed, we also had to assimilate the street theater of passing pedestrians, a few of them somewhat aware of but most oblivious to the action, such as the Parking Authority matron obsessed with her meter reading. Our concentration on the central drama was distracted by the randomly imposed scenes before us; and the marginal nature of the lives in the play was heightened by their apparent invisibility to others on the street and sidewalks. As the play resolved itself, our distance from the characters and the street scene clutter both dissolved, as we betook something beautiful and unique that had unfolded before us.