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Knight moves
The UnPOSSESSED, The Art of Sacrifice
BY CAROLYN CLAY

The Don Quixote of Stacy Klein’s The UnPOSSESSED brandishes a shield and a broom. The committed founder of Double Edge Theatre is likewise a bit of a throwback: a fierce disciple of Polish stage visionary Jerzy Grotowski in an age when imagistic theater has gone high-tech. Watching her athletic poor-theater adventure in surrealism in the wake of Robert Lepage is like meeting someone who still makes her own clothes. I wonder: 30 years ago, would I have found Klein’s rigorous, ritualistic brand of theater profound rather than retro? But rooted in old-fashioned avant-garde though it may be, The UnPOSSESSED, a 400th-anniversary riff on Don Quixote seen through the smoke of September 11, strikes a whimsical and melancholy chord that echoes Beckett as much as Cervantes.

Klein’s Double Edge Theatre, which made a homecoming stop in Cambridge last week (at Zero Arrow Theatre, courtesy of the American Repertory Theatre and CRASHarts), began life in Allston in the early 1980s. First it was a feminist troupe and then, as evinced by its opaque but compelling Song Trilogy, an intrepid explorer of the Jewish Diaspora. A decade ago, the troupe migrated to an Ashfield farm, where it could do its uncompromising work in more economically feasible environs. It has carried on its theater explorations there, sometimes in collaboration with Eastern European artists, including Wlodzimierz Staniewski’s Gardzienice Theatre Project.

Another influence of the last 10 years has been Klein’s personal and artistic partner Carlos Uriona, who brings to the table his experience in the street theater of Argentina, including shadow puppetry and circus technique. Uriona plays Don Quixote as a mad yet admirable artist done up like a grizzled Snoopy-as-the-Red-Baron to center an episodic collage drawn from Cervantes and asserting the power of dream, however hopeless, in a nightmarish world. Klein has said that, in the aftermath of September 11, she came to see herself as quixotic, perhaps even fanatical, and The UnPOSSESSED might be viewed as a wry yet reverent validation of the artistic quest. Truth to tell, the inventive work is more interesting for what it says about Double Edge, which continues to create its collaborative works of coalescing imagery, with the actor at their centers, than for what it says about Don Quixote, which isn’t much that hasn’t been more incisively articulated before.

But Double Edge is not about articulation; it’s about a visceral, subconscious journey, in this case piggybacked on the quest of Cervantes’s brave, deluded, self-appointed knight errant. The audience for The UnPOSSESSED is kept milling in the lobby until the piece begins, and the image it confronts upon entrance is one of the most arresting of the short evening: dangling in air, Matthew Glassman’s Sancho Panza clings to a fabric trapeze as, beneath him, two giant figures revolve on hidden ladders, majestically moving billowing flags. They are the human windmills against which our hero, emerging hand first from beneath a small mountain of books, will tilt.

Throughout The UnPOSSESSED, Klein and company utilize crude but effective physical motifs: a sort of aerial ballet performed on the fabric trapezes, actors rolling da Vinci–like across the stage in what is apparently a round metal cow trough turned on its side — and at one point dancing around its narrow edge. A frustrated Quixote informs Sancho and his partners that they look "ridiculous," but in fact the effect is magical, one of a number of seemingly effortless yet delicate feats in a work that floats and flows, however exposed its mechanics, as the proficient performers skim the stage on their wheeled ladders, doing double duty as musicians playing Justin Handley’s klezmer-influenced score on instruments that include mandolin, violin, guitar, cello, and accordion.

Uriona and Glassman, a muscular and cajoling Sancho, are formidable athletes as well as actors who bring a Beckettesque quarrelsomeness and tenderness to their connection. (This is most striking when they share a raw onion, recalling Estragon and his carrots.) If there is a pure Cervantes theme to the work, it is the infusion of Quixote into Sancho, who in Glassman’s charming rendition thrashes on his trapeze crucible toward a kind of bravery. The other four actors also prove personable, versatile, and vulnerable. Since leaving Allston to take on Western Massachusetts, Eastern Europe, and, last fall, New York’s La MaMa Annex, where The UnPOSSESSED was enthusiastically received, Double Edge has grown in accessibility and skill while remaining connected to its Grotowski-nurtured roots. It’s nice these folks are able to visit, even if they can’t afford to live here.

Knights also figure in Anthony Clarvoe’s championship-chess-world-set pushy-parent drama The Art of Sacrifice, which is in its world premiere at Lowell’s Merrimack Repertory Theatre (through December 4) — and not just as figures on the chessboard. "You’re a warrior in the cause of logic and beauty. . . . A wandering knight, that’s you," declares irascible father Will to son Aron, an International Grandmaster to whom his dad has been force-feeding chess since he showed himself a prodigy at three. But the only thing Clarvoe tilts at in this tepid two-hander are clichés — including the title revelation that those who try to hold on to all their chess pieces, or to the meaningful minutiae of their lives, will fall to those who are willing to pare away all but winning.

Clarvoe is the author of Ambition Facing West, a complex three-generational immigrant drama based on his own family’s journey from a Croatia rooted in history to an America questing toward the future. Following its 1997 premiere at Trinity Repertory Company, the play won the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding New Script. The Art of Sacrifice also examines the cost of ambition but with less layering, its warring father and son wanting to blame each other for instigating the feral drive to which their normal lives have been sacrificed.

The son, a ruthless but resentful chess geek who spent his youth hoarding Chex Mix in old trophies because his father wouldn’t let him off the board-game battlefield long enough to eat, feels he was pushed. The father maintains that the son, whose talent was "an animal" and whose tantrums could be quelled only by chess, demanded to be honed. Pointing Aron toward his manifest destiny, Will says, drove away Will’s wife and less talented son and forced him into monster duty on the chess circuit, from which he was eventually banned for life. The old man has framed that chastisement and keeps it among his son’s many trophies in the otherwise sparse den (the chess table set up under a phalanx of harsh lights, it looks less like a parlor than an operating chamber) that serves as a shrine to their mutual obsession.

The Art of Sacrifice is not badly written. It has amusingly caustic moments and dips a foot into the conflicting currents stirred up by the deaths — real or imagined — of fathers. But we’ve heard this conversation too many times before. Moreover, at MRT, in a mostly static staging helmed by artistic director Charles Towers, whatever emotional current might have charged the drama had its plug pulled by unfortunate circumstance: one of the play’s two actors had to be replaced at the last minute. Jeremiah Wiggins plays Aron with a wiry quickness that suggests both a sharp mind and arrested development. But Nesbitt Blaisdell, a Broadway veteran who came late to the role of the taskmaster dad who treats his son’s trophies more lovingly than he does his son, is too tied to his script to give an invested performance. It hardly matters. This is ambition facing its own navel, and the view is overly familiar.


Issue Date: Novemebr 25 - December 1, 2005
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