Warning: This blog has what would be commercial interruptions—if they were paid for.
For me, Minnesota’s style of theater is hopelessly entangled with Minnesota’s music scene.
My favorite night in the theater last year was rock and roll in an old house. The show was Peter Wolf Crier’s
This Is Not For You, an odd mix of cd release event, play, dance, storytelling, and multi-media mash-up that ran for three weeks in an otherwise empty house on an unappealing stretch of Seventh Avenue in St. Paul, a part of town about which the best thing you can say is that it’s on the way to the airport.
Like Jethro Tull or Molly Hatchet,
Peter Wolf Crier is a band whose name would suggest it’s a single person. It’s two people, Peter Pisano and Brian Moen. Their music is haunting lo-fi —guitar, drums, keyboards, echoing harmonies—with a lost, wintery sound that reminds me a little of Bon Iver.
Inter-Be is the name of the cd and you can hear it all streaming for free or buy it as a download from their
website. There’s also a press section on the site with detailed reviews of the event and the cd, which was chosen as one of the best releases of 2009 by City Pages.
The event was developed as an ensemble piece, I believe, under the direction of Jeremy Catterton of
Lion Lays With Lamb, whose production of
The Black Arts is currently being produced at the Guthrie as part of their
Singled Out festival of work by emerging artists.
Catterton also directed a production of another musical group’s multi-media theatrical event,
Idigaragua, featuring the music of
Fort Wilson Riot, which played to strong reviews at Bedlam Theatre in 2007. (I missed
Idigaragua, but I don’t intend to miss
The Black Arts, described as “inspired by a new wave of 'hard rock' magicians.")
A committed dis-enthusiast at heart
The night I saw This Is Not For You I went home and raved at the rest of my family that they had to see it. This is not like me. I’m not what you’d characterize as an “enthusiast,” generally speaking, and I’m specifically not enthusiastic about most experimental stuff and most musical theater. I realize those are pretty broad categories of dislike, but I actually have an even larger list of types of theater I don’t much care for, big chunks of stuff that other people just love, and that I cannot sit still for. I’m really more of a “disenthusiast” at heart.
I have what I call The Big House theory of theater. The world of theater is like a Big House, I like to say (smoke rising from the rain of pipe ash upon my sweater, World’s Best Dad mug of scotch in hand). There are many rooms in the house, many I will not enter, a few I don’t mind visiting for a bath or a sandwich, but only a couple where I’m really going to enjoy spending long periods of time. I think there are a lot of people just like me, but with a totally different set of rooms.
So it’s a good thing that it’s a BIG house.
I was really happy in the
This Is Not For You house. It turned out to be an entire house inside one of my rooms, an idea which would have been very at home in the world of the play.
The experience was something like finding yourself walking through music videos for a bunch of your favorite songs you’ve never heard before in an alternate universe where music videos are actually entertaining and intelligent. There were soap bubbles and feeds from tiny video cameras and secret rooms explored by candlelight and actors playing percussion by slamming the doors of kitchen cabinets. Parts of some songs drifted in from other rooms. For one number the floor underfoot was the drums, played up to the audience on the ceiling of the room below.
Rock scene theater
To me, there’s always seemed to be an energizing leakage from the rock scene in the Twin Cities into the theater scene. And not only in the instances where the two have literally combined—Catterton’s work with Peter Wolf Crier and Fort Wilson Riot, or Stephen Dietz’s
work with Rue Nouveau,
Chan Poling’s (the Suburbs and The New Standards) music for Jeune Lune, or
Workhaus Collective’s God Save Gertrude, Deborah Stein’s punk-opera retelling of
Hamlet, and
Music Lovers, a romantic comedy by Alan Berks, set in the Twin Cities music scene—but also in looser, more spiritual associations.
Balls, for example, Leslie Ball’s long-running cabaret of theatrical possibilities has a strong rock and roll sensibility, encouraging loose, loud, and unfiltered performance. So does
Patrick’s Cabaret. And nearly everything that happens at
Bedlam Theatre or
Bryant Lake Bowl. Until Bedlam came along I would have said Bryant Lake Bowl was a slam dunk as the
First Avenue of Twin Cities theater, but now I think they’re going to have to shoot it out.
Thirst Theater returns to Joe’s Garage in Minneapolis this month for its eighth round. (Conflict of interest alert: I work with Thirst.) The Thirst aesthetic is straight-out rock in spirit, with the playwrights encouraged to put no more than four hours of writing (with no outside hands on their work, no “development,” or drafts for approval, or director’s input), and the actors given only four hours of rehearsal before they have to perform for an audience, or really practically in the audience’s lap.
This, I believe, is precisely the same level of preparation that went into a performance by The Replacements, with only slightly less drinking.
The whole small theater scene has in common with the local music scene a lo-fi, DIY quality, a sense that it’s not even about making it to another level anymore, only about whatever beautiful thing can happen here tonight for whoever shows up. As Lou Reed said, “Despite all the amputations she could dance to a rock and roll station-- and it was alriiiiight.”
If you’d like to do some mock-empirical investigation of what I’m talking about, attend an episode of Jim Walsh’s delightful
“Mad Ripple Friday Night Hootenanny,” an ongoing gig where great local musicians try out new stuff, banter, and have a good time together, then take in a late show at Bedlam or Bryant Lake Bowl. After each event, have some drinks and hang around with the performers. I know it’s going to make for a long night, but this is the kind of thing you have to do for science.
Periodically, throughout the evening, close your eyes and soak up the feeling. Try to do it randomly, early as well as late, and not just when you’re reeling.
You will be persuaded that the music scene and the theater scene are some kind of twins, fraternal probably, but not the creepy ones who dress alike. Or if you’re not convinced, as Lou would say, it’ll be alriiiiiight.
Fabulous invalid twins
In an earlier post I talked about the sense the Twin Cities music and theater scenes both shared for a while, that maybe this was the best place to be. I don’t believe it was accidental that they shared that feeling at the same time. If that feeling comes again, I think it will be to both scenes again.
It’s a commonplace that the music industry and the theater (hah!) industry are both in deep trouble. Theater is The Fabulous Invalid after all, forever dying and still around, a fate music will probably come to share, being, like theater, one of the most best things in the world that people don’t believe they should pay for.
So possibly that kind of feeling will only come again to one person at a time, or a few, or a few hundred, whoever shows up some night, some place, when a beautiful thing happens in spite of everything that can be done to discourage it.
In closing, I’m going to put on
The Tropicals Live At The Jungle. The Tropicals were playwright Craig Wright and actor Peter Lawton; The Jungle was The Jungle Theater. It’s beautiful stuff that not nearly enough people have heard (available from iTunes at a very reasonable price).
It was one of those nights.
