Trying to see every play in January is a fool’s errand. The various experimental-theatre festivals all happen at once. Even if you run from pillar to post, you’ll miss something—some dreamy chamber opera, or thoughtful monologue, or naughty drag cabaret that mashes up Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” with the Smiths’ album “The Queen Is Dead.” (Salty Brine’s punchy little sparkler at Joe’s Pub, “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” plays through January 20th.) Under the Radar alone contains more than two dozen offerings, from pieces that are still in development to robust touring productions. All you can really do is fling yourself into the maelstrom and hope that when the waves wash you to shore you’re still clinging to some shred of meaning.
The New Yorker’s co-theatre critic, Vinson Cunningham, and I chatted recently about four shows that we both saw. All were projects that explored forms of instability: the shakiness of history, of human endeavors, and of time itself. We talked, and sometimes disagreed, about the artists’ tactics, but the four pieces each led us back to similar preoccupations with language, with intelligibility, with the performer’s voice, and with what lies beyond our comprehension. —Helen Shaw
Helen Shaw
One thing Under the Radar usually promises is international programming. The festival offers a great, big lamplight view of what’s going on in experimental theatre. So Under the Radar programmed this U.K. production from the Royal Court Theatre, Jasmine Lee-Jones’s “seven methods of killing kylie jenner,” which was supposed to come a year ago, but then the 2022 festival was cancelled because of COVID. Now it’s finally here.
The show is two girls in a room. One of them (Leanne Henlon) has posted something online; she is enraged by a news article about Kylie Jenner being a self-made billionaire, and she has tweeted some homicidal fantasies. Her friend (Tia Bannon) has shown up to persuade her to take the tweets down.
What did you think? Did you like it?
Vinson Cunningham
Keeping with the theme of internationality, what I loved about it was its language and its diasporic view of what the Internet is. “jenner” gives an international view of this pidgin that we’ve all put together by living online; the performers talk both through words and through images—rendering, almost sculpturally, all those memes that we’ve become accustomed to. I love Black British slang because of its reliance on West Indian slang. It’s such a rich and, I think, beautifully verbal play. And because it has so much to do with speech codes, and the question of who can say what (and what can get you in trouble online), I just thought it was wonderful to hear how things that you think of as homegrown travel across the world and come back.
Helen Shaw
The characters sometimes talk in person; they sometimes are in the “T.L.,”’ or the timeline of the Twitter feed, where the Internet-speak is so dense it’s as though you’re listening to opera. You’re hearing a language which you’re just close enough to that you can understand what’s being said, but certain subtleties of communication are lost.
And, as in opera, I wanted supertitles! Internet lingo is born out of the way writing looks—it’s full of anagrams, of puns, of distorted spelling, of initialism. So I wanted to see it! One big problem I had with the production is that it was so amplified and echoing and distorted, particularly in the online scenes, that I sometimes couldn’t hear the language at all because it was lost in reverb.
Vinson Cunningham
Maybe we’re different on that—I liked that something familiar to me on the page felt strange in real life, especially because there’s two levels of the play: the in-person in this room, and one of them basically performing online. As the two in the room get angrier at one another, their language gets more and more Internet-derived, lots of TBH (“to be honest”) and things like that. They lack the language for true confrontation and the language that friendship usually teaches us, so they go more and more into this other language. They’re using a mode of argument that works in one place and trying to apply it IRL.
Helen Shaw
If I were a less selfish audience member, I would be excited by the way incomprehension is also a part of online discourse. Lee-Jones is deliberately making that point: people watching online conversations play out don’t always understand them, but they weigh in anyway. But I am selfish. I want to be able to understand every line. I want to be able to write it in my little notebook, so I can look at it later!
So let’s talk about “Moby Dick” by Yngvild Aspeli’s French-Norwegian puppet company Plexus Polaire. This one was a hit. My audience was packed. It was in a huge theatre, the Skirball Center at N.Y.U., and it felt totally full! Do you have a relationship with this book? Is this something where you said, “Ah, yes, my old friend”?
Vinson Cunningham
I do love Melville, and I love this book. And, for that reason, the thing that sort of jarred me was that it doesn’t start with “call me Ishmael”! Instead, it starts with a collage of other lines. A murmuring-singing-moaning chorus comes out, and they sing other lines from the book—and I was like, “Are they gonna call him Ishmael? Is it gonna be a drizzly November in this man’s soul or not?” That was my first worry, which was quickly allayed, but I still think, You have to start there.
Helen Shaw
Well, and when our guy does come out, he is dressed as Where’s Waldo Goes to Williamsburg: little woollen beanie, cute cuffed pants. Everything else is very strange and otherworldly—the stage is muffled in what looks like planes of black velvet, and the puppets have these strange, harsh faces. But then Ishmael himself is just . . . Caleb from Starbucks.
Vinson Cunningham
We should say that in this production, Ishmael is the only person who presents him- or herself as a human presence. Everybody else is a matter of puppets and projections. Ahab is presented as one of two puppets—one upstage, on a platform, whom we’re supposed to understand as being seen from farther away, and the second when he’s downstage, where he’s a much larger puppet, animated by more than one person. And all the other shipmates, Queequeg and everybody else, are also being represented by puppets.
Helen Shaw
By playing with proportions, they make the stage feel deep. They’re often asking you to look at the stage as though you’re looking with a bird’s-eye view. You see whaling sequences from above; you see the ship from above. When people fall overboard, you see tiny figures from what feels like a very great distance. That illusion of depth I found exciting—the way they made the reach of the stage feel like the bottomlessness of the ocean. The very first puppet that you see is a school of glittering white fish that shimmer and quiver for an instant, and then they snatch themselves away into the darkness. Whales, shmales—that, for me, was the most animal and mysterious moment of the whole ninety minutes.
Still, as intensely beautiful as the production was, I’m not sure I spent a lot of the time thinking about the inhuman “unknown,” even though Ishmael tells us that’s what it’s all about.
Vinson Cunningham
In Melville, you’re always wondering about the operator behind the darkness—is someone moving what I’m seeing? And here, interestingly, some of that mystery is taken out of the text and put into the process of the playwright. The mechanics of the puppetry become the mystery—