Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War

Produced by The Mad Ones
Text by Marc Bovino & Joe Curnutte
Co-Conceived & Directed by Lila Neugebauer
Co-Created by the Ensemble (Joe Curnutte, Marc Bovino, Stephanie Wright Thompson & Michael Dalto)

January 5-21, 2012

The New Ohio Theatre
154 Christopher Street, Ste. 1E, NYC

I finally made it to The Mad Ones’ multi-award-winning, unanimously acclaimed Samuel & Alasdair: A Personal History of the Robot War after missing it in its debut run two years ago at my supplemental living room, The Brick. “Finally” is a tricky term, though, for the endless and displaced motion of time in this play.

We’re in a small radio station in an ass-end Soviet town in…probably this year. In the 1950s of the play’s reality, killer robots from beneath the earth wiped out North America — a cold-war B-movie standby of paranoia over rampant technology and alien influence — so democracy didn’t flourish but instead totalitarianism and its subjects hung on.

The play’s four protagonists and only actors — a smoov announcer, resident science-dweeb, honky-tonk chanteuse and singing communist cowboy — deliver an overnight broadcast and dramatize the story of the play’s title, a modern fable of a mainstreet love-triangle between two American Midwestern brothers and the girl next door. In a world where the USSR rather than the US emerged triumphant (or at least emerged), the trappings of midcentury Yankee culture are mythologized like we do the Old West (and that implicit conceptual pun is probably intended), and parts of the radio-play are delivered in note-perfect noir-detective or indeed western-shootout verbal mode; a deployment of genre drag played not with the kind of arch-snark I usually devour but as a poignant, almost devotional homage.

We get eerie hints that things aren’t going so well in what’s left of the world, and the lights and power waver at several times during the performance; the Samuel & Alasdair story is interspersed with ads for state-supported provisions that more than anything serve to maintain the faith that life goes on and each one matters, and it’s not certain if the idyllic-Midwest tale is actually repeated every night, as a kind of ritual to keep dead souls from fading.

For a production whose attention to detail is intricate — you truly feel you’re in a 1940s-surplus bunker of tech and bubble of culture, and I’d swear the walls of the New Ohio Theatre’s entire concrete-cavern space were repainted a Soviet red for the occasion — some of the most moving moments are when almost all senses cut out; a few times the station’s power (and the whole theatre’s) goes down altogether, and during one of these, the singer gets to tell her own, real, humble and enchanting story, when the lights are out and no one’s listening in.

Amidst the soap-opera being portrayed, an actual fragile, unrequited love flickers under the surface, like a candle of humanity held against the inferno of the superpower conflict and the tyranny that remained. We can’t know for sure if the killer robots ever really came or if the still-standing side simply pulled the trigger and told its people differently; we can’t know if anyone’s really left to hear the broadcast even now, or if it’s a sacred act of purpose and witness before the final end. In the echo of the ravaging 20th century, in the mirror of the two rival brothers’ battle over what they feel is love, we are left with a subtle, clever, and still devastating reflection on how important it is to persevere, and what it costs to “win.”

No dialing back: Miller in "Missing"

Bunny Lake Is Missing
January 5-14, 2011
The Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn, USA

Victims or predators in most noir fiction, women go from stock target to central concern in Bunny Lake Is Missing, a stage adaptation of the 1957 mystery bestseller and 1965 cult film that closed a well-received run this Saturday.

Set in the decades of the original story and built around an unwed mother convinced her three-year-old has disappeared from a nursery school while every authority she could appeal to thinks she’s mistaken or even deluded, the play is really a procedural on the criminalization of unconventional women, one of whom (Merriam Modell, as Evelyn Piper) wrote the original book.

Assured first-time director Ken Simon, who also adapted this version, tightens the narrative for effective clockwork tension, condensing it to about an hour of our time while moments despairingly extend or events race desperately for the protagonist.

The soundscape is a busy as the sparing set is static, with lead actor Victoria Anne Miller often alone onstage amid a chorus of voiceovers from overconfident officials or judgmental onlookers that seems like either a tightening cordon of public disapproval or the cramped echo-chamber of the mother’s own guilt. (This is complemented by Chris Chappell’s inventive and anxious score, which sounds like a needle stuck on some old movie’s lush orchestral passages and sawing a circle through the floor.)

Simon himself embodies the well-meaning certainty of the play’s socially-engineered era perceptively in his portrayal of a psychiatrist sent to assess the credibility of the woman’s claim, and Miller gives a compellingly contained yet haunted performance as a personality caught in the bind of propriety and panic faced by many a pre-liberated woman in the play’s time period.

The genre-subverting point is that no mater how the “mystery” works out, whether she’s a loving parent racing against time or a negligent too-young mother in over her head or a dangerously sick person playing out an obsessive fantasy, her dilemma as an unattached woman alone in a big city in the heyday of paternal America is largely the same.

Her fate is in the hands of a succession of males convinced they know what’s best for her (the psychiatrist; a police lieutenant; a vaguely stalkery neighbor), and her well-being is at odds with a series of competing and more acceptable females (the school’s principal; the missing child’s unseen grandmother). Her fitness as a mother and her fit in nuclear-family society are the real questions being asked in her case, and it’s telling that, even though her own mother thinks her a whore, the main thing she hurries to assure one questioner is that, “Believe me, I have no intention of becoming a career woman.”

This play was so popular it might come back, so to avoid spoilers suffice it to say that the resolution relies on some other figures of unnatural motherhood and scheming witchery as old as Western imagination. Keeping loyal to its genre conventions and leaving its cast locked in their historical moment, Bunny Lake delivers the classic satisfactions of a mystery revealed, and wisely offers no comforts in the light of what we know now.

I slept with dolls until I was about ten. A neurosis, perhaps, but the 16 years thereafter that I had nothing else regularly in my bed never did anyone much good. And when I say “dolls,” I mean I started with “Morgan,” a velour beagle based on some forgotten Hollywood canine star, then a felt Batman, and by the early grammar-school grades, an entire casting-call of those two, an airport-giftshop “Eskimo boy,” a velvet alligator, a gas-station tiger mascot, Green Giant and the Burger King, a squeaky rubber kitty, Santa Claus and sundry nursery-rhyme and muppet characters. I was a doll-nympho.

Elaborate Platonic dialogues would keep me up and put me under. I realize now I was rehearsing my storyteller destiny, but from the perspective of the time it sure seems like a forceful and futile attempt to push out the voices in my head. This, though, was better than what was still going on inside.

Nightmares were my personal HBO with no off-button from at least Age 5 to 9, and these were based in mass stories too. After a Brady Bunch rerun, I woke up babbling to my parents in terror that someone with ill intent was gonna find Marcia’s diary; burning my already open eyes was the image of a terrible, Lovecraftian tome, creased with a spiderweb of cracks and crusted with viper-like vines, bearing on my retina with the terrible weight of centuries. They had to put my head under the faucet before I’d snap out of it.

By the time I was 9-ish I’d started to have nightly mares all at around 1am, right in time to be comforted by the too-well-meaning parents with a chillout in front of a rerun of The Rifleman, an antique half-hour sit-dram about a gun-totin’ single father on the mythic Western-movie plains. Even I started to realize that this was a bit coincidental, so I got tired of the predictable psychic plot and graduated out of the nightmares, if not the doll-plays.

I’d run elaborate multi-night narratives, one involving some transoceanic trip we were all planning to take together. It got as far as piling into an imaginary aircraft, but I seemed to stall the storyline and I don’t remember us ever landing anywhere. I may have sensed they were planning to write me out of the show.

A spoiler-heavy account of how I relearned to love Spielberg with War Horse

At first I thought we’d be stuck in a rust-and-mud-colored genre painting for two-and-a-half hours, with folksy wit and hardship like Disney’s Potato Famine or somethin’. But even then that intrusive goose was a great actor, and the margin-notes of homespun wisdom were well-placed (when the mom pulls the flask away from the dad, saying “Some days are best forgotten, but not this one,” it’s an uncommonly un-Spielbergian endorsement of the oblivion of drink and the importance of forcing yourself to learn stuff).

And of course there’s no arguing with the beauty and park-statue majesty of that horse (actually at least eight different ones, but none of them were CGI so I was fooled). And even though the “training” of said equine follows a most classically Spielbergian “if at first you don’t succeed, the second time you ace it” rule, my MST3K gene was well fed by hilariously non-subtextual shots like the boy getting the horse to wear a collar by first putting it on his own neck and then sliding it over with their heads crossing in a Gone With the Wind-poster horse-snog.

It gets into my territory as soon as it shifts to the war, at which point we forget about making the horse a fairytale character and admit he’s pure myth. Everyone pursues and protects him to keep alive some symbol that’s dear to them, like the German boys struggling to keep each other alive for their parents’ sake; when they’re caught deserting, and asked by the capturing officer “A mistake?” and one answers “A promise” on the way to being firing-squaded, we know we’re not in Spielbergia anymore as all good deeds specifically get punished.

There’s always been a gap of good films making sense of one of our most senseless wars, though I’d thought WWI would be a mere incidental backdrop to this flick; wrong again, since the subterranean trench conflict is portrayed with nightmare insight, a capsized skyline aimed at hell like the city the opposite of civilization builds, a terrible doppelganger, gashed in the earth, for the furrows of the farm-field the boy left behind.

The horse’s wild riderless run through and above those trenches, among bomb-bursts and through barbed wire, is an acceptable fantasy since it looks like the delusions desperate soldiers would have anyway, and embodies the spirit that wishes it could race over these scenes. The endless green fields that these same settings were seen as earlier in the movie are a warning and an epitaph, not just a wide-angle sensation, and Spielberg is the rare big-picture showman who also understands that anxiety and atrocity are intimate, not grand-scale (as in one of the only two good scenes from Schindler, when Ralph Fiennes beats up one helpless woman; pilloried at the time since it was the one part that didn’t offer the distance of spectacle). The innocent beast getting snared in a spiderweb of barbed wire, prolonged and ever more close in focus, is quite hard to watch, and when the lone Brit and German solider venture out to cut him loose, sharing a moment of fatalistic camaraderie, we see Spielberg’s other rare talent among block-meisters, a keen eye for not the immensity or atrocity but absurdity of war — or really, the weirdness of normality in the overall sweep of human cruelty and conflict (as in Schindler’s only other good scene, where the Jewish refugee and the German industrialist share a casual drink on the night before deportation to a death camp).

In this Spielberg flick, people die and stay dead, like the young French farmgirl who nurtures the horse in a fleeting separate peace; the boy who first raised him does not die, but the prices he pays are believable, and though he tells a superior that “this is no random horse” when he and his old companion are miraculously reunited on the battlefield, the boy’s own survival is completely arbitrary. That’s the burden of those who do make it home.

I did think we should see him come home to find out that the dad had died, but then I remembered the dramatic circle he has to close by bringing back the standard his dad hid from service in the Boer War, which he won’t talk about and the boy took without him knowing; by this point, the boy too has seen and done inhuman things, and he’s not congratulating his dad, he’s forgiving him — a still-unusual type of happy ending.

It always seems strange to focus sentimentally on a beloved pet in the midst of a global tragedy, a Disneyish trivialization of trauma. But the very incredibility of this vulnerable creature lasting though such an ordeal is the metaphor — and the substance — of what we focus on when we’re at peace and maintaining a semblance of society. The travail of this blameless beast (and the many others who are shown not lasting) is the story of how war takes away what we most care about and are least able to hold onto, and kills what’s inside of the people who are left, for a generation, or forever. Too many Spielberg flicks, with their bffs from space and their high survival rate from global holocaust, are about what would be nice; War Horse is an enchanting, significant statement about what should be.

You all know Wanamakers’ department store from Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, as a shadowed, bombed-out belfry for pigeons across from Philadelphia’s tomb-like city hall. Bruce Willis slingshots back in time to its heyday, and the same round trip is possible today, as the store’s been turned into a Macy’s but obliged to stay exactly as it was through historic-landmark law.

A comforting, vaulted and paneled cathedral of commerce from boom-era America, its altar is a seven-story atrium anchored by a big bronze eagle statue on the floor-level, of watchful eye and grasping claw, and at the height of the buying season a towering LED-dappled Christmas tree, behind the year-round pipe organ, with automated lightshow pageant on the hour. The crossroads of spacetime converge again, as now-computerized sugar plums and toy soldiers flash to scratchy 1950s carols and the narration of a surely immortal Julie Andrews beams back from some circa-2120 resort outpost on Mars’ second moon.

I try to make a pilgrimage every year (Philly is the closest thing I have to a hometown, where the conscious memories kick in from a nomadic lifetime, though four stops and eight years of it were in and around this city so my most formative ones were like a map to the stars’ split-levels in Shyamalan/Sebold country). Upstairs the store’s also got an annual Dickens Village full of automata staging A Christmas Carol, salvaged gear-by-gear from another, now shuttered, product palace nearby; the joke’s on John Wanamaker’s ghost, since this version leaves the 99-percenter sensibilities of the original book tenaciously intact.

The last time my folks ever had money we lived right in town, across from the faux-Grecian city museum in an aspirationally futuristic hive-building which was then the largest apartment complex under a single roof in the world, leveling god-knows-what but leaving a lot of Old Philadelphia around its landing site. I’d be strollered among the sun- and century-absorbing brownstones later recolonized by priced-out Brooklynites and steered past the Quaker-fortress prison that’s now the area’s biggest tourist draw, sometimes let loose to crawl on strange concrete turtle sculptures in the modernized playgrounds at the gated Athens-like 1840s orphanage my dad and uncle grew up in down the street.

New Deal survivors, my parents had proceeded to quasi-counterculture folk-junkies, and our building had a gleaming gilt Joan of Arc statue out front, which looked a lot like the equestrian Vanguard Records logo, so at that age I thought it was a statue of Joan Baez, and I probably wasn’t the only one.

Behind the museum was another classical theme-park, the temple-like marble bannisters and colonnades of the 1820s Waterworks, like the settlement of some unrecorded Argonauts who’d come seeking cheesesteaks. In postmodern times it looks less the antique than my moon-habitat former home, and after urban-streetscape grants it’s got fewer cracks than I do.

In one of the only dreams I’ve ever had that continued after I woke up and fell back to sleep, so maybe it’s more like a message, I was rolling down low grassy slopes in the strip of park next to this Maxfield Parrish-y miniature (our first childhood loitering-place), with my younger sister, actually born here and now 16 years dead, and I asked her if I’d see her again, and she said I would, and then I woke up for good. I matched her in those days, with long wavy golden hair our parents couldn’t bring themselves to do away with even on a boy; I may have been the only American male in the entire 1960s whose dad and mom would get yelled at by strangers in elevators to cut his hair.

After clearing out their last apartment I still have a paper bag of it from the unavertable first barber visit. Maybe I’ll scatter it over the Waterworks’ human-made Niagara some day when I’m sure I’m done and my sister saves that picnic-bench and the Argonauts rise over the cliffside and the moon-people land again.

Who remembers Keith Haring? If ever there was a patron saint of our current cartoon high-culture it’s him, and in my zoned-out, OCD end-teens I saw all those anonymous, anomalous minute-masterpieces of his go up on the overlooked media real-estate of subway walls in pre-supersized New York.

I would shamble from block to block in a make-work courier job for my dad, one half-step ahead of a disappearing city. Street people would sit down next to me and beg a bagel and the counter-guy would menacingly come over and when I was up to it I’d say they were with me. I drew the attention of others who sensed I’d fallen through the same cracks in existence that they had.

I was kissed by a junkie I gave money to on the old, bleak 42nd St., and slapped by a homeless guy I walked into outside Grand Central; both were trying to wake me up and reconnect me, but I was busy, getting to some address, and concentrating on the spaces, between the letters, in the words, of thoughts.

But further below, someone was leaving symbols for anyone who wanted to see. So here’s a poem I just wrote about Keith:

’K.

Long after we’d intruded on the earth
some of us, filing by,
found the markings, on untended frames
cave drawings traced with the remains
of ancient shells and bones
Angels, sun-babies, many-headed magnificent singing beasts
Like messages left by some future, joyous tribe.

Long-since lifted off
in the rumble of the passing silver serpents
like chalk-dust ghosts
and breathed back in
worth the time they’ll take away.

Now no surface is unfilled
and I speed by, seeing through
to promising windows
of endless, beginningless black.

Adam McGovern 12/27/11

So how did I get through my whole childhood evading the emotional trauma of the holidays to which all over-observant minds are heir? Maybe it was by not exactly having a family; the major source of such things. Oh, we had each other — a mom, a dad, a girl and boy and a cat — but it was a space-pioneer, zombie-barricade kinda thing, since all but one grandparent were long gone and the one who wasn’t was out in California with my mom’s (secular-Jewish-anyway) folks and the few East Coast Catholics didn’t much speak to each other. So Jewish Mom would trim the coveted Christmas tree and Catholic Dad would tell us about the Maccabees and we’d have a consumer paradise on Earth.

I got a plastic turntable with a set of Sesame Street vinyl singles, and I don’t think I consciously grasped what downers those songs were, though even then what I dug most was the wistfulness — “Somebody come with me and see the pleasure in the wind/ Somebody come before it gets too late to begin…Somebody come and be my friend/And watch the sun ’til it rains again.” The pre-emptive melancholy turned out to be splendid training for manic depression.

One morning my dad set up a styrofoam version of the cloud-castles inhabited in package photos by “Commander Comet,” a favorite Venusian action figure who looked pretty much like a naked male angel in gold body-paint with purple Quentin Crisp hair, which explains a lot. In my house, the men were kinda from Venus.

But the highpoint of the Judeo-Christian calendar for us was really New Year’s, when I’d crawl through a wilderness of grownup legs to the melodious public nuisance of booming cocktail talkback way past my REM-time as the ’rents threw down with hordes a decade or two younger; they were like the Timothy Learys of binge-drinking. (Later, I got shitface at an office party for my dad’s work the night before Second Grade started, then stayed up ’til 1am watching a rerun of The Music Man and was golden the next morning; my hangover panacea, you’re welcome.)

For card-carrying, practically ankle-braceleted suburbanites, it’s funny to think how metropolitan our existence was; holiday meals were almost never taken at home, and almost always among jubilant strangers, at warehouse banquets and mob-scene buffets, except the year we didn’t quite think it through and stayed in eating egg salad for Thanksgiving, like Charlie Brown with popcorn and toast, which for the kids was the true meaning of a hallowed day.

That you-and-me-against-reality instinct sustained us through Dad’s eleven relocations and two bankruptcies, especially the yuletide spent when we were essentially homeless and borrowing some friends’ beach house, in winter. Mom would walk us up and down the deserted shore, seeing weird stalactites of sand that never got to take shape in the presence of people, between long lonely stone jetties with marsh incongruously crunching beneath our feet, veins of Rip Van Winkle ice forming in the crevices of the wizened boulders.

It was the most luminously depressing place since the opposite, Northwest coast we’d once vacationed at (and which looks that way even in high summer), and the romantic desolation would set my emotional pitch for many futures, or maybe just struck a chord I could never really lose. The best disorders need no season.

A week late, but with all my time left, I caught the excerpt from Gil Scott-Heron’s forthcoming memoir in the back of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. The miraculous find of one story, the story, saved up — I saw his end coming but not this. The book’s called The Last Holiday and for the one just passed it’s like he gave us his life back. These scenes of it are selected and scored, like they should be, in language that lends cinematic spectacle to ordinary viewpoint and breathes intimate sensation into once-removed experience, ‘cuz Gil could always follow the melody in the mundane and pick out the poetry in the din of the everyday. No doubt there’s a lot of tedium and terror that was kept out. But I hope he didn’t take it with him. The only true afterlife may be the way you get to be remembered. I think Voltaire called fame “the sunshine of the dead” but Gil only ever wanted you to notice the people who aren’t asking for it. So maybe this will be like one good summer day left over.