“The Vigil or The Guided Cradle”
The Brick Theatre, 575 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
Opened April 22, runs through May 8
www.impetuoustheater.org
www.bricktheater.com

The central metaphor of Crystal Skillman’s play “The Vigil or The Guided Cradle” (a less-than-comfortable title based on an ornately cruel Medieval torture device) is the grand clock in the center of Prague’s old city, where lifelike figures of virtue and sin have played out their roles unchanging for most of a millennium. In “Vigil” it sits at the center of time, as 21st century tourists and travelers caught up in the steadily deteriorating geopolitics of our day revolve in the narrative with the torturers and captives of a supposedly darker age.

Two wanderers meet all too coincidentally at the clock in modern times as the gears of generational global conflict interlock in ways best left for the theatergoer to discover; across time, the Medieval man who tried to blow up the clock for his own blood-feud reasons locks in a battle of wills with bloody inquisitors and a more weirdly principled interrogator (the astonishingly contained and shaded Christian Rummel).

In a duel role as the contemporary American tourist and an unambiguous innocent caught up in the ancient jailers’ sweep, Susan Louise O’Connor paints an intense portrait of willed ignorance and tenacious faith. Surrounded by unquestioning functionaries of terror and torture, Rummel’s and O’Connor’s characters struggle with what they really know and, along with the rest of the frightened and victimized ensemble, alternate like the turn of a roulette wheel or locked gates’ random tumblers between determined delusions and abrupt fits of mercy, posing questions about whether the clockwork of the human heart is born broken or if we can in fact transgress against our own worst instincts.

Rummel and O’Connor each become the mechanism of a moment of redemption in which the play’s two eras converge and wheel away again in a magic-realist but refreshingly underplayed dance of humanity’s brutal legacy and still not abandoned charitable ideal. A brave and unpretentious reflection on vengeance and sacrifice, “Vigil” clarifies the current moment of hope and barbarism and speaks to the future by showing that both of these are nothing new.

I’ve mentioned TED before, and I can’t resist sharing two items from this mind-expanding (indeed, civilization-expanding) site.

First, the incredibly cool musician Bobby McFerrin demonstrates at The World Science Festival how all our brains come pre-wired for music:

Next, game designer Jane McGonigal makes a compelling case for how games can make a better world:

The Wii-G: A Wii from the Dark Side

Why plan to plunk a plain `ol Wii under the tree or by the menorah when you can get a near-nefarious version for the spiritually irresponsible loved one in your life? Nintendo insiders have revealed a new version of their popular console: the Wii-G combines hip wireless video gaming with a creepy means to contact the “other side.”

I met with one mystic scientist who would agree to speak only under condition of strict anonymity.  He explained how it works: “Once the game begins, the wireless remote will seem to move your arm of its own accord, pointing to the letters and words on the on-screen game board.”

I had to ask the obvious question. “Since it’s on a screen, why point to anything at all? Why not allow the spirits to simply magically place the messages right on the television?”

“We did create a version like that,” the scientist explained, “but instead of answering our questions it kept typing up teleplays for unaired episodes of Charmed. So back to pointing it was.”

The Wii-G is only available from the following stores: Everything Under A Pentagram; Ambercrombie & Crowley; Cauldrons-a-Million; and select Wal-Marts.

Someone over at the excellent Make magazine’s site posted this video of Sir Ken Robinson speaking at a TED conference in 2006. Entertaining, moving, and pointed, I thought it worth sharing here — we’re all interested in pursuing and supporting creativity.

This video’s home page can be found here.

[Saturday Night Saloon Series, 11/14/09 (remaining showings 12/12 and 1/9), Brooklyn, USA]

I’m seeing the Vampire Cowboys theatre company’s live movie-serials every other installment, and neither one of us wants to be the first to say shut up:

Dustin Chinn’s sentai pastiche “Let’s Ninja Science Ranger Team Get!” started over-the-top and is heading back up the sides for another plummet, with playground ultraviolence and potboiler overstatement in the capable hands of its frenzied ensemble overall and the post-stooges psychic mayhem of Jon Hoche, Temar Underwood and Paco Tolson in particular.

Crystal Skillman’s IT situation-farce “Hack” has continued to ramify like an unattended NORAD screensaver that’s been accidentally modeling Defcon 1. The storyline is a labyrinth down which characters keep wandering into random genres connected at some distant, divine remove to whatever-the-hell crisis they’re ostensibly averting (or causing and supposedly controlling) — a great metaphor for mass-media’s constant distractions from a semblance of purpose. Best among the roll-call is the newest character since I skipped an episode, the “It’s a Good Life”-style 10-year-old hacker who fixates on pantomiming Hannah Montana in-between bouts of real-life recreational mastery-of-the-universe. Everyone’s sliding into their avatar identities and wishing they’re someone they’re not, who’s nonetheless realer than they are — a splendid source of episodic tension with no existential season finale in sight.

As its overemphasized title telegraphs, Brent Cox’s “Jack O’Hanrahan and the Troubulation of Doom” remains a pure poetry-slam of vague anxiety and cogent malapropism — “An old war buddy whose death was almost tragic”; “The professor they call…The Professor” — too many to mention, but there’s two more to go. On the other hand, shortsightedly pronounced dead here last time, Mac Rogers’ exorcism soap-opera “Mother Sacramento” and James Comtois’ time-travel battlefield melodrama “Entrenched” convinced me of the value of holding on to that cliff; “Sacramento”’s sophisticated setup has swerved into some salutary hysteria and “Entrenched” has reprocessed its slow-build storytelling into genuinely creepy apprehension.

Anchored by an almost episode-length soliloquy from a transcendentally manic Hope Cartelli whose blind-drunk but temporarily cold-turkey character thinks she’s hallucinating the whole scenario, Jeff Lewonczyk’s labcoat-ripper “Lady Cryptozoologist: Season 2” delivered an entire segment-full of sexual Darwinism and Freudian vaudeville; not so much a comedy of errors as of doggedly intentional mis-happenstance, and what else is natural selection for?

I think I’ll miss December so the finales can come as much a surprise to me as to our heroes. There’s always enough mystery if you know where not to look.

[www.vampirecowboys.com/events.htm]

(Being an occasional recommendation of the lit without the graphic)

Jonathan Lethem is a name which should be known to all geeks for his connoisseurship of our interests in his essays on comics and their formative impact on the late-20th century psyche, and his injection of our subject matter with the deepest personality and meaning, from the gloomily sardonic retired-crimefighter story “Super Goat Man” earlier this decade to last year’s masterpiece of abandoned, workaday spacemen and women in an all-too-near future, “The Lostronaut”. It’s earned him your support and makes him worth your while even when he isn’t talking about guys in costumes or women in rockets, as with “Procedure in Plain Air,” in this week’s New Yorker magazine (Oct. 26, 2009).

It’s a very literal — and thus, utterly surreal — confrontation with the global crime-and-punishment tactics we’ve spent at least the last eight years putting as far out of our minds as we can manage.

An aging slacker in gentrified neighborhood New York is personally deputized for the ill-defined war on terror in a weirdly routine and civil transaction between docile prisoner, pliant and wanly self-important citizen and bland, barely-identified public servants, sliding into complicity with a now self-perpetuating, strangely antiseptic atrocity largely as a welcome break in his predictable daily schedule and a variation from his own lack of purpose.

The writing seems structured to recall the absurdist abstractions with which Iron Curtain satirists used to sail under the communist radar, and styled to sound like it’s been translated from ornately polite Polish or Czech. (The implicit point that the USA “defeated” the old Soviet Union only to in some ways take over from it is not new, but has not been said enough.)

It’s a wryly mannered staging of a quietly urgent problem, the extralegal system of state power and eroded individual rights left intact from the previous presidency if deemphasized by the current one. I always felt that Dave Eggers’ “Another” was the story of the first Bush term, in its scenario of an American tourist and an Arab guide racing horses in the tabula rasa of a remote desert, bridging a human gulf in an unreal but insistent way before returning to the armed camps of their respective cultures; T.C. Boyle’s “La Conchita” was for me the story of the second half-decade, with a crass, sardonic California organ-seller finding meaning (and inflating his ego all over again) when forced to help dig victims out of a sudden mudslide, a post-Katrina tale of buried redemption that fit our fragmented national family with sad exactness. “Procedure” could be the story of this era, summing up the unfinished business of the compromised American character. When stuck in the physical and metaphorical holes the story deals with, it’s unwise to expect too much too soon — but it’s best not to get too comfortable either.

Status of server migration items as of Monday, Oct 19, 2009:

• data move:  completed!
• database moves:  completed!
• blog database move:  completed!
• blog interface/framework move:  completed!
• blog software upgraded to latest version:  completed, testing
• script/code rewrites:  completed, testing
• site email addresses (internal use): 99% completed, testing

Pages seem to be up, javascript slideshow is working.  Links seem to be working.  Will continue to test.

Update:  fixed bug in RSS processing that places links to latest blog entries on the comiccritique.com front page

(Being an occasional reading of and into current films)

I have seen the future of music, and it happened three decades ago. “Soul” has been a dirty word at the multiplex, it seems; three of the most vivid re-creations of black culture and its impact on all civilization (and three of the most entertaining movies, period) in recent years — Talk to Me, Cadillac Records, and Dreamgirls (notwithstanding its one polite Oscar) — have tanked at the box-office or quickly sunken from memory. Maybe after four years (can I get an “eight”?) of a black presidency, there will be more recognition of these themes as *American* history. You’d think good music would make it harder to argue with (and all three above were music-related in some way; volatile deejay, groundbreaking record-label, struggling would-be stars); billed as a straight concert movie, maybe Soul Power has music enough.

Even so, alert documentarians give it as good a storyline as any fiction, and it still seems a bit stranger. This is the flipside of When We Were Kings, focusing on the music festival meant to coincide with the famed 1974 Ali-Foreman fight in the former Zaire (they were actually separated by more than a month). Surfacing 35 years later, the film plays like the timewarp Woodstock of the decade it’s been released in. The gated suburb of mid-’70s mass-media would’ve dismissed this as a laughable footnote and chitlin’-circuit curio had it come out when it was actually made and its participants were at their peak; with the internationalization of music now well underway and the primacy of the black canon to modern culture a long-settled fact, it feels like a standard text.

We see the Spinners as the most professional men in show business; Bill Withers breaks your heart with every note and shows what singer-songwriters should always be; Miriam Makeba and Celia Cruz, now dead, show how much more than alive they always were anyway; Congolese legends Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau get long-overdue platforms; and James Brown, endlessly inventive and able to incarnate any new idea or musical ideal, is the elder-god of modern sound. Between and around sets, the camera captures the well-oiled pomp of the proto-blockbuster machinery that distant funders and concert-industry fixtures put in to make this happen; the ebullience of impromptu jams in the streets; the subtle ubiquity of Zaire’s then-dictatorship (as opposed to Congo’s now-chaos); and, above all, the camaraderie of the black, Latin (and some white) creators, revitalized by returning to humanity’s homeland and centered on Muhammad Ali, out of the ring for most of this account and fully recognizable now as not just a master Warholian self-promoter but a truly courageous spokesman, statesman and model citizen, speaking truths to racial power that are still too true, whether you’re on your first beer or your third.

On the other hand, progress is the art of adding up the one-steps-forward while keeping track of the two-steps-back (Makeba, after all, kept facing ahead and outlived her own land’s dictatorship). For all the celebration onstage this could be a sad film, considering how many involved didn’t live to see other days like January 20, 2009. But their triumph, and our debt to them for a lot more than an hour-and-a-half of pop perfection, is that every one of them could see it coming.