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Stage Review: Quantum Theatre's latest is an urban collage of comic sadness
Wednesday, June 23, 1999 By Christopher Rawson, Post-Gazette Drama Critic
Scotsman David Harrower has a bleakly poetic vision of anomie and frustration in the urban wasteland. If that sounds like an old story, well, so does "Oedipus."
But in staging the American premiere of Harrower's "Kill the Old Torture Their Young," Quantum Theatre and director Rodger Henderson give it the crispness of conviction, imbued with the discordant energy of mystery in comi-tragic form.
What else is new? Although not as galvanic as some Quantum shows, "Kill Torture" is a creepily abrasive, comically sad experience I wouldn't want to miss.
Henderson is the key. Harrower's story, characters, setting and staccato poetic lament don't quite connect, but the direction keeps each element interesting.
The story is of a notable documentary maker (artist as adrift, feeling seer?) who returns to his native city to capture its current soul on film, funded by the local establishment, which is represented by a mogul who is really a tool of Others.
The mogul's secretary gets somehow involved with the filmmaker. Meanwhile, an elderly birdwatcher feels the city crowding in. A young woman neighbor tries to befriend him. A young man appears as the filmmaker's would-be driver, then turns up running a garage/convenience store, and there's a Rock Singer who flies in and out of town making oracular comments.
People meet, desires conflict, conflicts develop, the story moves... but somewhere it begins to disintegrate. Situations are wound tighter, but to little outcome -- not yet, anyway. This is intentional, of course. This culture and this city (presumably some smaller industrial city in Scotland, but Pittsburgh would do) aren't able to support epic narrative; the center doesn't hold; edges crumble; conviction dissolves in attitude.
Meanwhile, the Rock Singer dips in and out with self-conscious irony, a complicating overkill since the narrative device is ironically distancing to start.
But none of this really gets at the core of the experience, which is watching assured actors move in unexpected ways through both fictional and real spaces under the command of someone (director Henderson?) who seems to know what's going on.
Ah, the real space. Oddly enough, it's a theater.
Quantum has made a very good thing of using construction sites, cellars and other found places. But as far as I know this is the theatrical debut of this refurbished 200-seat theater, which had a previous incarnation as one of the Bank Cinemas. With comfortable new seats and red wall coverings, it's state-of-the-art -- except for huge ducts overhead, doors which seem to exit right out of the building, and a pervasive hum and rattle.
At intermission, we wandered the bank space itself, trying to peel back the layers of memory to find the urban mall that blossomed there a decade or two ago. Spooky. The effect is like a found place, where history is a-tilt and industrial space incompletely humanized -- not a bad match for what the play presents.
On stage, Henderson creates further transience with mechanistic set pieces, including a platform that compresses the characters artificially, as the city does.
The commanding Ferdinand Lewis is an erratically charming and obsessed filmmaker. Rick Applegate is more colorless as the mogul, making his spiritual crisis oddly banal, which seems to me appropriate. Raymond Laine is like gray cardboard as the bird-watching elder -- also appropriate -- and Cody Henderson scores three times, as Rock Singer but especially as two passers-by. His scene as a bird-watcher who just wants to be left alone is a great turn for actor and author.
The performance of the show is Sam Henderson's as the not-quite-so-hapless convenience store clerk and loose cannon. He's wonderfully funny with a world of bewilderment in his bright eyes.
The women don't measure up. Karla Boos plays the secretary with a fitting flatness, behind which lurks Boos' own birdlike enigma. But the character might benefit from some growth that Boos doesn't manage. This is triply true of Lissa Brennan's Angela, the old man's would-be befriending angel. Brennan does great whine, but isn't there any more?
If you're counting, the company includes three Hendersons, ALL UNRELATED. Strange but true.
So's the play -- strange but gripping, sad but funny, limp but crisp, with a title that seems another slice of free-floating deconstructive commentary.
Let me know what you think.
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Where: Quantum Theatre at Library Center of Point Park College, Downtown.