Reviewed
by Jerry Kraft
Sarah
Kane was a
ferocious playwright who brought to the theatre an innovative gift for language,
sophisticated theatricality, and a bleak but passionate vision of a world in
which pain and injury are the usual responses to need and desire. With her
suicide at the age of 28, she inevitably became linked with doomed young
artists like the poet Sylvia Plath, whose trajectory of genius and demise seems
to have an inevitability rich in both romanticism and futility. Unfortunately,
that categorizing tends to color all of Kane's work, and especially for a play
like "Crave", it distorts the vitality of a world in which existence does not
have an easy exit, and the ongoing nature of being is presumptive to the
struggle.
In
an intense and exhausting fifty minutes, this rarely produced drama displays
all of Kane's verbal brilliance, her anguish, sexual torment, spiritual despair
and theatrical precision. Washington Ensemble Theatre, the most innovative and
important art theatre in Seattle, gives it an exemplary production. The
inventive and insightful direction of Roger Bennington is matched by an impeccable set
design by Jennifer Zeyl, and the four talented actors of the cast express all of the sound
and physicality, the desperation and hunger and fear of the text.
"I
wish I had music, but all I have is words," says one of the characters, each
identified only by a letter. But what words, and from them, what music. The
production begins with the stage masked top and bottom by a black strip, so
that our perception is physically narrowed, our attention forced deeper inside
the box where the characters are enclosed. The four individuals are frozen in
tableaux, while the lights rise slowly, almost imperceptibly, in silence. With
the first words, and the illumination of white, harshly textured walls, white
costumes, the room is filled with sound; ceaseless, yearning, bitter,
articulate and howling, grasping at meaning, demanding answers that will not be
delivered, attempting connections that are painfully impossible. Each voice is
distinct, but not individualized. The text reveals less about any personal
experience than the emotive experience of this immediate event.
The
play was originally conceived as a static event, but Bennington has given it
constant movement, adding a gestural language and kinetic theatricality to the
swirling broth of Kane's speech. Certainly there is much of the existential
legacy of Beckett and Sartre in her words and ideas, and much of Artaud and
Arrabal in this production's theatricality. But there is also a genuine and
lyric voice in this desolate and demanding poetry, a passionate need for
meaning and connection between people that is no less insistent even for the
certainty that it will forever be denied. While the fatalism and nihilism of
her belief system may be a difficult argument to make, sometimes just the
sheer, blinding intensity of the statement is enough. The cast, Mikano
Fukaya, Marya Sea Kaminski, Marc Kenison and Lathrop Walker, balance and support each other beautifully,
while remaining essentially and effectively separate, nonetheless connecting
and relating continually. Mr. Kenison performs an exhausting, breathtaking solo
speech that plays like Coltrane at three a.m. Ms. Fukaya wears a mask of raw
nerves as thin and vulnerable as her white slip, remaining tender even as she's
being ravaged and demeaned. Ms. Kaminski carries a clear-eyed awareness and
wounded humanity that feels timeless and archetypal. Mr. Walker expresses an
anguish that feels like an image from Dore's illustrations of Dante, and an
unfeeling cruelty that is both chilling and self-damning. Throughout, the
precision and clarity of the expression, kinetic, aural and visual, is damn
near perfect.
If
one reason that we go to the theatre is to encounter an authentic expression of
the human experience, then "Crave" is an important and powerful piece
of work. On an intellectual, cognitive level, I think there are a good many
arguments to be made against its beliefs and conclusions. Certainly some of the
later religious implications of baptisms and resurrections and such seemed a
bit strained. But if you turn off your own words, listen only to the expression
coming from the stage in all its forms, then the work is, or at least was for
me, powerfully affecting. "Poetry is language for its own sake," a
voice says from the stage. And so the reason for this text. "...A horror
so deep only ritual can contain it," says another. And so the reason for
this theatrical event. In the conviction and urgency of the whole there is a
terrible beauty, and unarguable, self-referential truth, be it only Sarah
Kane's. Fearful. Pitiable. Great stuff.