response to Dead City

In a letter from New Georges’ artistic director Susan Bernfield in the program of their new production of Sheila Callaghan’s Dead City, she says the following: We think going to the theater should always be an experience, offstage and on. This time around, we’ve worked harder than ever at making that happen.” Susan. I can tell. And what an experience it is.

Sheila Callaghan’s new play, a “riff” on James Joyce’s Ulysses, is not just any experience, but it is one saturated with an interdisciplinary and totalizing drive that carries the event of this play from start to finish. In some ways the storytelling groundwork, superficially interpreted, is something we might have seen in the past, a female protagonist living an economically cozy life in uptown Manhattan, and through a series of life-changing events, comes to see that the ground she stands on is not so firm, and she has lost true meaning for herself in the process.

Dead City’s story, though, is much more universal than that. And once again, as we often see in good theatre, the experience and the ‘narrative,’ becomes less about the “what,” and more about the “how” and the “why.” This involves a different way of producing theatre, and a different way of watching and engaging with it. The 3LD Art and Technology venue is the perfect place for this to occur. Through the resources of the wonderfully talented cast, playwright, and production staff, combined with those of the space, the production was able to craftily implement video, sound, and spatial relationships, grounded in the text that brought the play to life in ways it would not have been able to under other circumstances.

What is the best way to examine a human being? And what is it about the medium of theatre that can fruitfully aid us in this examination? Dead City understands that it is the inherent contradictions, the push and the pull of a spectator’s experience, which proves most useful. In a world where film and television dominate the mainstream and the entertainment culture, a spectator in the theatre is bound to have a much different experience inherently than they might have, say, fifty years ago. They experience an in/out relationship to the world of the play. Dead City materializes this world into the thematics of the play. Our protagonist, Samantha, touchingly portrayed by Elizabeth Norment, is described once in the play as one of those insane people who look crazy on the outside but are a “maelstrom” underneath. This relationship extends to the whole of the production, as we buzz through a day in Manhattan at light speed, making stops along the way to witness life-changing events. How do we do this in the theatre? Sheila’s answer is a complex interweaving of forms that feed her story and materialize that in/out relationship we have with the theatre.

The result is a unique blending of three major theatrical conventions: Empathy, Lyricism, and Earthy Groundedness (something universal). Sheila has a unique talent for poetry, and she knows how to use it inside the world of the play she has created. What we experience is sex, violence, lust, and blood, the universal stuff of humanity, described in beautiful and economic detail through magnetic poetry and symbolism. At times, in the play, it was difficult to tell what was “real,” and what was not. But why must we be bound to make such a distinction? Or rather, the interesting part of the experience is the “figuring-out-of” the real and the hyperreal only to rest somewhere in the middle, and learning something in the process. This “real” / “hyperreal” project is directly in the text of the play as Baudrillard’s theories of simulacrum are a consistent theme. Again the push and pull of reality versus its opposite, and Samantha’s struggle to distinguish between them (just like the audience’s struggle) creates a uniquely existential environment where Samantha feels both trapped and as wide open as the sky, liminal, waiting to be changed. The claustrophobia of the inner world (often projected on screens or told through a “NYPR” host) is an opening to what the inner world is not, or what the inner world wants to be. Having this inner world on display for the audience draws empathy in a most fantastic form, mixed with poetic language. So many times I felt drawn in by the very veins securing my heart when Samantha’s inner struggle was made public to the audience. It is this kind of empathy that leads us to realize that we are all not that much different, not too far removed from each other, it is what we project that draws judgment and struggle. It’s the self-censorship and world-view that stops the inner life in its tracks. Callaghan’s choice to show us this struggle on stage lends to an existential examination which is nuanced and unique.

Much credit also goes to Daniella Topol, who directed the production. She clearly had a deep understanding of the play and a wonderful vision of how to make it work in the space. The play is, after all, sprawling and complex; it is an epic story condensed into a day’s worth of events and an hour and a half of stage time. And the environment is so crucial, a fast paced New York City, constantly concerned with itself and its ability to move forward or die. These characters move around like pawns in the city, but in a strange and theatrical way, it is an environment tailored to their story, despite its efforts to swallow them up.

Regular Callaghan-goers will see a number of the ideas/theatrical conventions she has explored in the past: extension of a character’s inner life into physical being, poetry, a unique understanding/perspective of the 21st century, a smash-up between the real and the surreal. But Dead City is a realization of the implementation of these ideas into a totalizing and interdisciplinary form which audiences can both identify with and find magical in their effect. And for all the technology, all the fantastic production value, in the end Sheila understands that the real touch is just what Samantha’s husband needs at the end of the play, “something small.”