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So we saw a very strange play on Friday evening called "Under Construction".  It was entirely without plot, and the playwright randomly mixed scenes that were Norman Rockwell-esque with nightmarish, dystopian scenes reminiscent of Silent Hill or something.

Princesca HATED the play, calling it one of the worst things she's ever seen.  I still don't know what to make of it.

Like alot of experimental theatre, there was some degree of audience participation.  For one scene, one of the actresses grabbed a mic and started asking members of the audience graphic sexual questions.  She asked one old lady if she owned a vibrator, for example. :cool:

Anyway, I'm curious what people think of this kind of thing.  I can't remember ever seeing such an unconvential play before.

HULK SMASH!

Seriously, sounds retarded and something only 28 year old theater grads would enjoy.

There was also a nude gay man on stage at one point.  To Marty, surely it's the greatest play in history. :)

Quote from: Caliga on April 06, 2009, 01:56:40 PM
There was also a nude gay man on stage at one point.  To Marty, surely it's the greatest play in history. :)

I feel reminded of the IT Crowd episode where they go to the musical.

To give an example of how the scenes progressed:

There was one scene where one of the actors was smoking a pipe and narrating the scene, which was a reenactment of one of those '50s filmstrips about how a young couple is supposed to properly court.

NARRATOR: When Johnny arrives at Mary's door, he is to knock politely and wait for Mary to open the door.  Mary opens the door, smiles politely, and says:

MARY:  Good evening Johnny, I'm delighted that you have arrived on time for our evening out together!

JOHNNY:  Good evening, Mary.  Would you please introduce me to your parents?  Let me help you with your coat.

Most middle-aged American posters will no doubt know what I'm talking about (and possibly others, but I dunno for sure.

Anyway, so that scene ended abruptly and then the next scene consisted of an actress reading index cards with a random mix of catch phrases on them, pitching each one to the floor.  Behind her, there was a woman repeatedly vomiting into a bucket, a naked guy wrapped in clear plastic screaming and chewing on the front of the plastic thing like he was trying to burst out of a chrysalis (very Silent-Hillish), a guy in his underwear being duct-taped to a flagpole by two other men, another guy hitting the stage wall repeatedly with a baseball bat, and another guy wearing a grotesque clown mask (looked like a Killer Klowns prop) parading around in random circles.  It got increasingly hard to hear the card reader over the cacophony going on behind her.

Well, how about that.  The playwright has the entire script on his website:

http://www.charlesmee.org/html/construction.html (http://www.charlesmee.org/html/construction.html)

I've managed to dodge experimental theater to a large degree. Voted HULK SMASH.

I'm not patient enough to sift through the 99% of it that is crap to get to 1% that is decent or better.

Well, in an interesting parallel, there were some scenes that I thought were brilliant, but some that were so bad as to be like torture ("Oh Hod please let this END!")

I realize that the playwright more than likely considers those scenes successes, since the goal may well have been to torture the audience with them.

It's awful; but usually I can get an anecdote out of it.  So the avant-garde has made my life richer.    :)

I think the last play I saw in theater was a horrible interpretation of Büchner's Danton's Death (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danton%27s_Death). It featured garden gnomes, simulated pissing on the stage and nudity among other horrible stuff I thankfully can't remember in detail. Half the audience left in the pause and I think they fired the director a short time later because it was just that bad. Based on this, I have to say that I don't like experimental theater.

I was also about the only one I know who didn't like Blue Men Group.

I don't like Blue Man Group either. :bleeding:  I can't understand why it's so wildly popular.

Sounds amusing.
But going to the threate in general is rather offputting. The snobby aura is designed to keep my ilk out seemingly.

Quote from: Caliga on April 06, 2009, 02:05:34 PM
To give an example of how the scenes progressed:
<snip>

Aren't we past the point of bitching about the 50s?

Quote from: Caliga on April 06, 2009, 02:05:34 PM
Anyway, so that scene ended abruptly and then the next scene consisted of an actress reading index cards with a random mix of catch phrases on them, pitching each one to the floor.  Behind her, there was a woman repeatedly vomiting into a bucket, a naked guy wrapped in clear plastic screaming and chewing on the front of the plastic thing like he was trying to burst out of a chrysalis (very Silent-Hillish), a guy in his underwear being duct-taped to a flagpole by two other men, another guy hitting the stage wall repeatedly with a baseball bat, and another guy wearing a grotesque clown mask (looked like a Killer Klowns prop) parading around in random circles.  It got increasingly hard to hear the card reader over the cacophony going on behind her.

Oh, so it's a comedy.

I like it as long as it is good. The problem with modern theatre is the same with any modern art - it's not that artists these days are crappier than in the days of old, but we don't have decades separating us from the bad stuff that got forgotten, so only good stuff survived to our times.

Good point, and actually this production is part of the Humana Festival of New American Plays, the point of which is to debut new plays and see if they're good enough to "make it" on a wide scale.

Quote from: DisturbedPervert on April 06, 2009, 02:32:35 PM

Quote from: Caliga on April 06, 2009, 02:05:34 PM
Anyway, so that scene ended abruptly and then the next scene consisted of an actress reading index cards with a random mix of catch phrases on them, pitching each one to the floor.  Behind her, there was a woman repeatedly vomiting into a bucket, a naked guy wrapped in clear plastic screaming and chewing on the front of the plastic thing like he was trying to burst out of a chrysalis (very Silent-Hillish), a guy in his underwear being duct-taped to a flagpole by two other men, another guy hitting the stage wall repeatedly with a baseball bat, and another guy wearing a grotesque clown mask (looked like a Killer Klowns prop) parading around in random circles.  It got increasingly hard to hear the card reader over the cacophony going on behind her.

Oh, so it's a comedy.

It's AVANT-GARDE comedy!  :boff:

I like good theatre.  You know I don't think anything I've seen that's avant-gartde (however good) is as avant-garde as almost any Samuel Beckett play.

I've seen some shit theatre - or I've seen enough to know that it's time to leave - and I've seen some incredible stuff.  Avant-gardeyness doesn't matter in that sense.  I've got as much out of a tiny, ensemble, all-male, circus-based production of A Midsummer Night's Dream as I have from Peter Brook's relatively conventional Hamlet.  What matters is quality of acting, ideas, execution (lighting, stage design, etc.), direction and to a lesser extent writing.

So I can't say whether I like avant-garde theatre or not.  I like good theatre and I like good writing.  Whether it's Mark Ravenhill or Ben Jonson I'm watching if there's skill and precision in it it's worth it whether they do it in period costume with a fourth wall removed or whether they do it naked in a paddling pool full of mud.


Incidentally my favourite pseudo-avant-gardeyness was an Italian version of A Midsummer Night's Dream I once saw.  Half-way through, for no apparent reason, all the women took their tops off and started playing catch with a big beach ball all over the stage.  According to the Director's notes it was to suggest the 'dream-like' quality of the play :lol:

Quote from: Martinus on April 06, 2009, 03:22:39 PM
I like it as long as it is good. The problem with modern theatre is the same with any modern art - it's not that artists these days are crappier than in the days of old, but we don't have decades separating us from the bad stuff that got forgotten, so only good stuff survived to our times.

Yeah I love the Royal Court and going to see new theatre.  But it can be quite hit-and-miss.  There's only so many times you can watch someone desperately try and aim for some epater les bourgeois style thing when they're the only people watching.

In Bristol though I go to lots at a festival of physical theatre run by the Bristol Old Vic called Mayfest, which is normally excellent.  Basically it's because they tend to be physical pieces that have succeeded elsewhere before they get to play here.

I thought avant-garde was what you yelled before a sword fight.

Quote from: Sheilbh on April 06, 2009, 04:27:11 PM

Incidentally my favourite pseudo-avant-gardeyness was an Italian version of A Midsummer Night's Dream I once saw.  Half-way through, for no apparent reason, all the women took their tops off and started playing catch with a big beach ball all over the stage.  According to the Director's notes it was to suggest the 'dream-like' quality of the play :lol:

:D I guess that's what the Director's dream would look like.

I love it - but you have to screen for quality first. Fortunately, I find we have a lot of good ones here - the era where shock-value theatre was the end all be all is thankfully over. The last season of the Nouveau Théâtre Expérimental was amazing: a play on Lortie,  based on the true story of a half-crazed military guy who broke into the National Assembly and killed 3 people ; another play was about finding inspiration for a Bollywood movie in Quebec, questionning the idea of identity. I have yet to see the next one.

Btw, how do you guys define avant-garde theatre? Does it have to break the narrative and/or the scene/audience boundary to be considered avant-garde or is it sufficient to be modern and figurative, but still maintain a relatively traditional narrative line (in terms of the form, not content).

Quote from: Martinus on April 06, 2009, 05:46:54 PM
Btw, how do you guys define avant-garde theatre? Does it have to break the narrative and/or the scene/audience boundary to be considered avant-garde or is it sufficient to be modern and figurative, but still maintain a relatively traditional narrative line (in terms of the form, not content).

Well I don't know.  As I say I can't think of anyone more avant-garde than Beckett.  Famously in Waiting for Godot, nothing happens, twice.  One of his plays features three un-named characters (man, woman1, woman2) encased in funeral urns so they can't move.  Happy Days which is currently playing, starring Fiona Shaw, to rave reviews is difficult to describe but again the main character can't move.  She's encased in earth up to her waist at least (wiki's synopsis is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Days_(play) ).

I don't think you get any more destructive of narrative than a playwright who realised that drama's not about narrative at all, or anyone so brutal to form as a man who wrote a play of about 30 seconds length that's just breathing and screaming.

I think to an extent, if we take a minimalist definition of the avant-garde, all theatre has to be avant-garde - unless it's a bloated musical.  Because film does realism and the fourth wall stuff so much better and on such a smaller scale theatre has to, in my opinion, get rid of the audience/stage boundary.  This is often done, in traditional plays, by making the audience participate in some sense.  For example while the Victorians would have lots of extras clambering on stage to hear Mark Anthony, the standard modern performance would have him address the audience directly; they are the crowd outside the Senate listening to the funeral oration.  From what we know of Elizabethan staging, however, this isn't anything new.

I think playing around with form is more avant-garde, but even there it's now standard.    Mark Ravenhill's work mess around with form and narrative and come at things from a Marxist position which is all a bit cliche and 1960s.  On the upside his use of language is incredible and his plays are enjoyable.  But at the core of it all I think there's quite a puritan morality going on.  So I don't know how avant-garde even something like 'Shopping and Fucking' is.

I think the best I could do to describe the current avant-garde would be to emphasise its physicality and its attempt to be visceral.  It's influenced by Grotowski's 'poor theatre' and Artaud's 'theatre of cruelty'.  But even that's been done for years, at least since Steven Berkoff and 'Metamorphosis'.  But that's not enough.  So I can't define it.

When I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of a park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy.

 -_-

Quote from: jimmy olsen on April 06, 2009, 06:16:12 PM
When I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of a park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy.

You finally came up with a good one.

FINALLY.

That's the Naked Gun.

Quote from: Oexmelin on April 06, 2009, 06:45:49 PM
That's the Naked Gun.

No crap.  :D

Normally he posts a picture of something totally retarded. With my fairness policy(tm), I reward proper quotes for movies.

You can never go wrong with a Naked Gun line. -_-

Quote from: Ed Anger on April 06, 2009, 06:42:23 PM

Quote from: jimmy olsen on April 06, 2009, 06:16:12 PM
When I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of a park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy.

You finally came up with a good one.

FINALLY.

Thanks. -_-

Now of course, when you post a Spacely Sprockets Jetsons pic when the joke is running in a Sprockets-SNL direction again, I'm gonna verbally rape you.

When it is good it is good.  Unfortunately I think most avant garde people think if people think it is good there must be something conventional or wrong with their work.  :P

I say yea.

Good experimental theatre can be very good, but it is very hit-and-miss, with misses outnumbering hits. Entertainment for those with the time and energy to do serious research on what is good and what is not, and willing to risk wasting an evening or three having some asshole yell at you dressed in saran wrap.

Dunno if it counts as "experimental", but I've been following this play-cycle, which would be of particular interest to Oex:

http://www.videocab.com/index.html

It is very good - a series on, of all things, Canadian history; and very, very funny. The "experimental" aspect is that it is performed in a very tiny space - the stage is the size of a closet, yet they are able, using lighting and minimal props, to stage an entire play in that space.

HULK SMASH!

L.

Sounds like if I saw it I'd want everyone involved terminated with Xtreme prejudice.

Quote from: Pedrito on April 07, 2009, 10:08:03 AM
HULK SMASH!

L.

... which, ironically enough, would make for experimental theatre.  :D

It depends really on the piece. I tend to go by word of mouth from friends with any play.

Quote from: Malthus on April 07, 2009, 10:23:18 AM... which, ironically enough, would make for experimental theatre.  :D

I didn't think of that, but I did put the quote about the Browning in there specifically because it originated as a line from a play (forget which though).

Quote from: BuddhaRhubarb on April 07, 2009, 12:08:15 PM
It depends really on the piece. I tend to go by word of mouth from friends with any play.

So how do you decide who sees it first among your friends?

Quote from: Caliga on April 07, 2009, 12:11:57 PM

Quote from: Malthus on April 07, 2009, 10:23:18 AM... which, ironically enough, would make for experimental theatre.  :D

I didn't think of that, but I did put the quote about the Browning in there specifically because it originated as a line from a play (forget which though).

Found it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Johst

QuoteWhen the Nazis achieved power in 1933, Johst wrote the play Schlageter, an expression of Nazi ideology performed on Hitler's birthday to celebrate his victory. It was a heroic biography of the proto-Nazi martyr Albert Leo Schlageter. The line "when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun", often associated with Nazi leaders, derives from this play. The original line is slightly different: "Wenn ich Kultur höre ... entsichere ich meinen Browning," "Whenever I hear of culture... I release the safety-catch of my Browning!" (Act 1, Scene 1).

Inspired by this thread, I went to a modernized version of Picture of Dorian Gray. Harry was a macho clubber, Basil was a washed-out aging queen, etc. It was rather disappointing, except for the fact that the actor playing Dorian Gray was hot and got completely naked. I was sitting in the first row, so his balls were hanging in front of my face when he was doing some sort of a monologue.  :lol:

Avant-garde theatre: :thumbsup:

I've got tix to Chaz Palminteri's "A Bronx Tale" next week.  Nothing like experimental, avant-garde Mob theatre.

Quote from: Martinus on April 18, 2009, 03:21:15 PM
I was sitting in the first row, so his balls were hanging in front of my face when he was doing some sort of a monologue.  :lol:

You should have started sucking them.  :)

Quote from: Caliga on April 18, 2009, 04:27:25 PM

Quote from: Martinus on April 18, 2009, 03:21:15 PM
I was sitting in the first row, so his balls were hanging in front of my face when he was doing some sort of a monologue.  :lol:

You should have started sucking them.  :)

I considered that, but then thought it may have been considered as going too far in terms of the actor-spectator interaction.

I'm not sure that anything crosses the line with this genre.  :cool:

The one I saw in Louisville featured an actress taking a mic and asking audience members if they owned vibrators, liked anal, swallowing cum, and so forth.  Probably to make it more shocking, she tended to target old ladies for these questions.

Quote from: Caliga on April 18, 2009, 04:31:14 PM
I'm not sure that anything crosses the line with this genre.  :cool:

The one I saw in Louisville featured an actress taking a mic and asking audience members if they owned vibrators, liked anal, swallowing cum, and so forth.  Probably to make it more shocking, she tended to target old ladies for these questions.

Hehe.

Well this one pretty much maintained the boundary - was just a modern play written by the director. So it went from sublime to ridiculous and back several times. :P