|
Puppets will always be associated with childhood
entertainments. But like the jugglers and clowns popularly
called new vaudevillians, Janie Geiser's Atlanta-based Jottay
Theatre represents a low-tech response to mass culture and
multimedia performance. She's a storyteller who uses puppets
to explore how little information it takes to engage the
imagination (of children or adults). In "The House,"
the piece Geiser co-wrote with Neill Bogan that forms the
first half of her hour-long show at DTW, a young mother named
Vi becomes so agitated over tensions in the Persian Gulf that
she leaves home and spends her days in the library trying to
figure out how to solve them. Her mental dislocation is
portrayed with extraordinary subtlety; except for the three
people closest to her, all other figures are two-dimensional;
the melodic fragments of Chip Epsten's haunting score keep
looping back on themselves; Vi's nightmares are populated by
the human faces of the puppet manipulators at her window; you
don't realize she's in a hospital until she mentions that her
cohort John "couldn't quite concentrate because of his
medication." The piece is beautiful and unsettling, like
a crayon drawing of a broken heart. "The Fish,"
based on a Russell Banks story, also portrays a misguided
attempt at social responsibility, but its satire of land
despoilers is clumsier, its depiction of a (literally)
bucket-headed colonel's irrational fear of nature more
obvious. Still, conjuring a pond out of the space between two
stepladders is typical of Geiser's shrewdly minimalist
storytelling.
7 Days, March 22, 1989
|
