The Chemistry of Economy
My next show The Cuban Missile Tango opens in less than two weeks. I’ve have 1500 movements, two pages of streaming overhead supertitles, sound fx blasts here and there and an abstraction of a story of a world crisis. I feel like Michelangelo trying to find the sculpture in the stone (let me take a moment here to say I by no means place myself near any rank with this master.) What I’m trying to say is that the theatre I create is always discovered through a “reduction.” Skimming away the fat to finding the economy of the soup. Taking away what isn’t necessary to let the crystal shine. After weeks of meticulous staging I am at the point where I need to be a delicate surgeon. Cut too deeply and the patient (the show) suffers. To lightly and it’s overburdened with excess. Economy in theatre is an art. Sometimes I find this economy before a show opens. Sometimes never. It’s like a puzzle with too many parts. First you must get rid of the pieces that don’t fit and then fit the puzzle together. The tricky part is knowing what the puzzle is.
At this juncture, I am battling, as always, between narrative and non-narrative. Too much narrative and the piece is laden with exposition. Not enough story and the work is all abstraction. The Cuban missile crisis was a complex event. With my dramaturg, Mona Huneidi, we distilled the outline of the events to a Reader’s-Digest-Hollywood-version. Now I know why so many movies about historical events are flat. It’s too difficult to reveal history in the short period of a film or a play. Hopefully, what will lift The Cuban Missile Tango is that so much of what I’ve staged is movement and dance. The form lifts away from the narrative to create that which is, well, hard to say it any other way - performance. In performance, the story and narrative pull away from its source and become something else.
Remember this is not The Cuban missile crisis, this is The Cuban Missile Tango.
The show plays Aug 27, 28, & 29 @ 7:30; and Aug 30 @ 2:00 (these are the correct dates, our website has not been updated.)