Editorial 6.2, February 2004, by Deirdre Helfferich Bar Fights at the Marlin Hans and I went recently to see Bar Fights, a presentation of four short one-act plays at the Marlin. It was interesting being back in the grotto, seeing those walls again, undecorated by matchbooks or business cards. I’ve been in the Marlin several times since it ceased being the Blue Marlin, usually for Blank Slate art shows or to hear hot musicians like Tim Easton, but it’s not a regular hangout. Every time I go, however, I think on how nicely the place has turned out, and how great it is to see the art on the walls there, and read the classy graffiti in the john, and I think nostalgically of the bad old days when I worked in the Blue Marlin. The Blue Marlin, as some of you may remember, was the underground restaurant serving heavenly pizza, the best damn pizza in Alaska, absolutely yummy garbage pizza piled high with all that is greasy and bad for you (unless you ordered the vegetarian, in which case it was piled high with what looked like bright green fuzz—sprouts—atop an enormous mound of miscellaneous healthful vegetables and fruits). I used to work at the Blue Marlin in the eighties. I remember with great fondness many very late nights after the restaurant closed (like, 6 a.m.) jamming in the basement, singing rock and roll and the blues with a collection of people who weren’t sure which end of a guitar was up and with others like Fred Budda, professional drummer extraordinaire up from the Lower 48 for the Pops Festival (he only came to the Marlin twice that I recall). I also remember, with not nearly so much fondness, cleaning up floods when the sewer backed up, drunken relatives of my coworkers half out of their gourd and stealing beer from the tap, and the all-pervasive smell of pizza. Good pizza, to be sure, but after three unrelenting years of it, it became a bit much.... Although we had video games and after-hours music back then, we didn’t host art shows or poetry slams. This is one way in which the Marlin has gone from superior pizza parlor to classy nightclub, and I’m glad to see the management hosting plays now, as well. Interior Media Evolution, the nonprofit group that sponsored last month’s BiPolar art show here in Ester, sponsored the shorts we saw. The plays were held in the back, overlooked by a decidedly ill-looking marlin on the wall above, survivor (just barely) of the fire that almost claimed the building a few years ago. Each play was about fifteen minutes long and used the same group of from four to six actors. The first play, Slop-Culture by Robb Badlam, was in some ways the weakest, but it was still funny. There was a tendency for the actors to step on each others’ lines, and it required familiarity with American pop culture to appreciate, in particular with television shows like Gilligan’s Island and Tom and Jerry. I’ve seen Gilligan’s Island a few times and am a fan of Tom and Jerry, but my German spouse was at a loss in this one, with many of the references going right past him. The second play, Après Opera by Michael Bigelow Dixon and Valerie Smith, was an interesting character study that verged on slapstick at times. The characters in this play, Peter (played by Dave Fields), Karen, his former lover (Genevieve Taylor), Duncan, Karen’s narcoleptic fiancé (Joel Vonnahme), and Laurel, the hostile waitress (Tamar Geist), meet in an opera-themed restaurant. The action opens with Peter lighting matches and pinching them out with his fingers, evidently not believing that putting them out against his bare skin will indeed result in pain, and so, as he tells the waitress, he is “conducting experiments” by attempting to use different digits and other portions of his anatomy to snuff the flame—resulting, predictably, in lots of swearing. He is there to meet Karen, his once-lover, who has called him out of the blue to arrange the tête-á-tête. Karen, who at first seems quite normal (especially in comparison to Peter the Pyro), proves to be just as weird when she introduces Peter to her soon-to-be husband, Duncan, who is a bit of a geek and peculiar himself. Duncan is socially impaired, to put it mildly, and has the disconcerting problem of falling asleep at the drop of a hat. Karen goes one very large step into oddness when she demonstrates a sadistic streak by inducing a horrible dream in her unconscious and apparently very suggestible fiancé—this for the entertainment of Peter—of a vampire reaching up from the grave to grab Duncan’s leg. She doesn’t tell Duncan if he gets away, leaving him caught in his ghastly nightmare. Of them all, the screaming waitress seems to be the most normal, but even she is pretty peculiar, and prone to take extreme umbrage over, well, nothing. The irony throughout is that each person expects the others to treat them as though they are perfectly ordinary. “And,” as Laurel observes, “pretend nothing’s wrong when there obviously is.” This one also had its rough spots, but by and large, nicely done, and very funny. Loyalties, by Murphy Guyer, was a timely piece and the best of the four plays. The setting is the dining room of Rudy (Andrew Cassel) and Monika (Leah Hill), who are celebrating Monika’s birthday with her sister Katrin (Jennifer Schlotfeldt) and her beau, Jacob (Joel Vonnahme). Rudy, who is an officer in the army, is an opinionated man, firm in his faith in his government and the rightness of the current administration. He’s a bit of a chauvinist, too, and a talker. He keeps calling Jacob “Jake” and it rapidly becomes evident that Rudy and Jacob detest each other. The conversation rambles around, touching on the recent wins in the Olympics, the current conservative government, the value of poetry (Jacob is a poet), and the worth of patriotism. Rudy is, of course, a patriot, and Jacob, being a poet, is more interested in truths that go beyond government. Yet the two characters are not stereotypes of Poet and Patriot—they listen to each other, and while they disagree, they marshal cogent arguments for their views. The two women seem to be primarily background to the developing argument between the men, but gradually the viewer realizes that the relationship between the two sisters is fully as strained as that of their men, but perhaps for different reasons. The party ends with shouted epithets between Rudy and Jacob, each insulting the other’s values—and being revealed as hollow as the other had accused them of being. Rudy resorts to violence after being accused of being a bully and guilty of blind patriotism, and Jacob abandons his lover in pursuit of poetry in Paris, just as shallowly and selfishly as Rudy had declared he was at heart. The sisters have a shouting match, Jacob and Katrin depart separately, and, seemingly, the play is over. But then, Rudy comes out in his army coat, preparing to go to work. He asks his wife if it is so wrong to be patriotic, if love of his country is so terrible. He turns toward the audience, and the red armband he wears with its swastika becomes visible, and everything we have just witnessed changes meaning. From what appeared to be modern times in America, we are suddenly thrown back into 1936 Germany. The import of a selfish, weak, yet artistic man named Jacob leaving his country to go to France takes on an entirely new and sinister dimension, and he no longer seems weak, nor perhaps as selfish as we thought. From imagining George Bush and the neoconservatives, we suddenly think of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and we see both the similarities and the gulf between them. Rudy’s rambling discussion of sports and politics and patriotism is revealed to have far deeper implications than just some harmless blowhard in the army spouting off. His poignant question at the end reveals him to be not a monster, or an unfeeling automaton, but an ordinary man caught up in extraordinarily evil times. The argument between the sisters is suddenly not over choice of men and defending that choice, but over a choice of how—and if—to face a terrible and growing evil all around them. Even the chocolate birthday cake suddenly is very important, reminding me of how rare and very precious something as simple as chocolate was soon to become in Europe. Neither my German husband nor myself saw this plot twist coming. The play was superbly written, and the actors accomplished and thoroughly convincing. The small tensions at the beginning of the play between the women and their men (Katrin futilely moving the wine glass away from Jacob, Monika attempting to divert Rudy’s conversation) were well done, and Cassel’s performance as Rudy was both sympathetic and nuanced. Vonnahme, who provided comic relief in the other shorts, was convincing in this somber role as the overly serious, somewhat snide Jacob. Schlotfeldt was excellent as Katrin, going from the lightly humorous beginning, rolling her eyes in embarrassment at the old argument brewing between Jacob and her brother-in-law, to the violent emotion of the argument between herself and her sister, to her stunned sense of betrayal from Jacob’s decision. Vonnahme didn’t quite bring up his end of this dynamic, as I never was convinced that Jacob cared deeply for Katrin. Still, the play was powerful and shocking, and the tangible fear expressed by Hill as Monika, watching her husband Rudy reveal his moral helplessness at the end, made me shiver—not least because of the peculiar sense of familiarity. The last play, unlike Loyalties, was fairly predictable but amusing nonetheless. Written by Matt Pelfrey, Jerry Springer is God opens with a group of people trying to think of an outlandish enough situation that could get them on the Jerry Springer Show. They conclude that they are too normal and well-adjusted and will have to lie about their relationships to make them seem bizarre enough. They seem like a semi-normal group on the face of it, although the Rivendell sweatshirt worn by Jim (Andrew Cassel) hints at oddness. The actors portray their characters fairly well, each character’s personality convincingly evoked in the few moments allowed them. This play was the most densely populated, with six characters. In the course of their discussion, however, a game of oneupsmanship begins between Jim and RC (Joel Vonnahme) over who has the appropriate amount of machismo to be worthy of a high-class woman such as Dana (Leah Hill), who is RC’s girlfriend. The women in the room get disgusted and start leaving—until Jim can’t stand the Peewee League comparisons anymore and reveals, rather crudely, that he has been boinking Dana. A free-for-all worthy of the Springer show naturally ensues, the imaginary curtain falls, and the evening’s plays come to an end. Overall, very enjoyable, but it is the darkness and echo of today’s society in Loyalties that will stay with me. If Interior Media Evolution continues to put on plays like this set of four, they have a very successful future ahead of them. | ||
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