The Hard-To-Achieve Ease (English Translation)

Eight characters in search of a play: the marvelous Elevator Repair Service in Salzburg

by Mario Jandrokovic

Now how did the story go? Young man, doctor, meets young woman. He’s an idler, she’s too fussy – struggling for intellectual deepness in a painfully awkward way – surounded by a family that “quirky” hardly begins to describe. After a series of confusions involving a precocious sister, an insane mother, sex, a gunslinging homeboy, a weird stomach sickness and a no-less-weird literary club, it all finally comes to something like a happy ending. This would have been enough, just to transform this stuff that soap opera dreams are made of into a mix of absurdist theater and deft comedy, but in fact “Cab Legs,” performed Sunday and Monday at the Metropolis Theater by the New York group Elevator Repair Service, did much better than that.

“Which came first, gravity or the Catholics?” Again and again the seven performers got caught up in absurd conversations that constantly hovered on the brink of uncomfortable silence. The man behind the mixing board augmented the play with a quirky pop-sound backdrop that strangely and abruptly animated the actors into whimsical dance numbers, of which not a single moment of seemingly accidental comedy was in fact left to choreographic chance. With all manner of noises this “technical director” underscored the slapstick nature of the play and also, as the pompously dramatic voice from offstage, took on the role of the young doctor’s severe and righteous father, who falls victim to a renegade: “What’s wrong dad?” — “I’ve been shot.”

With almost no scenery and without dramatic strain, Elevator Repair Service managed to blow open the stage space. The performers repeatedly fell “out of the play”, going on in disorientation, muttering, whispering, gesticulating clumsily, and in this they distinguished themselves with a great acting feat that had the appearance of utmost ease. Certainly this broke the spell of the stage as a place of illusion, but at the same time “Cab Legs” blessed its audience with an unforced and joyful communicative and absolutely magical theater experience.

Above all, the actors, with their tiny, almost unnoticeable yet perfectly suited gestures, broke through the beautiful-bodies pathos too strongly represented in the Szene Festival program, that presentation of acrobatic exertion that in the end only refers to itself.

translation by Scott Shepherd