A God, A Thermos, A Play

Elevator Repair Service Tackles Euripides’ Bacchae

by Julie Bleha

Devised theatre, or how to get from point A to point B

Elevator Repair Service, now in its eleventh year, is a stalwart of New York’s experimental theatre scene. This article will discuss their two-year work on a show (eventually) called Highway to Tomorrow, an adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae. ERS is a collective of artists who make “devised theatre,” developing their shows over lengthy periods of time. In its simplest definition, “devised theater” refers to work done by a collaborative group whose members come together in a room and create a piece, in the concrete sense based on found objects and given circumstances, and in a more abstract sense on ideas and images of interest to the artists involved.

Other companies known for working with similar methodologies include New York City’s Wooster Group, Chicago’s Goat Island, and the UK’s Sheffield-based Forced Entertainment. Forced Entertainment’s artistic director, Tim Etchells, describes his company’s working process: [It] has always mixed improvisation with writing, argument, discussion, and latterly at least, a great deal of watching back through videotapes of the previous day’s work. It’s a process in which no single aspect of the theatrical vocabulary is allowed to lead — so that set design, found costume, soundtrack, text fragment or idea for action might each just as well take the lead as a source or starting point in the project.

Etchells also notes that this “process . . . refuses to know, at the outset, what it is looking for.” Just as Etchells hopes that Forced Entertainment’s work will “remain ahead of our thinking,” (17) ERS’s John Collins has said in an interview that his colleagues ask of themselves that they will “follow impulses without examination.” Like Forced Entertainment, ERS revels in devising work, because the process is full of ambiguity, allowing for multiple meanings in both a theatrical and an intellectual sense, and because no values are assigned to objects, or even to texts, at a project’s inception. While the artists undoubtedly utilize their intellect, they privilege immediacy over reflection — at least in the beginning phases of a project. Another trait ERS shares with these companies is the devotion to lengthy development periods for the work. It can take anywhere from one to three years to finish a piece, with “finished” being a relative term, as the piece can live on in the repertory, ripe for change when it is revived.

Dali, McGurk, Williams, and Wuornos, or love and hate in the rehearsal room

Of the many thematic and performative throughlines in ERS’s aesthetic that have developed over the past decade, an emphasis has emerged on the company members’ shared sense of humor and on a literal conception of “play” — in their view, both fundamental elements of theatre. At the same time, however, ERS members have evinced, throughout the life of the company, a certain suspicion about received notions of theatre and theatricality. They abhor heavy-handed theatricality, a dislike which sometimes leads company members to make declarations that seem strikingly anti-theatrical in tone. Time and again, comments (from various company members) like “[let’s] shake off some of this theatre” resound in the rehearsal room. This of course puts the company and its work in a precarious position, theoretically and practically, because their work is most definitely in and of the theatre; yet one can see the company’s effort to, at the very least, redefine received notions of theatricality as a laudable one.

Bradley Glenn, a veteran of many ERS shows, wryly noted in an email that the company has a “love-hate” relationship with theatre: In rehearsal we have always joked about something Richard Foreman said, to the effect that “A jar rolling across the stage…could qualify as theatre.” Although we joke about that, since the beginning the group has always asked, time again, “What is theatre?” and I think the most successful shows offer several options and answers. ERS takes quotidian objects such as those suggested by Foreman and uses them in its search for the answer to what exactly theatre may be.

Once rehearsals for a new show commence, all available company members (performers, directors, designers, choreographers, technicians) and occasional guest artists assemble, and from this conjunction of minds and bodies are planted the seeds of a play. Projects proceed from a kind of a tabula rasa, as if the artists have to review and relearn how to build a show. Taking seriously assorted mundane questions — “What do you want to see?” “What takes up an hour?” — someone brings in an object, another text or a sound source, or someone employs an object found in the space to start “playing.” Here is where the fun begins, as the ludic atmosphere that pervades every ERS piece is teased into existence during the rehearsal process. Because of this commitment to the possibility of chance and change, it is difficult to predict form an ERS play’s inception what it might be “about” in more than a general sense, or indeed, how it might ultimately look and sound. ERS answers its fundamental question — “What is theatre?” — by privileging experience over narrative. This tendency is exemplified in the company’s work on The Bacchae.

Elevator Repair Service’s membership has changed over time, but the company continues to sustain a strong artistic profile through an artistic directorship that has developed a highly distinctive theatrical aesthetic. Since its founding in 1991, ERS executive director John Collins has steered each project. Company member Steve Bodow joined him as co-director in 1997. Collins, a sound designer as well as a director, has worked with Richard Foreman and continues a long-time stint as sound designer with the Wooster Group. In an ERS show, sound cues function as lines or choreographic gestures do, and the sound operators work in parity with the actors. As with a Wooster Group show, sound design is built into the very fabric of an ERS show — there are no cue sheets. Though ERS’s aesthetic is distinctly lo-tech in regards to set (and costume) design, it is decidedly hi-tech in its sound design. The rehearsal room is set up with an impressive array of sound gear: aside from component stereo equipment, there is a computer running a custom-designed sound-effects system, as well as microphones, headphones, and resources for music and sound clips. All of these can be connected in various ways, allowing for sonic experimentation.

Since its debut with Mr. Antipyrene, Fire Extinguisher, ERS has produced nine shows, and as of this writing (Fall 2002) they were working on a tenth, Room Tone. Earlier productions focused on topics as far ranging as Salvador Dali’s mythical lost screenplay for Marx Brothers, to an infamous bar (McGurk’s Suicide Hall) in late-nineteenth-century New York City, to the peculiar life and mindset of Andy Kaufman. These shows theatricalized abstract ideas through found objects (e.g. carpet remnants with tape markings) and found texts (e.g. physics lectures).

In 1996, ERS for the first time embraced a text written specifically for the theatre, using Tennessee William’s play Summer and Smoke as the basis for Cab Legs. They “translated” William’s language to create a loosely contemporary text by paraphrasing his words (leaving room for moments of improvised dialogue) around which they performed dances inspired by Betty Boop cartoons and Bollywood musicals. Cab Legs stands out for its exuberant choreography, created by the company but with a separate credit also going to long-time company member Katherine Profeta. In their next show, Total Fictional Lie, ERS returned to found text by mining a number of documentaries on vaudeville, serial killer Aileen Wuornos, Paul Anka, turkey hunters, and traveling Bible salesmen. Total Fictional Lie is concerned with how people present themselves in seemingly non-fictive moments; ideas of presence and presentation were turned inside out (and literally upside down) in this show. Prefiguring their interest in The Bacchae, the company plumbed the difference in varying versions of truth: In a documentary, can we believe the omniscient narrator? Can we believe seemingly objective witnesses? Or are they, as much as anyone, subject to a misrecognition of their own subjectivity and impulses? Total Fictional Liehighlighted the conjunction and the disparity between performers and the personas they presented to their audience. Artifice and, more importantly, the actor’s presence were foregrounded on many levels.

Total Fictional Lie caromed back and forth from dance to appropriated documentary dialogue, eschewing text-driven narrative logic and relying primarily on the show’s singular choreography for structural cohesion. Although the show was a crowd pleaser, one could appreciate the individual vignettes and dances more readily than any inherent dramaturgical logic which tied the scenes together. Perhaps in reaction to Total Fictional Lie‘s lack of a conventionally theatrical narrative structure built on plot and character, ERS’s next project, which would become known as Highway to Tomorrow, took a renewed interest in tackling dense text. In fact, ERS increased the stakes of the challenge, selecting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, as their source text. Both Bodow and Collins felt that the best way for the company to engage with text was to attack an abundance of words, hence the choice of a novel.

Puppets and people, or all tomorrow’s parties

This first version of Highway to Tomorrow (HTT1 of an eventual four) was performed in an August 1999 workshop. Actors sat at a table and manipulated a motley assortment of hand-made puppets (a shoe and a mallet both with sunglasses taped to them, a thermos with a pair of self-adhesive googly eyeballs affixed to it) while they read aloud from segments of Fitzgerald’s novel. When HTT was next mounted in November 1999 (HTT2), the company had switched its source text to another Fitzgerald novel, the unfinished Last Tycoon. Two of the five actors from HTT1 were replaced; similarly, only some of the puppets from HTT1 remained in use, most notably the thermos.

Rehearsals for HTT3 resumed in the spring of 2000 with the intention of revising and expanding the piece. Steve Bodow suggested yet another shift in text, to Euripides’ Bacchae, and the company agreed that it was a challenging idea for them to tackle a Greek play. Their encounters with the novels had shown that the most fecund texts were those replete with material resistant to dramatization. In Greek drama, large-scale action is often reported but not physically staged, i.e. not seen. This characteristic met the working parameters established in HTT1 and HTT2. A happy accident in language confirmed the choice: all agreed that the thermos offered a felicitous stand-in for the thyrsus of The Bacchae. The thyrsus is a fennel stalk that serves as emblem for Dionysus, even taking on the attributes of a scepter in its designation of his power. In HTT, the fennel stalk would become a stand-in for the god. Hence, the thermos, as punning stand-in for the thyrsus, came to stand as double for the Dionysian persona. The accident lay in the fact that such a relationship could only be guessed at in those early rehearsals: all the company knew was that they had a felicitous pun at their disposal.

The ambiguity inherent in devised theatre suggests doubling, which is of course one of the main motifs in The Bacchae. The choice of play was a particularly apt one for ERS, given their working methods. Moreover, The Bacchae‘s inherent examination of theatricality itself was in perfect consonance with one of ERS’s long-standing concerns, the presence of the performer. The play’s central character reveals himself as Dionysus to the audience but “acts” the “role” of the stranger from Lydia to the other characters. This deliberate confusion between actor and character offered the company one of several rich opportunities for further exploration into the notion of presence. Guest artist Randolph Curtis Rand, in a tour de force, presented Dionysus as vaudevillian interlocutor, vaguely threatening cartoonesque villain, and smooth-talking talk show host, ready to explain the intricacies of the situation.

Rand joined the company in the spring of 2000 for HTT3. Remaining from HTT2 were guest artist Paul Boocock (brought in for HTT2) and mainstay company members Susie Sokol and James Hannaham. Rehearsals began with questions that already would have been answered in a more conventional working process. It was not clear, for example, how the directors would cast the different roles from The Bacchae, since it was not yet determined how many characters would even be used. As usual for ERS, they decided to let their circumstances dictate and take precedence over the text’s demands. Four actors, several puppets, and choreography from previous versions, most notably a dance called “Impotence,” became the raw materials for HTT3. The music for “Impotence” was already set: it was a looped track (without vocals) from a Fela Kuti song, a rhythmically energetic piece, the power of which set the pace for the show’s ebullient pacing and rhythm.

At this time, the company was using sound to address some of the difficulties inherent in working with a dense text, using various pieces of equipment (literally) laying around the rehearsal room. In general, the directors (Collins in particular) were bothered by the abundance of verbiage. They wanted to try to overemphasize the words rather than ignore the problem, in the hopes that confronting the language in this manner would allow them to control it. One suggestion was to have “offstage” actors read lines into a microphone which was run into a headset worn by the “onstage” actor. Both actors would be saying the lines of the scene, with a fractional delay between the first (off-stage) actor and the second (onstage) actor. Another time, Susie Sokol brought in a videotape of a Werner Herzog movie, and Collins captured and looped an auctioneer’s patter from the film and fed that into headphones. This deliberate addition of white noise was the director’s attempt to use technology to stymie what they felt were overly literate moments onstage. Worth noting in this practice was the company’s ability to try fairly complex tactics at a moment’s notice. Ultimately, many of these experiments did not make it to the final product, but their resonance distinctly influenced the actors’ work. One moment of “doubled” speech that did remain was to be found in Dionysus’ manipulation of his table microphone. Due to his varied use of it, he offered a double sonic “vision” of his character, at times intimate, at times distanced from the audience.

As casting firmed up, one of the tasks the company set itself was to rename the people and places of Euripides’ play to something contemporary and geographically recognizable. In doing so, it played with an absurd dissonance in the contrast between matter and nomenclature, such as the contrast between thermos and thyrsus. Thebes became St. Louis, and the “stream of Dirce / and the waters of Ismenus” became the Susquehanna (Bacchae1.5-6). The Chorus of Maenads became the collective personae “the Asian women” (played by James Hannaham). Teresias morphed into Teri the Seer, Cadmus into Carl, Pentheus became Paul (the name of the actor, Paul Boocock), and when Agave (Rinne Groff) was added for HTT4the following autumn, she was renamed Holly. Interestingly, Dionysus, the focal point of the play, remained Dionysus. During the runs ofHTT3 and HTT4, spectators found this playful “misnaming” quite humorous, but their laughter masked a more subtle issue. The play marks Dionysus as an outsider, and the new nomenclature underscored the distinction between the god and the other characters. At the same time, it also highlighted a consonance between the actor Paul and the character Paul. Just as The Bacchae subverts and simultaneously reinforces the paradoxical theatrical conventions of disjunction and communion, so did ERS’s tactics in Highway to Tomorrow.

Some of the most interesting examples of the slippage in identification and meaning came from the group’s effort to work the pre-Bacchaeelements into the new framework. In HTT2, the company had included reference to the film version of The Last Tycoon to provide a visual reference for its work. This was a natural move for the group, as so much of its inspiration comes from visual sources. HTT2‘s cast members had transcribed actions from a scene in The Last Tycoon in which Tony Curtis’s character is trying to explain to Robert de Niro that he, Curtis, is impotent. Movements culled from the scene became the basis for a dance named, appropriately, “Impotence.” Company members copied selected gestures of de Niro and Curtis — in real time, as best they could. A video monitor set up in a corner of the room showed the film during rehearsals, forcing the performers to refer to it while executing their moves, circulating in the space according to Collins’s and Bodow’s direction. As they worked, Collins videotaped them.

Collins and Bodow decided that “Impotence” would open HTT3. In rehearsal, the actors, directors and choreographer screened both theHTT2M rehearsal tape and The Last Tycoonagain, to transcribe still more actions. Moves taken from the earlier rehearsal were copied, repeated, expanded, adapted, and subsequently “translated” by the current company into a new dance sequence. (Other visual sources were used, but The Last Tycoon provided the bulk of the material.) Like images from an infinite mirror, second- and third-generation moves filtered through the performer’s body, expanding the roster of gestures exponentially. (ERS refers to this work as “dance translation.”) The directors eventually removed the VCR and TV monitor from the rehearsal room. Unable to reference the seemingly “live” images of the earlier cast dancing, HTT3‘s cast was left only with the memory to provide reference points.

In the new version of “Impotence,” the performers repeatedly looked at the place where the video monitor had been in the room forHTT2‘s rehearsal. This move became a foundational step in the dance, with the performers all trying to retain a sense of fidelity to the experience of their (or their earlier counterpart’s) looking to the monitor for guidance. Or course, the audience had no knowledge that such a monitor ever existed, but in performance, the dance’s potency stemmed from a sense of latent anxiety as the actors craned their necks towards the downstage right corner. The dance thus became a celebration of high energy that was also fraught with tension, a perfect opening gambit for The Bacchae. ERS’s strategic uses of video as a layering device in rehearsal deepened the performed scene’s dramatic resonance.

In fact, ERS is very much a (collective) creature of the heavily mediatized culture we live in. This is apparent in their use of video and sound technology. It is also apparent in the jump-cut aesthetic they apply to their staging, inspired by film and television techniques. For instance, while watching The Last Tycoon, company members noted that the positions of the actors would change from shot to shot, as if they had moved “off camera.” Indeed they had, but in response to the technical demands of shooting, not necessarily for the storyline’s needs. The audience is not privy to these “off-camera” moves, but must simply accept the new information. In an attempt to simulate these abrupt changes, “Impotence” was given rapid twists and turns meant to suggest similar extreme physical shifts.

At another point in rehearsal, there was a problem with the segue form the end of one speech into the next beat. Steve Bodow asked, “what happens when there’s a break between scenes in a sitcom?” John Collins responded “what can we learn from sitcoms?” Both agreed they might find a solution from TV’s shooting practices: one might, for instance, see an exterior shot with no actor visible, so the directors suggested that all actors run behind the wall to give a narrative and visual break to what was happening (tape of HTT rehearsals on 6 May 2000). To say that Bodow and Collins referenced sitcom camera strategies is not to suggest that the idea was an easy fix to their problem (as it happens, they discarded the suggestion). Rather, it is to underscore their familiarity with the televisual, to see how its generic modes can crossover and inform, hopefully for the better, theatrical modes.

The play had not been cast, at least not in the traditional sense, at the time work began on “Impotence” in HTT3‘s rehearsals. Actors had merely been trading reading assignments; character relationships were grounded only in the contingencies of a particular rehearsal. Once the show was cast, it was interesting to note how the choreography reflected character relationships. Paul/Paul and Randy/Dionysus faced off at one point in the dance, as Paul and Dionysus would later in the play. Even the name “Impotence” prefigured the dissipation of Paul’s power throughout the course of the play, his failure to thwart Dionysus, his inability to effectively rule his city, and ultimately his disgrace as a fallen son, murdered by a mad mother.

A similar example of “dance translation” can be found in the choreography for “Butt Dance.” Also created without an idea of where and how it would fit into the play, it was inspired by a text from the 1960s, brought in by Bodow, that showed exercises prescribed for facial muscles. Company members then transferred the moves south to the gluteus maximus (and the adjacent muscles), basing the dance on the spontaneous flexing of these muscles in isolation from the rest of the body. Notwithstanding its name, the dance also retained (exaggerated) versions of the source book’s facial poses. Used to set the tone for the Maenads’ mountainside activities, it was termed an “ecstatic ritual” in the scene breakdown of the Fall 2000 (HTT4) program. It enjoyed an enthusiastic response from the audience.

HTT4 opens with soft music playing in the background, providing atmosphere for the lo-tech set, bereft of anyone onstage. There is a small table stage left, with a pile of books on it and a microphone stand and microphone to the left of the table. There is a red picnic cooler on the offstage side of the table. A folding chair and a puffy pink dress hang on nails on the wall behind the desk. Stage right is an even smaller table up against the back wall, with a fish tank along its upstage edge and an electronic keyboard along its downstage edge. There is a pole upstage center; this serves as the meeting point for two plywood walls, which extend upstage as they form a right angle. Continuing out from the stage-right panel (parallel with the upstage edge of the playing area) is a shorter panel, about waist high. All of a sudden, a thermos with stuck-on plastic eyes “enters” walking behind the lower wall, “looks” at the audience, and darts back down again behind the wall. It reappears again, “reading” from a single sheet of paper, obviously increasingly agitated at what the paper contains. Annoyed and frustrated, the thermos jerks the paper down behind the wall, crumples it, and throws it back over the wall in our direction. The thermos ducks down again, and we hear the smashing and crashing sounds that are the universal signifiers for a frantic search for a misplaced object.

Throughout this business, spectators respond with a steady stream of chuckles and guffaws. The thermos resurfaces with an oversized book entitled Hypnotism for Everyone. As it proceeds to dart behind the book, then returns to stare out at us, we realize it is trying to hypnotize us. There’s a lag of a few seconds, and then we start to really laugh at this sequence. But are we laughing at the thermos in action or are we giving credence to its persona in the play, its assumption that we can be hypnotized? Because by laughing, we are already buying into the conceit to a certain degree, as we are admitting its presence and the effect of that presence. And we laugh some more when the thermos, after staring fixedly at us for a number of seconds, flops over and hits its “head” on the edge of the wall; it has transfixed itself. We are removed enough to enjoy the thermos’s mistake, yet we are also transfixed by the scene, and we remain firmly in the theatrical grasp of the player and its, or his, play — for we have come to anthropomorphize the thermos (regularly given the male pronoun by the cast, who otherwise call “him” Thermie). Before we know much else about this piece, we know the thermos is a major player, and this knowledge clues us into the idea that we are not going to watch a typical rendition of The Bacchae — whether or not we also “get” the thyrsus/thermos pun. The sequence ends with the entrance of a woman in a gown (we later realize she is Holly/Agave). She stealthily approaches the thermos, reaches for it, and clasps it to her chest, banging herself, and it, against the wall where it meets the pole. At the moment of impact, we hear a goat’s bleat. After this, the stage explodes into the “Impotence” dance.