![_There's A Hair In My Psychedelic Psoup: Ty Segall and White Fence at the Mohawk [Show Preview]](http://austinist.com/assets_c/2012/05/tysegallwhitefence-thumb-250x250-716638.jpeg)
Review: Two Rooms and Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat at the City Theater's Summer Acts Festival [Theater]
War plays... mmm. They're difficult; you're trying to snare a (likely reluctant) American audience to sit and dutifully hear information they've probably been avoiding being assaulted by on a daily basis by the media for (has it been, really?) seven years now. Reports of war violence and repercussions trickle into this country in an inoffensive, marginally affecting, and ultimately ignorable stream. The stakes for a production are obviously higher when the subject matter is unlikely to appeal to an weary audience wary of more of the same dispassionate, banal regurgitation of factoids.
War plays tend to be most penetrating when they're either a purgative swan song or an incendiary call to arms. When dealing with something so polarizing, it's shrewd to shoot out tethers from one camp or the other. But which is more "necessary" in our milieu of the United States of the Comparative Comfort Zone? In other countries, offering both a mourning space and re-ignition zone with the same piece would be most economical. Considering our non-war-wife, distracted majority, however, a bellowing, shocking demand for change certainly has more potential to motivate.
That is not to say, by a stretch, that the elegiac does not have a place. Two Rooms can function adequately enough when that purpose is forefront: commiseration is still a marketable commodity. The play, which concerns a woman dealing with the media and bureaucratic representatives while awaiting government action to spur the release of her war-prisoner husband, is pretty soft by today's standards. The swirl of long-winded allegories, florid narrative monologues, and "Isn't this wrong? And sad and complicated? Yes it is", elbow-nudging commentary typical of commercial theater of the late 80's/ early 90's make it a soft, frustrated piece about impending loss and conflicted imperative that, when properly affected, is structured to inspire empathy rather than action.
Rapscallions On The Periphery's production is never really imbued with the sort of fierce connection, depth, and sense of time that the play requires to optimally function. The play takes place over a three year span of time, but there's so little accruing guilt, remorse, apathy, hope, and resentment in the characterizations that its intended effect upon relationships is rendered effete. The barren set, reflective of the woman in question's desire to have a space that mirrors her husband's holding cell, offers an aftertaste of hope growing stale, but that motif is endorsed and explored so little through performance that the play's inquisition of the practicality of hope is still rendered pointless. This piece can pack a specific punch if charged with a constantly morphing ambivalence, shove, and active sincerity but there is rarely ever a sense of vibrating, convicted-and-paradoxically-conflicted connection, and it seems that the actors rarely understand the potential impact their characters might have upon the others. Subtext is steamrolled and crucial pensiveness is sacrificed for a racing, clubfooted pace that results in a hugely unsuitable shallowness. Save a few moments that (to actress Val Frazee's credit) spiderweb-crack war-wife Lanie's blurred malaise, the proceedings seem to barely truly affect the characters in any real, substantial way. Instead of providing selling-point catharsis, this light-touch production proves to be about as affecting as a human interest story on the evening news.
Audiences are considerably more difficult to draw in to the theater than they were when Two Rooms was written, and are generally more drawn to stylistic risks and symbolic stakes than to literalism. When tackling matter meant to really affect, plays more brutal, visually graphic, and aggressive in tact and larger in scope are in order. Pieces like English playwright Mark Ravenhill's Shoot/ Get Treasure/ Repeat. Heavy and suffocating like so many blankets thrown in hostage situations, Shoot... is Ravenhill's exquisitely-stitched response to issues of lost conquest, gained hierarchy, and unseen costs of hope. Out Of Context's production of selections from Ravenhill's cycle of short plays regarding the consequences of inserting Western ideologies into a society (willing or otherwise) claws at the eyes and chest. Capitalizing upon looping, graphic imagery, the heavy repetition of motifs and words in the piece, and a set structured like a classroom, this stitched-up production (reconstituted by the director) pummels rhythmically until one leaves the theater feeling as one should more frequently: changed.
The force isn't even; the men in the piece, charged with similar performance challenges, simply cannot pull the weight and pack the punch the women do. The soldiers in Ravenhill's work, reduced to a libidinous mental adolescence, are dichotomous indictments, characters just a shade too dark and hyper-real to be really satirical, and these performances simply don't convey that. It's actually almost appropriate, however, being that the women, who are the most abused (in the common sense) in these pieces, and who are most commonly depicted as media-darling victims, should be the most polarizing and magnetic. Kinsey Keck, though seemingly geared towards more presentational forms like Restoration and musical theater, offers instinct and piercing engagement that are palpable, but the real reason the show works, the entity that sculpts the thing into a shame-spurring, gorgeous obelisk is Kristi Brawner. With such thick, heavy material, the show could've devolved into a well-intentioned, "college show" mess were it not for the nearing-prodigious capacities of this young actress. Her horrifying, transfixing performances amplify and enunciate everything Ravenhill's script shouts and establish her as the sort of actress needed for the sort of show we need: raw, open-handed, alter-sprawling, able to draw attention from those who might otherwise tune out, and explicit.
And at this point, that's what's appropriate. Why else would the anti-war movement have needed a figure like Cindy Sheehan to finally galvanize it? When the war came home in the form of a grieving mother, and the crosses erected at her protest site to drive home the number of young men and women who died, they emblazoned the concept of suffering and injustice into the conscious. By showing the blood and turning the numbers we'd heard on the news into the children of people who we can relate to, they were able to shatter the plexiglass that separated people from action. And why shouldn't thrusting, vicious theater be able to do the same? The really exhilarating thing about a play like Ravenhill's—and what's missing from Two Rooms—is that, ultimately, it makes good street theater. It's kinetic and mobile—as if to say, "If they won't come to us, we'll go to them."
