Libel's piece, "Four Ways to Look Up," combined dance, monologues, dialogue and voiceover narration to tell a fragmented tale centered around a girl (Libel) who is searching for her best friend, Klaus the ventriloquist and wannabe tightrope walker. She never does find her friend, but in her search she encounters three Lewis Carroll-esque characters: a parachutist (Carl Angiolillo '04) who can't take flight, a creepily robotic fellow (Jacob Heim '04) who invites cardboard people over to dinner and a woman (Annie Lok '01) who pulls around a red wagon containing paper boats and tells a nostalgic story about her father.
Though initially confusing (Libel began the piece with a monologue which was as disjointed as the puppet-like dance movements which accompanied it), "Four Ways" gradually gelled into a cohesive whole. The four characters had no obvious connection to each other in a narrative sense (they had no shared history, and they did not encounter each other in a clearly defined place or time), but they were unified by a somewhat pathetic, somewhat romantic yearning for the unattainable (in other words, '"looking up").
The piece featured a soft-shoe number set to the Beatles' "When I'm 64," and the allusion to "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band" is a telling one. Not only did "Four Ways" approximate the pseudo-Victorian psychedelic imagery of
"Sergeant Pepper's," but it echoed that album's theme of the dangers and necessity of fantasy-building in an unaccommodating world.
However, unlike the Beatles' rather sobering conclusion ("Day in the Life"), "Four Ways" concluded on a literally uplifting note, as all four characters danced together and swung each other through the air. Klaus never appears, the parachutist never takes flight, the cardboard people remain cardboard, and the elusive father never returns-but at least, Libel seemed to argue, these four misfits have each other.
Visually, "Four Ways" was a startling achievement, featuring engagingly quirky costumes and choreography, as well as a lyrical moment where Angiolillo ran around the stage as the multi-colored silk of his parachute billowed out behind him. The performers, particularly Heim, brought out the humor of the piece.
Less effective were the passages addressing the concept of time (a voiceover narrator repeatedly made reference to a world where the laws of physics are skewed), as their connection to the main theme of 'looking up' was never clearly established. The progression from pathos to uplift also happened a little too quickly for my taste, but that did not significantly detract from what, on the whole, was a cleverly conceived and soulfully performed exercise in avant-garde theater.
Septien's piece, "To One Whom I Saw as Small," was more conventional in both content and structure, but no less original in execution. The heroine, Ruthie (Septien), is the three-time Spelling Bee Champion of the World. Living in a household that seems to come straight out of the Eisenhower era, she is encouraged in her spelling endeavors by her oblivious ex-inventor father (Bernard Bygott '02E), her mute homemaker mother (Diana Buirski '02) and her tutor, the airheaded Professor Dewey (Matthew Moses '02). When Ruthie finds a photograph of herself from her first spelling bee, she begins to re-evaluate her life, a process which kicks into high gear when she falls in love with Cliff (Nathaniel Miller '01), an excruciatingly shy banjo player.
Although the concept of time was not as overtly addressed in the Septien piece as it was in "Four Ways," I found Septien's treatment of the subject to be more effective. By using rapid repetition and time skips, she showed how a "good morning" between family members five years ago is the same as-yet subtly and heartbreakingly different than-the "good morning" of today.
The performances that Septien got out of her actors were nothing less than extraordinary. Bygott, with his craggy, perpetually startled features, captured the obtuseness and tenderness of a father who definitely does not know best. Miller's Cliff instantly won the audience's sympathy with his aw-shucks drawl, while Buirksi convinced me of the mother's sadness without saying anything for most of the play. The flashiest part belonged to Moses, who capped his hilariously chipper turn as Professor Dewey with a faux figure skating routine-without ever leaving his ever-present rolling chair.
The performances went a long way in enriching material that was essentially old hat. The villains here-suburban mediocrity and the spiritual emptiness of a success-is-everything society-had been easy targets for satire long before Arthur Miller simultaneously decimated and immortalized them in "Death of a Salesman" and Kevin Spacey and co. re-packaged them for modern consumption with "American Beauty."
Still, I believe that the "how" of any piece is far more important than the "what," and Septien found ingenious ways to invigorate old ideas, using music, simple but effective choreography, and stylized dialogue and staging to deconstruct and reinvent her smell-the-roses fable.