Review - The Old Woman

I'm normally not a devotee of avant garde theater - I'm such a plot girl, I find it hard to let my brain go and just exist with a surreal piece.  And I don't really understand it as thoroughly as I should.  I will admit, in college I did take a course in surrealism (mainly fiction, not drama), and I do, on occasion, try to expand my brain.  When BAM announced they were doing a Robert Wilson piece starring Willem Dafoe and Mikhail Baryshnikov, I thought, what the heck?

I saw Dafoe in an environmental production of The Hairy Ape a number of years ago and found him to be spectacular.  I've always enjoyed his film work, of course.  And naturally I'm a huge fan of Baryshnikov - not only of his dancing, but of his stage work, as well.  I saw him do some Beckett a few years ago and he was haunting.  So I was inclined to enjoy their work in the Wilson piece.

photo credit: Ruby Washington

No matter how I explained to myself that there wouldn't be a narrative and just go with the flow, it was still a bit difficult for me to completely engage in The Old Woman.  Adapted from a surrealistic text from Russian author Daniil Kharms, Wilson and adaptor Darryl Pinckney have put together more like vignettes than actual scenes.  The original text is about a writer who found a dead old woman in his apartment, he put the woman into a suitcase, and then the suitcase disappeared.  This version doesn't really follow that throughline.  There are references to old women, there's a reference to a body in an apartment, and there are suitcases.  There's a lot of repetition of dialogue, some of it in Russian, some in English.  But the piece is mainly dreamlike flashes of imagery and shapes, not really with dramatic flow. 

photo credit: Ruby Washington

Not that there's anything wrong with that, I guess.  Dafoe and Baryshnikov played rather two sides of the same person.  They wore matching dark suits, whiteface and extreme angular hairdos.  Dafoe was maybe the more angry of the two, Baryshnikov was maybe a little more melancholy.  But they both were fully committed, playful when called for, and chilling in other scenes.  And physically, their performances were expert.  There were two scenes that were mirror images of each other, with the exact same dialogue and same odd movement sequences, but they were spoken with entirely different intent and ended in the complete opposite direction.  I found those two scenes to be lovely and extremely evocative, almost like a weird dream.  Other scenes were harder for me to connect to, which probably doesn't bother any of the creators in the slightest.



photo credit: Ruby Washington

Throughout most of the afternoon, I was extremely intrigued about what would come next, though I did begin to get a little restless by the end.  But to be honest, this could possibly be the most ravishingly beautiful physical production I have ever seen.  The lighting and the manipulation of the actors in space was breathtaking.  The actors were on a swing at one point, with a gorgeous backdrop behind them, and it was glorious.  One scene had one actor with green lighting on his face only, the other actor had red lighting on his hand only.  The manipulation of the lights was expert.  Maybe this didn't work for me as a piece of theater, but it certainly was a stunning work of art, and I'm sure I'll never see anything like it again.  I'm glad I saw it, though I'll be happy to get back to a little plot the next time I'm in a theater... :)  I took quite a few photos on my way to and from Brooklyn, so I'll include some extra photos at the end of the post.  Enjoy!