The Awkward Age: New York's New Experimental Theater

I

The performance begins when three people wander in. All are in their twenties or early thirties. They make their way toward three chairs and sit. The chairs are creaky. They are mortified. They glance up, startled, see an audience, blanch, fumble, shrug. They look at each other, then at the wall. They simply ended up, somehow, in front of an audience. They don't have any lines--nobody's given them any, it's so unfair, and they didn't know they'd be forced to act--and unlike Pirandello's characters, they cannot improvise. Their own stories, one suspects, are not too melodramatic or unwieldy or giddily nonsensical or shocking or violent or repetitive for the theater, but too banal.

The time stretches out. One girl flashes her orthodontia, gets scared, tucks her chin into her chest, stares at the floor. There is nothing romantic or touching about her lack of grace. She and the other two, they're just American kids, brought up on trash TV and microwaved meals. They look healthy enough, if a tad sallow, and they've probably got decent, maybe even expensive, American college degrees. What they don't have is a damn thing to say.

Finally, the girl who smiled starts whispering to herself--asides, maybe even a dialogue, that the audience can't hear. Here and there, a word or two comes through: "preacher's daughter," "handkerchief," "bad cold." To her relief, another actor tentatively begins to whisper in dialogue with her. The half-heard snippets build to a critical mass, and after a few moments it hits me: they are performing, or rather paraphrasing in a post-Brando mumble, Summer and Smoke. Were the characters too lurid, was the language too lyrical, the story too passionate, for these young actors to take seriously?

Every now and then, the action is interrupted by a nerdy dance, the actors' bodies signaling not so much through the Artaudian flames or Chekhovian tears as through distraction. In one such dance, they perform simple, repetitive movements, crossing and uncrossing their arms in sync, but their facial muscles and eyes are possessed, seized by nervous energy. One young woman blinks involuntarily. Another is muttering. They could be members of Ishmael Reed's Wallflower Order; the W.O.'s sacred creed could be their own: "I, my muscles, stone, the marrow of my spine, plaster, my back supported by decorated paper, stand here as goofy as a Dumb Dora." What happened to virtuosity? Or is this its new incarnation--artful artlessness?

II

The performance begins when three people, like, wander in. They are mall rats, barely out of teenybopperdom, and they move like scoliotics. Like the Wallflower Order actors, they sport costumes assembled from the Goodwill reject pile--1970s synthetic fashions so dated and hideous they've come back around to hip. They stand around in silence, betraying nary a flicker of animation, virtuosos of a new experimental theatrical ideal: antipresence. One of the girls, a character called "Lori" (the "i" says it all), picks up a prop phone. "Hello?" she says dully, then holds the receiver to her ear for what seems an eternity of dead air. All three blink awkwardly and stand pigeon-toed but nobody moves--they slump in place. Finally, Lori replaces the receiver. "John is driving over," she reports in a loud, flat tone to no one in particular. "He wants to see what we bought." Nobody reacts. Has this drama's stasis been broken or merely extended? By the way, this is drama, right?

III

Before the performance begins, a bunch of people are kind of, like, hanging out on stage. One of the performers waves to someone she knows in the audience; a stage manager in jeans wanders on with a prop. The actors are in costumes that evoke turn-of-the-century Europe, but here and there pieces are missing. Everyone sports smeared red semicircles under their eyes...