Relentless (review)

There is no easy way to reduce the Double Edge Theatre's production, Relentless, to only a few ideas or images. The company's performance piece about men and women defined by the search for idealized sex and love is filled with gorgeous, disturbing, and visceral pictures in nearly constant motion. At times, director Stacy Klein overwhelms her audience with the lush mixture of light, sound, and movement. At other times, the images are as simple as a man walking slowly through the theatre space with an extended accordion, silent except for the breath-like sound coming from the instrument. Celebrating the experimental theatre's twentieth anniversary, this performance was shown at the Farm, Double Edge's idyllic rehearsal, performance, and living space in Ashfield, Massachusetts.

Relentless often defies interpretation; like Odin Teatret of Denmark or New York's Wooster Group, Klein's troupe creates its theatre pieces as extended meditations on a theme. Working with company members Jennifer Johnson, John Peitso, and Carlos Uriona (himself one of the founders of Argentina's seminal performance group, Diablomundo), Klein and Double Edge explore a landscape of passion through a mood of eroticism and constantly unfulfilled or deferred desire.

Created by the performers and Klein over a period of three years, Relentless is a pastiche of music, texts, and imagery. It combines the poetry of Lorca and Rilke, the confession of Susan Smith (the South Carolina woman who allowed her car to go into a lake with her two children inside), and the music of Telemann and American composer John Willbye, as well as many other texts and musical pieces. The actors use dance, circus, commedia, and other methods to create the chaotic world of the characters. It is a dreamscape, and as such, the images alone and together constitute the foundation of meaning.

Describing a few of those potent images can give a glimpse into the work. Johnson is handed an apple by Uriona from out of a chamber pot, and she hikes up her skirts to sit astride the pot as she devours the apple. Upstage, the men play music and dance. She pulls out a hand puppet from between her legs and laughs at its presence. Finally, she cannot put anymore in her mouth, and she begins to reject the apple, spitting and gagging, spewing the pieces across the stage as the men stare in shock. She slides herself out of the scene on the chamber.

In another moment, Johnson writhes on the bed as Peitso is beneath, moving the bed under her. Peitso glides the bed all over the stage as Johnson occasionally reaches for him, and Zbigneu Preisner's music from The Double Life of Veronique surges through the scene. Uriona, who had attempted to make love to Johnson, moves into the background and opens the double doors upstage. In the dim light he undresses in the tub and stands and stares at Johnson as she is rolled around the stage.

In the most overwhelming passage, Johnson, wearing torch pads that dangle from metal lines on her wrists, lights the pads on candles and spins them and her body frantically as if dancing to death while speaking Rilke's The Prodigal Son. She continues until she is out of breath and crying as the flames go out.

Uriona enters on a loft above the stage floor, reciting from dissident Argentinean journalist Jacobo Timerman's story of his imprisonment and torture at the hands of authorities, Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. Throughout, she manipulates puppets that "speak" Timerman's powerful text: "And now, I must talk about you, about that long night we spent together, during which you were my brother, my father, my son, my friend. Or, are you a woman? If so, we pass the night as lovers. You're merely an eye, yet you too remember that night, don't you. . . that night that we conquered death?" Peitso appears and embraces Johnson from behind, and they dance a passionate...