Swampoodle (review)

Less than a mile and a half from the United States Capitol building and lost among the District of Columbia's iconic monumental architecture rests a dilapidated building known variously as the Uline Arena or the Washington Coliseum. Now used as a parking garage, this shell of a structure formerly played host to some of the most significant events in pop culture history, most of which have been either forgotten or overshadowed by the rest of the city. Swampoodle, co-produced by Solas Nua and the Performance Corporation, attempted to rekindle the memory of those historical events and to reclaim the glory days of the arena. Through the historical yet disjointed narrative of the script and fractured exploration of the space, with action taking place in various alcoves around the arena, as well as among the audience and in distorted audio and grainy video projections of footage from the 1950s and '60s, the production produced a meditation on the fragility of history and memory that successfully embodied the past, even as it illuminated the arena's ghosts for a modern audience.

The Uline Arena, which opened in 1941 and was renamed the Washington Coliseum in 1959, served as an athletic venue as well as hosting other major events, such as the Beatles' American premiere two days prior to their historic appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. Over the next half century, the arena held a Malcolm X rally, Will Roger's Follies, and Rudolph Nureyev's performance with the Royal Ballet, along with various other events. By the 1990s, the arena had become a trash-collection facility before its current function as a parking garage.

Karl Quinn in Swampoodle. (Photo: Shauna Alexander.)

The play Swampoodle took place entirely within the arena. As the audience made its way into the cavernous space via a large garage door, a custodian (Michael John Casey) called the people in and recited a brief history of the space and the neighborhood. Structured as a series of episodes, the main narrative provided a historical overview of the arena and the surrounding neighborhood. Rather than a typical linear account, the various scenes and vignettes often occurred independently and seemingly unattached to their adjacent dramatic moments. At one point, an actor stood on some rubble and recited lines from Hamlet; moments later, in another part of the space, a bulldozer demolished a set of living room furniture. Later on, a multitude of vignettes were presented simultaneously around the periphery of the arena: a 1950s crooner singing, ballet dancers performing a routine, a worker piling bags of garbage into a corner—all creating a montage of the past lives of the arena.

Without seating, the audience was left to stand on the floor of the arena. The action of the play occurred throughout the space in various nooks and alcoves, sometimes at a distance from the audience, sometimes with actors moving directly through the crowd. Audience members moved throughout the space as they followed the action, which drew attention to the architecture of the space itself, as though the arena were a character in its own right. Without a single focal point for the audience to watch, portions of the action were lost as a scene at one end of the arena gave way to a subsequent vignette in another part of the space. At the beginning, I attempted to keep up by moving into better positions to see each scene, but after a while I became content to just wait for a scene to arrive in my field of view, as opposed to moving throughout the space.

Just as there were portions of the action that were visually lost due to the staging, a large portion of the spoken dialogue was similarly incomprehensible due to excessive echoes and distortions from the microphones. While these continual audio and visual disconnects might seem detrimental to the performance, they appeared to be part of the larger framework for the production. Indeed, the media techniques that should have connected the audience to the performance proved...