Ernest Shackleton Loves Me by Joe DiPietro (review)

Since the early 2000s, husband and wife team Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda (two-thirds of the “power-pop trio” GrooveLily) have ventured into the world of composing for the stage. To date, their most well-known theatrical works are two “rewired” versions of classic fairy tales, Striking 12(an urban riff on “The Little Match Girl”) and Sleeping Beauty Wakes(set in a modern-day sleep-disorder clinic), both collaborations with playwright Rachel Sheinkin. Milburn and Vigoda’s most recent theatrical foray, the two-person, time-traveling, cyber-love story Ernest Shackleton Loves Me, received its electric world premiere in the Seattle Repertory Theatre’s intimate Leo K. Theatre, presented by Balagan Theatre. Coauthored with Memphisscribe Joe DiPietro and directed by Lisa Peterson ( An Iliad), Shackletonis an ambitious work whose strengths lie as much in the technical expertise that is required to pull it off as in its whimsical book and score.

Vigoda originally conceived the piece in 2009 as a solo performance piece after experimenting with music-looping technology to create and manipulate layers of sound bites in real time. Here, Vigoda’s blue-and-violet, coiffed single mother Kat was joined onstage by the charismatic, protean Wade Mc-Collum in a number of roles, including Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton, deadbeat boyfriend Bruce, and even Ponce de León and Jacques Cousteau.

After being summarily dismissed from a job as a composer for video-game scores, Kat blogs from scenic designer Alexander Nichols’s Frankensteinian makeshift music studio, which engulfs her freezing Brooklyn apartment. Computers, cords, and cameras fed into microphones, instruments, and a single iconic reel-to-reel tape recorder, each of which served a practical purpose in scoring the musical live. Suddenly, she begins receiving transdimensional answering-machine messages and Skype calls from the long-dead explorer, who professes his love for her and her music. He adopts Kat’s sci-fi theme for “Star Blazers” as the anthem for his miraculous 1914 expedition aboard the doomed ship Endurance. Kat soon joins him in the Antarctic waste as his muse, accompanying him as he overcomes impossible odds to rescue his crew, without a single loss of life.

Yet, Ernest Shackleton Loves Meis far more than a nautical history lesson wrapped in a paranormal love story by way of Tony Kushner (although Shackleton’s uncanny arrival via refrigerator certainly does evoke Angels’ Mr. Lies). The musical offers poignant commentary on the alienating effects of twenty-first-century social media, the need to leave one’s comfort zone and venture into the dangerous world outside (a theme present in Striking 12and Sleeping Beauty Wakesas well), and the value of epic odysseys of self-discovery in an era where the very idea of exploration seems passé.

The sheer musicality of the score was enhanced by the manner in which it was performed onstage. GrooveLily fans are well-acquainted with Vigoda’s virtuosic talents as she simultaneously acts, sings, and plays her Viper electric violin, strapped to her shoulder and neck as if it were a natural appendage. Yet, as Kat, she exhibited a new level of musical dexterity as she built layers of musical loops of sampled sounds into a self-accompanying orchestra of one. There was an innate sadness and dread that permeated Vigoda’s performance, as this technique fragmented her identity, reconstituting it over and over again. Screens projected multiple Warholian images of her face as she desperately sent blog posts into cyberspace like so many letters in bottles on the open sea. The song “Stop Rewind Play Record” pulled this into narrow focus as she recounted her early experiments with acoustic looping on a reel-to-reel tape recorder as an attempt to connect with her absent father—an intense metaphor for life in which she dreams of the ability to edit and splice out the negative elements and replay/relive them in a reconstituted reality.

When the trilling, tenor...