July 22, 2009
Reviewed by VanLoan
vanloan@nyconstage.org
3! was part of the Underground Zero Festival at PS 122
Doris Mirescu’s theater company Dangerous Ground specializes in creating multimedia “experiments” often using art house film classics as source material (i.e. Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris). However, one is totally unprepared for the visual and aural onslaught upon entering the mainstage theater at P. S. 122 where her latest piece 3! is playing as part of this year’s undergroundzero festival (curated by Paul Bargetto). It is her stylistically dramatic reinterpretation of the prolific German filmmaker Rainer Warner Fassbinder’s 1979 film “The Third Generation“.
“The Third Generation“ is Fassbinder’s melodramatic meditation on the state of the German political system as the seventies come to a close. His despairing, mournful take on the scene is that political activism has become sanctimonious cant and its current practitioners are self-indulgent miscreants fueled by trust fund money. He uses a fictionalized version of the infamous Baader-Meinhof urban terrorists (who themselves were the German version of Italy’s murderous Red Brigade) to show the disillusion and fragmentation of the young German bourgeoisie. Because their political motives are unfocused if not entirely lost, the “third generation” is easily manipulated by the very factions they are seeking to overthrow. Thus, the situation becomes one of comedy which is how Fassbinder viewed his film.
That director Mirescu captures as much of Fassbinder’s genius in her extravagant theater piece is rather amazing. The density of the work draws its inspiration from the movie but is as much a product of her imagination. Mirrors are everywhere both reflecting and refracting the action (Fassbinder’s use of mirrors in his work is legendary), video screens inflate the action from various parts of the stage heightening the melodramatic aspects of the script. In a truly inspired touch, Mirescu has television sets showing various Douglas Sirk movies (Sirk was a German film director who Fassbinder openly emulated; his masterpiece “Written on the Wind” with Rock Hudson and Lauren Bacall is on a continual loop on one screen). Roving technicians follow the leading characters with boom mics which become octopus-like tentacles ensnaring them in their subterfuges while other reverences to Fassbinder’s movies abound such as bewigged mannequins and an operatic soundscape.
It must be said up front that without prior knowledge of the film (I have seen it about three times over the years), one will most likely be lost. The loose plot line follows the group of wannabe terrorists as they attempt to kidnap wealthy American industrialist Peter Lutz (Joel Repman). The base of operations is a large post-war Berlin flat that serves as a sort of command central for their operations. Sexual promiscuity and drug use are prevalent. Various codes and secret passwords are formulated to keep the authorities from becoming suspicious. The phrase most used (and most cryptic) is “World as will and idea” which comes from the philosopher Schopenhauer whose aesthetic held that art offered a way for people to temporarily escape the suffering of the world that the will entailed. Lutz’s secretary, Suzanne (an effectively overwrought Zoe Anastassiou) is secretly a member of the society and is instrumental in her boss’s abduction. The group leader of sorts August (played with superb menace by Florin Penisoara) is constantly donning women’s clothes to the point that it no longer becomes about disguise as about cross-dressing (his suitcase full of bribe money is shown to be from the Monopoly board game). Money begins to run out, boredom and infighting start to set in, the German police are under international pressure to find Lutz while the monitors show news clips from the Red Brigade’s exploits. And August is having trouble deciding which wig to wear.
Despite (or possibly because of) the pictographic blitz, we eventually grow a little weary. The eye is captured by the random prurient detail (a flash of nudity as characters change clothes on stage), the blatantly graphic (an onstage rape that is quite brutal in its intensity) or the silent Sirk movies “The Tarnished Angels ” is also shown). The fragmented story line and numerous characters becoming involved with the group (there is a subplot about an illegal Arab immigrant, Repman again) prove difficult to sustain over the three hour length. The same burst of intensity that eventually burned out the terrorists might be an apt description as regards Ms. Mirescu’s production. However, the fourteen actors are all both gutsy and courageous in their labors while the design team of sound editors, mixers, live camera feeders and art directors are to be thoroughly applauded for their contributions. No one is credited with costume design but the 70’s patchwork of paisley, polyester and patchouli is spot on. 3! is exactly the type of show that Bargetto and the undergroundzero festival should bring to the public eye and it provides them with a smashing conclusion.
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