"4 Out of 5 (Stars)"
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| Stars range from 5-1. |
With THE FLICK, Annie Baker demonstrated that watching
three low-end employees of a tiny movie theatre fill three hours sweeping rows
and scraping gum from seat bottoms could be mesmerizingly interesting. In 10
OUT OF 12, which runs close to two hours and 40 minutes at the Soho Rep, Anne
Washburn has done much the same in exposing audiences to the crushing sense of stasis,
interrupted by momentary crises, often experienced by theatre people during that
period called technical rehearsals, when lighting, sound, and scenic elements
are first brought into the process of preparing a production. Ms. Baker studied
in Mac Wellman’s unusually successful MFA program in playwriting at Brooklyn
College, and Ms. Washburn teaches in that program. One wonders if someone in
Flatbush is presently conceiving a groundbreaking play about gardeners watching
grass grow.
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| Bruce McKenzie. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
I say this facetiously, of course, but the truth is
that these new plays have added something noteworthy, though not revolutionary,
to our understanding of theatre’s ability to grip an audience through close
attention to how the moment by moment minutiae of people managing specific jobs
gives us insight into human behavior. In its depiction of how the many
specialized theatre workers—actors, directors, lighting and sound technicians,
stage managers, costumers, etc.—conduct themselves during what can be
grindingly boring procedures, 10 OUT OF 12 harks back to certain plays by David
Storey, which, in seemingly plotless terms, slowly expose the individuals
involved in playing (offstage) a game of English football or building a tent
for a wedding ceremony.
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Conrad Schott, Bruce McKenzie, Sue Jean Kim. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.
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Although what we’re
witnessing is a greatly conflated, episodic compression of the many hours spent
during tech, mingling almost surrealistic interludes with straightforward ones,
it doesn’t flinch—prospective audiences, take notice—from creating a sense of
the same crushingly slow sense of progress experienced at the real thing. Ms.
Washburn based her play on the notes she took during various tech rehearsals
she attended over a five-year period, so the air of authenticity is thick. Having
directed a couple of dozen plays myself, I know whereof I yawn. The miracle
here is the extraordinary cohesiveness of the perfectly cast and technically impressive
production, which Les Waters (artistic director of the Actors Theatre of Louisville)
has directed with an awesome precision that nevertheless inspires believability
in every performance.
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| Bruce McKenzie. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
On the one hand, 10 OUT
OF 12 (which means that, according to Equity rules, 10 out of a given 12 hours will
be devoted to the rehearsal) is the kind of play and production that will
strike chords of recognition and appreciation in the hearts of any theatre
person who’s been there and done that; on the other, it may all seem like much
ado about nothing to civilians who couldn’t care less about how a play is put
on stage, and want to see a story and characters they can relate to. While some
of the characters do get to express themselves in personal terms, all we really
know about them is how they deal with their professional obligations, or what silly
things they do to prevent the ennui from driving them up the wall, not about
their lives outside the theatre’s womblike embrace. Apart from those playing
the actors, who get both an actor’s and a character’s name(s), most are
identified merely by their functions, i.e., Stage Manager (Quincy Tyler
Bernstine), Technician 3 (Jeff Biehl), Costumes (Rebecca Hart), Director (Bruce
McKenzie), Sound (Bray Poor), Technician 2 (Garrett Neergaard), Assistant
Director (Conrad Schott), Lights (Wendy Rich Stetson), and Assistant Stage
Manager (Leigh Wade).
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| Nina Hellman Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
The audience sits in
bleachers facing a low stage on which David Zinn has designed what seems an
only partly completed set comprised of, at stage right, a long wall, with a
door set in it, built of unfinished plywood. When necessary, the entire wall,
sitting on casters, can be rolled across the stage to expose a forest glade
depicted on its back. Action occurs behind the audience, in the aisles, on
stage, and behind the set. While the non-actor characters are dressed in normal
everyday wear, the actor characters, once they’ve put on their costumes
(designed by Asta Bennie Hostetter), first appear in 19th-century clothes, the
women (Nina Hellman, Sue Jean Kim) in large hoop skirts; later, when scenes set
in contemporary times are performed, the costumes change accordingly. There
are, by the way, substantial play-within-a-play chunks, which offer tantalizing
glimpses of the spookily odd postmodern drama—which includes lots of ghostly, Nosferatu-inspired
hands—the actors are working on.
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| Conrad Schott (shadow), Sue Jean Kim. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
Since much of what
transpires during a tech is heard only by those wearing headsets, each member
of the audience gets a listening device to loop over one ear so they can
eavesdrop on the substantial amount of back and forth shared among the techies.
Ms. Washburn’s notes have been extremely useful in capturing both the
tech-speak used in cueing and setting levels, as well as in expressing the inanities
spoken during moments when not much else is going on. When thus isolated for
our listening pleasure some of these overheard sallies—consistently delivered in
a dry, off-the-cuff, naturalistic tone—can be hilarious. One, for example,
features a hungry techie, offered half of his colleague’s sandwich, seeking
information on each component, and finally deciding that maybe he’s not really
hungry enough to indulge in his friend’s generous offer.
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| Conrad Schott (shadow), Bruce McKenzie (shadow), Sue Jean Kim, Nina Hellman, Gibson Frazier. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
The play is divided into
two acts by the fifteen-minute break announced by the stage manager for the
company’s benefit. The second half turns out to be more conventionally dramatic
than the first, largely because a sizable, uninterrupted scene comes
screeching to a halt when the actor Paul (Thomas Jay Ryan) decides to
interrogate the director about his dissatisfaction with how his character is
written, while also subtly critiquing his fellow performer (Gibson Frazier). The
scene is exceptionally well played by Mr. Ryan, whose Paul is tiresomely
argumentative and rhetorically gifted, but completely
impractical. Mr. McKenzie’s frazzled but generally low-key director, unwilling
or, given his general air of quiet desperation, unable to engage in a
long-winded discussion, somehow manages to fend him off, helped by the reaction
of Mr. Frazier. Another dilemma ensues when someone has a bloody accident, but,
as theatre tradition would have it, the show—or at least the rehearsal—manages to
go on. Until it doesn’t, that is, and the next day’s call is announced.
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| Leigh Wade, Sue Jean Kim, Bruce McKenzie (back to camera), Gibson Frazier. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
10 OUT OF 12 actually
concludes by shifting to another mode in a charmingly sung and danced coda, choreographed
by Barney O’Hanlan, exquisitely signifying a love letter to the theatre and the
hardworking, mostly unsung artists and technicians who devote themselves to it
regardless of the sacrifices (such as having to take temp work to survive) they
must make. In a sense, it refutes a letter I happened to read on my subway
trip home, written in 1884 by America’s leading star of the day, Edwin Booth,
to someone seeking to become an actor and hoping for Booth’s encouragement. Hoping
to deter the man’s aspirations, Booth says, in part: “It is a life of wearisome drudgery;
and requires years of toil, and bitter disappointment, to achieve a position
worth having. . . . Were I able to employ my thoughts and labor in any other
field I would gladly turn my back on the theatre forever.” A far cry indeed from Ms. Washburn's uplifting message.
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| Sue Jean Kim, Leigh Wade, Gibson Frazier. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
10 OUT OF 12 being about a tech
rehearsal, the technical components are extensively showcased, both when they’re
working properly and when they’re not, but a loud shout-out has to go to Justin
Townsend for his exceptional lighting effects and to Bray Poor for his
memorable sounds. The excellence of their work helps demonstrate once again why the Soho Rep, for its play choices, direction, acting, design, and technical contributions, continues
to be about the best and smartest small nonprofit theatre in the Off Broadway arena.
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| Nina Hellman. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
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| Thomas Jay Ryan, Gibson Frazier, Sue Jean Kim, Nina Hellman. |
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| From left: Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Bruce McKenzie, Gibson Frazier, Nina Hellman, Conrad Schott, David Ross, Sue Jean Kim, Garrett Neergaard, Leigh Wade. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
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| From left: Sue Jean Kim, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Garrett Neergaard (with headset), Nina Hellman, Bruce McKenzie, David Ross, Conrad Schott, Leigh Wade, Gibson Frazier. Photo: Julieta Cervantes. |
Other Viewpoints:
Soho Rep
46 Walker Street, NYC
Through July 18
