“All That Jazz”
Three of the shows I saw this past week had intermissions,
leading some members of the audience at each to take their leave early. I
sympathize with those who left two of those shows early, including whoever did so at (A)loft Modulation; A Play with Jazz, Jaymes Jorsling’s oddly
titled, ambitious, but ramshackle play, performed with large infusions of live jazz,
at the A.R.T./New York Theatre in Hell’s Kitchen.
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| Company of (A)loft Modulation. All photos: Joan Marcus. |
Smith was an acclaimed photojournalist for Life, then
America’s most popular weekly magazine. In the mid-1950s, he suffered personal
and professional crises, including great dissatisfaction with how his work was
handled by Life. So disturbed was he that he resigned, abandoned his wife and four kids in Croton-on-Hudson,
and moved, in 1955, into a loft at 821 Sixth Avenue, in the then unsavory “flower
district.” There, for a decade, he wallowed in booze and drugs while being a
late-night host to artists and musicians, including such jazz icons as Thelonius Monk, Zoot Sims, and Charles Mingus. His
neighbor in the adjoining loft was the notable jazz musician and Juilliard classical
music teacher, Hall
Overton.
Smith was a virtual hoarder of pictorial and aural mementoes
of his years in what came to be known as the “Jazz Loft,” not only obsessively
taking pictures—over 40,000—of its happenings, but keeping reel-to-reel recorders
going surreptitiously to the point that 4,500 hours of conversation and music
were taped. His archives ultimately were thoroughly researched and written about by Sam Stephenson,
director of the Jazz Loft Project at Duke University, and the inspiration for Jorsling’s
character, Steve Samuels.
Jorsling’s rambling, episodic play, presented on a cramped,
cluttered, tri-level set designed by Troy Hourie, and complexly lit by Becky
Heisler McCarthy, is set both in the 1957-1964 period and today, sometimes with
characters from the past occupying the same space as those in the present (as
in In Old Age, currently at the New York Theatre Workshop). The action jumps
around among situations in the past and present, the former involving fictional
characters based on Smith, Overton, and their friends, the latter focused on
the conflicted relationship between the Sam Stephenson avatar, Steve Samuels
(Kevin Cristaldi), and his wife, Annie (Julia Watt).
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| PJ Sosko, Christina Toth. |
The Smith character is Myth Williams (PJ Sosko), which, of course, inspires talk about mythology. Overton is
Way Tonniver (Eric T. Miller), another symbolic moniker, and their substance-abuser friends are the
drummer Reggie Sweets (Elisha Lawson), the sax player Sleepy Lou Butler
(Charles Hudson III), the junkie Chip (Spencer Hamp), and the hooker Skyler,
who becomes Myth’s photography acolyte. (For whatever reason, Skyler, played by
the sleekly constructed Christina Toth in stylish red wigs—is costumed by Elivia
Bolenzi [whose other costumes work better] to look more like a fashion model
than a skanky streetwalker.)
Aside from Reggie, who’s probably based on drummer Ron Free,
it’s not clear who these friends’ real-life equivalents were. The play takes a way-overlong
two and a half hours to wander around in subplots concerning everyone’s
stories, including those of two inquisitive local cops, one from each era. He's played
by the same actor, Buzz Roddy, in more or less the same way (albeit with a
tonally authentic NYPD attitude) but wearing different jackets.
One of the play's more consistent throughlines concerns a discovery about who actually wrote a famous jazz number. The problem is, it’s a fictional tune so, when the composer is finally uncovered, we couldn’t care less. It's not as if we learned that Duke Ellington didn't write "Sophisticated Ladies."
One of the play's more consistent throughlines concerns a discovery about who actually wrote a famous jazz number. The problem is, it’s a fictional tune so, when the composer is finally uncovered, we couldn’t care less. It's not as if we learned that Duke Ellington didn't write "Sophisticated Ladies."
The general premise is that, as we watch various moments in
the lives of the loft’s long-gone denizens during its heyday, present-day Steve is studying Myth’s tapes and photos of what we're seeing. He’s so fixated on documenting them (while
trespassing in the abandoned loft) that, without asking Annie, he quits his job
so he can devote his every minute to the task.
This creates ongoing tension between the couple, as Steve
can think of no better reason to explain his need to do the work than because, unhappy
at his job, his documentation is something that will make his life matter. It's a thematic point also
expressed about his own work by Myth. Strangely, despite Annie’s insisting on knowing his end
goal, Steve never volunteers that he’s going to write a book or produce
some similarly useful outcome to justify his sacrifice.
As he listens to the tapes, headphones on, much of what he’s
hearing is acted out as when it was first spoken. He works in a kitchen area
down left, while the action is mainly performed on a slightly raised area at
stage right, while other scenes are seen even higher in Way’s loft. There, saxophonist
Jonathan Beshay, drummer Kayvon Gordon, and bassist Adam Olszewski, join the
actor-musicans playing Way and Sleepy Lou for some intense jam sessions at
multiple intervals.
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| Kayvon Gordon, Jonathan Beshay, Adam Olszewski, Eric T. Miller, Charlie Hudson III. |
The loft scenes sprawl
confusingly through the late 50s and early 60s, with video projections (credit
Adam J. Thompson)—some of it distractingly live, à la Ivo Von Hove—and old radio
sound bites (credit Andy Evan Cohen) providing occasional background exposition
or atmosphere—the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s assassination, a poem by Edna St.
Vincent Millay, etc.
Meanwhile, we watch Myth’s clique take drugs, drink bourbon, contemplate
their potential, talk about and have sex, drop names, spout profanity, suffer
existential angst, and experience a suicide.The play also alludes (with few details) to Smith’s trip to Japan in 1964, when he famously documented the effects of the Minamata pollution tragedy. Often, simultaneous scenes in two time
periods require the dialogue in one to be cross-cut with that in another.
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| Eric T. Miller, PJ Sosko, Charlie Hudson III, Spencer Hamp. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Myth and Way, especially the former, lapse into intellectually
pretentious dialogue that, even if borrowed from actual transcripts (I have no
idea) is dramatically stultifying. Myth’s language is especially pretentious, using
words like “esurient” even to a presumably uneducated harlot. His verbal pretentiousness is such that, instead of simply saying he quit his job with Life,
he’s more apt to observe “I divorced myself from their jurisdiction.”
The wonder is that, under Christopher McElroen’s sharp
direction, the actors invest their artificial lines with a sense of truth.
Otherwise, the only thing to trust in this bleary exercise, as my jazz
aficionado plus-one assured me, is the superior quality of the original jazz (by Gerald Clayton) we hear.
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