Written, composed and directed by New York-based Richard Maxwell, Ode To The Man Who Kneels is at the Project Theatre until Saturday 12th January. Originally commissioned for a Swiss theatre festival, the production also played in New York late last year. Performed by a committed cast of three men and two women, the author himself tinkles the ivories alongside a guitar player, in front of the plain stripped pine set. A spotlight, housed in a primitive wooden box on a stand in the front row of the auditorium, casts a wobbly circular light on to the players, dressed in timeless simple cowboy/Wild West outfits; we are constantly aware of the shadows of the actors looming starkly on the white backdrop.
The Man Who Kneels tells us, as The Standing Man is pointing a gun-shaped finger at him, that he’s really an actor, and how actors spend all their time saving their experiences for use later. “It’s not a real way to live”, he says, in a camp accent, more Fire Island Pines than Lonesome Pine. But, he declares with intensity, “I feel”. Before long, he’s dead, shot by The Standing Man, and he lies on the stage for most of the rest of the evening, relatively still.
As the piece progresses, with vignettes of varying lengths offering us glimpses of lives and themes that are resonant with the Western genre: drought, violence, lawlessness, cruelty, it becomes obvious there is no narrative. There are songs interspersed between the segments, melancholy and downbeat. One number, Endure, (recorded at the New York run), is below. A conversation between a couple is interrupted by the woman breaking away and telling the audience “There is a moment when the couple appear to be making love”. One man threatens another with obscene acts that belong more in a 21st Century S&M chatroom than the Wild West. The Standing Man then kills the other male member of the cast, who then, as a corpse, obligingly shuffles over to the side of the stage. The actors speak lines such as “I am not sure I am who I say I am”. Someone puzzles about the difference between seeing in colour or black and white.
I try to find a way of connecting with what I’m seeing and hearing. Is this performance art? I imagine multimedia installations, large photographs (such as those by Maud Larsson) with lines of monologue or dialogue looped as a soundtrack for each one, as we take in each “character”‘s story. I imagine a similar effect could be achieved with the actors in crackly, jerky, hand-cranked sepia video sequences, and a gallery full of screens, playing different scenes in random or synchronised order, with the music hauntingly wafting in and out of our awareness. The point of my imaginings is to highlight the fact that I don’t think this piece worked as theatre. I saw an effort to evoke an atmosphere, a spirit, a mood, which was most successfully achieved when there was music. I knew I was being challenged, which is no bad thing – but to what purpose?
I experienced an initial frisson of interest when The Man Who Kneels started talking “out of the box” as an actor, and I wondered if the piece was going to be about the nature of performance itself, a meta-narrative on the actor’s craft, or a post-modern take on the Western genre. Or, indeed, an unusual perspective on modern consciousness, seen through the metaphoric lens of an old wooden box camera.
It turned out to be, I’m afraid, none of these things. At the post-show discussion on Wednesday, Maxwell revealed himself to be someone taking great pleasure in confounding the expectations of audiences, as if that was a novel and/or original thing to do in itself. He seems to have an inordinate reverence for his actors, indulging them in their search for the “energy” of each moment, without paying attention to whether or not such endeavours interest the audience, or whether putting those “isolating seconds” all together makes emotional, intellectual or even intuitive sense, or is moving, disturbing or stimulating in any way.
The piece was workshopped with the actors (at the start of rehearsals there was no script). Maxwell supplied the concept for each segment, trusting that the actors would come up with their own truth in each one. One actor spoke of the challenge of playing in the piece, saying it was more like heightened film acting, there being no arc of performance from beginning to end in the piece. Having been a performer myself in shows constructed in a similar way, in experimental theatre in the 1980s, I know first-hand what the pitfalls are. The first one is one of the reasons I am no longer an actor: I was very good at emoting – but less good at evoking emotion in an audience. I could be consumed with real, live, turbulent feeling on stage, quivering with it, gasping with it, sobbing with it – but knowing that I had reached the core of my emotional “truth” was not enough – it was not necessarily something that was going to make the audience feel anything at all. Some actors have the knack, some don’t. Of course, without a good script, it really doesn’t matter how gifted the actor is. I’m afraid I saw rather too many actors in Ode To The Man Who Kneels who reminded me of my own acting flaw, displaying a fondness for exalting in a solipsistic “method” process, at the expense of communication, and I found it embarrassing.
The other pitfall of this kind of work is that, if one is deliberately confounding expectations and eschewing traditional means of engaging or “resonating” with an audience, the work had better display evidence of something more substantial than mere cleverness. The message should be powerful, the words insightful, the visuals striking, the moods distinctive. Bafflingly, there is a credit for dramaturgy in the programme; I cannot see how this script would have passed such scrutiny.
When Maxwell spoke of how he was more interested in talking to his actors in rhythmic terms rather than psychological terms, I then realised why I was so bored. Good drama is psychology. He said that, in Europe, audiences seemed more preoccupied with the Western form, whereas in the US, where the form is domestic, historic, unremarkable, audiences seemed more engaged with the content. But I cannot see how, even if I was deeply familiar with the Western genre and discourse, I would find the patchy, discordant and indulgent sequences in this play interesting.
A certain amount of leeway should be granted to all productions that push out the envelope. A degree of willingness to go out on a limb, and be taken somewhere strange and unfamiliar should be in every serious theatre-goer’s makeup. But, just as importantly, one should know when to point out when the emperor has no clothes.