Agents of Stasis

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

By Matthew Irwin

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-A specter haunts Riot Act Inc.’s original production, The Bogeyman.

Along with the usual scramble for a location and a final script, the project by Jackson Hole’s “community conscious” theatre has also watched three performers drop out, one go to the county lockup, two get “in the family way” and the others struggle with conflicting schedules.

All told, The Bogeyman debut has been canceled three times over the last year or so, hinting towards the possible imprudence of evoking the old childhood phantom as a muse for artistic expression.

Even Riot Act’s very notion of the bogeyman as an internal inhibitor rather than menacing tormentor seems to describe the project’s organizational challenges. However, by its continued existence, the production as a whole also seems to suggest an alternative to the reality inherent in the show – namely that individuals can’t find themselves within a crowd.

Now, after a year of rewriting, recasting and rescheduling, The Bogeyman will attempt again to open, June 17 to 19, this time at The Sugar Space in Salt Lake City. The cast hopes to add Jackson, Victor and/or Driggs and Boise to the run.
A collaborative effort
In scene five of The Bogeyman, a chorus member leaves the group because she cares – that is, she has the capacity to care, which itself may not isolate her from the others, though her ability to act independently does.

Vacillation between the group mind and personal determination, more than any other theme in The Bogeyman, impels a narrative in which characters make decisions out of convenience or necessity, rather than intention. A businessman searches for love because he imagines it to be the only thing that will satisfy his appetite. A woman says she’ll find love for him, but only because she wants him to take her place under a rock. And the chorus member, after a Whitmanian gesture of compassion, downplays the significance of her decision, saying simply, “Being a part of a group didn’t work for me.”

The struggle between what a person wants and what the crowd expects not only speaks to the company’s vision of a bogeyman as an agent of stasis, but it also describes the paradox that haunts a collaborative experiment, such as The Bogeyman, in which independently thinking people attempt to agree.

Artists generally contend that art does not result from compromise – that a committee, with its collective self-consciousness and variable aesthetic authority, for instance, cannot envision a final work as clearly as an individual. And this is a theory I support, but the word “collaboration” – ever more relevant a term as artists and arts organizations vie for funding – has a different set of objectives and connotations. Whereas “compromise” and “committee” suggest consensus as the goal, “collaboration” implies that each contributor will be heard – in fact, must be heard to justify their participation in the first place.

Before she had a script or even a napkin outline for an original production, Riot Act cofounder and Bogeyman producer Macey Mott had high ambitions for a collaborative performance piece, drawing from as many artforms as possible. She believed even that Jackson Hole’s talent pool would produce something worthy of Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

She called playwright Micheline Auger, whose one-act, “Soft Merlot,” showed at Riot Act’s annual series of shorts in 2009, and Margaret Breffeilh, who worked as a choreographer on the company’s production of The Rocky Horror Show, which enjoyed a sold-out run last October from a warehouse south of town. [Full disclosure: Earlier this month, I volunteered as director of a one-act play written by Auger and produced by Riot Act.]

Wanting a story that transcends time, place and culture, the three discussed universal themes in children’s stories and mythologies, as well as characters who embody those ideas, and eventually they landed on the bogeyman.

Within three weeks, the collaborative moved into Dancers’ Workshop studios, with the addition of choreographer Heather Best (who would become pregnant a year later when the project finally had some legs) and local thespians Andrew Munz, Melchor Moore and Stephen Lottridge. Saxophonist Jason Fritz, another Rocky Horror contributor, signed on to do the music. The visual artist known to sketch in local bars, Tom Woodhouse, eventually came on to create a number of ghoulish masks. And Fritz enlisted guitarist Chris Towles and percussionist Justin McCulla from his jazz trio.

While workshopping the bogeyman phenomenon through writing, acting and movement exercises, this larger group settled on the idea of “inner bogeymen,” Mott said, or the things an individual does to himself that keeps him from reaching his potential.

Where’s Alice?
At times, the characters (and there are many) misunderstand or misuse words, especially homonyms, and puns and Lewis Carroll-like nonsense litter the text. “If you can talk about it, you don’t know what it is,” Auger said. “[Love] doesn’t reside fully in the brain; it doesn’t reside in the tongue.”

The Bogeyman actually has a lot in common with Alice in Wonderland, although without an Alice. That is, the audience doesn’t have somebody in the work to agree with, somebody to acknowledge that the silliness is just plain silly.
Alice teaches us to understand Wonderland as she learns about it herself. The Bogeyman, on the other hand, doesn’t provide someone to distinguish between the verbal clowning and the meaty lines, such as “The love that can be spoken is not the love,” which Auger adapted from Lao Tzu’s “The tao that can be spoken is not the tao.”

Instead, the script offers an unreliable narrator (He faints, he embellishes, he speaks obliquely) and largely episodic scenes, tied together by a thematic cycle – the end of one character’s story signals the beginning of another’s, with each leaving a group only to join another.

The Fringe
When Auger brought her first draft to the group it was still a baby, in Breffeilh’s words.

The group discussed the script, sometimes heatedly, and eventually Mott withdrew her request to use Miller Park for an August 2009 debut because the script wasn’t ready.

At that time, Munz dropped out because he had other obligations and “just wasn’t connecting with the piece,” Mott said. Then Moore said that he was worried about the content being too sexually explicit, according to Mott, so he also quit. “Something was hitting him that wasn’t hitting anybody else,” Mott said.
The end of summer brought a temporary halt to the show’s development. With Halloween around the corner, Mott refocused her energy on producing The Rocky Horror Show, a project she’d wanted to do since founding Riot Act more than five years ago.

By the time Rocky Horror opened, Auger had moved to New York City, though she continued to work on the script. Mott and Breffeilh started working on the show again in January, and Auger delivered the full script in February.
Before they went back into rehearsals, Lottridge had also opted out, so they held auditions, which brought in a pregnant Katie Payne Confer (whom Auger would sit in for if needed) and Ryan Kelley. Multi-talented performer Danny Haworth came in March, and it looked like the show was a go.

Billed as the world’s largest arts festival, “The Fringe” in Edinburgh is particularly open to unknown artists. It has one requirement for performing arts entrants: they must secure a location in the area for a performance during the festival. Mott landed a studio a lot like Studio One at Dancers’ Workshop, she said, called C Spaces.

On a Monday in February, The Fringe accepted the collaborative. That Wednesday, the entrance fee would be due. The Friday before, however, a judge gave Kelley 90 days at Teton County Detention Center, for “furnishing alcohol to a minor,” according to officials.

Mott withdrew Riot Act’s application for The Fringe, and cancelled an April performance of The Bogeyman at Dancers’ Workshop.
Without a replacement for Kelley, Mott feared that a late withdrawal would result in the project, and perhaps even Riot Act, being blackballed from future eligibility.
“I thought it better to turn down [The Fringe] at that point,” rather then to get involved and have to pull out, she said.

Kelley was released on Monday, but he’s no longer a part of the project.

Coming around the Bend(s)
In April, local Renaissance man John Hanlon joined the cast of The Bogeyman. An academic, a writer and a performer, Hanlon auditioned for Riot Act’s recent series of shorts, but when scheduling conflicts made it so that he couldn’t participate in the shorts, Mott snatched him up for the collaboration.

In scene three, Hanlon plays Augustus Disgusting, a makeover specialist who promises to make the woman from under the rock “ready for [her] love,” except that when she comes out of the machine, she looks the same as Augustus’s employees, “the Bend(s).” She offers to help him run his makeover business. “That’s something like love, is it not?” she says.

It’s a standout moment in the script for the way it describes how people shape their desires around their immediate circumstances. Though the woman doesn’t express her motive for wanting to run Augustus’s business, she clearly chooses comfort over the uncertain quest for love.

What, then, compels a dozen or more singular artists to risk the comfort of their individual talents for an uncertain quest for artistic harmony? Yes, the Bogeyman project has failed to pull in everyone. It also at times has too much going on, between the props and twisted language, the movements and character changes. But to find the answer, the question needs to be reversed: Why would they risk artistic harmony for comfort when there are rewards in both the successes and failures of the project?

“I was writing towards failure, towards things I didn’t want to write,” Auger said of her first attempt at the script. “I loved that, and I was afraid, but I moved anyway.”
The whole cast, in fact, continued to move forward despite that an actual performance seemed doomed, because the collaboration’s success and the consequences of the production’s ideas in the real world depend on someone seeing the show.

“The audience is the last character,” Auger said.
The audience is in fact a part of the show from the very beginning, as it’s done in the round, so that audience members have a clear view of each other. On occasion, the cast reaches out to the audience in their seats, and in the final scene, the Girl/Boy motions for the audience to take the lead.

Seen as an integral part of the performance, the audience itself is Alice. And like Alice who allows herself to be transformed by Wonderland without succumbing to its insanity, The Bogeyman’s audience has the choice of remaining complacent or breaking the cycle. If they leave the performance without confronting their self-imposed obstructions, their bogeymen, then they succumb to the insanity of the play, of the real world.

Curtains
The Bogeyman is still a day away from its debut. Auger flew in from New York, last Sunday, knowing already that she’d like to make some changes to the script, and she hadn’t seen the full script performed. At that time, the band was still working out the music, cast members were still learning their lines and their movements, all of the masks had yet to be incorporated and Best and Confer were both well into their pregnancies.

But The Bogeyman is a process, a project, a collaboration, which we now understand to include the audience, and it hasn’t had it’s say.
“We’re gonna continue to find out what [The Bogeyman] is about,” Auger said, “when we see the audience’s response.” JHW


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