THE WICKED STAGE and the gag reel

by Rob Kendt

Fog of war: I didn't attend the street theatre of the recent anti-war protest in Downtown L.A., but a recorded snippet on the radio caught my attention. The earnest KPFK announcer said it was Rob Lowe introducing "the acting president of the United States… a man I love," Martin Sheen, who got to the mic and said, "Thank you, Brad," then delivered a feverish paean to freedom and justice. (The first speaker was, of course, Bradley Whitford, not Lowe.) And while The West Wing can be preachy, it had nothing on Sheen's tent-revival fury. I still can't figure out, though, why this kind of righteous passion is directed against, not in favor of, international efforts to remove a dictator from power. These efforts haven't come to war yet, but, for all the fierce talk about resistance, the protests I've heard essentially treat war as a fait accompli.

So, apparently, do the artists behind Songs of Joy and Destitution, Chuck Mee's post-modernization of Euripides' Trojan Women and Orestes, which rocked the Open Fist Theatre the night of that L.A. protest. Indeed, while I make it a policy to review plays, not their press releases, the guileless cynicism of the one-sheet for Songs merits mention. It says that Mee and director Matthew Wilder have set Trojan Women "in an Iraq hollowed by our upcoming bombing campaign" (like that "our"), and Orestes in a postwar U.S. Granted, there are Greek analogies easily at hand--the Oedipal overtones of the Bush family vendetta against Saddam, the parallels with the Greek/Persian wars already noted in Peter Sellars' and Robert Auletta's The Persians back in 1993--but the Trojan War and its aftermath, a mythical free-for-all of sexual envy, incest, and blood rites, makes an odd fit with the current standoff. Does Dubya have an Iraqi Helen who's really lit his fire? Is Helen a stand-in for Middle Eastern oil? I'm afraid it's beneath these artists to explain. Their audience-taxing work--which requires us to sit on overturned plastic buckets amid the action of Trojan Women, then to rove through an ambitiously realized no-funhouse of five-minute installation/installments of Orestes-related ramblings--only makes contemporary sense if one takes for granted that the war we may be facing will be just another cog in an endless wheel of violence inflicted by the West on the rest, and ultimately, justly, on itself. If that's your bag, knock yourself out. There are two moments that give glimpses of the brilliant, irreverent Mee who wrestled with Brecht on his home turf in The Berlin Circle: the entrance of Andromache (Alison Tatlock) as a society widow with shopping bags and a pathetic doll, representing her child, dangling by one leg; and a breathlessly perfect found-art Orestes scene that has comic-grotesque Red Cross nurses squaring off opposite basketball players with silent-film mustaches on a narrow court, and Orestes himself (Bradley Spann) fuming like a boxer in a bloodied robe.

While I doubt that Euripides, who fearlessly held his countrymen to account for their brutality and arrogance, would recognize this pomo horrorshow as his own, ultimately Songs does share the Greeks' fateful vision of war without end, of blood running through history like a refrain. And it suggests a depressing symmetry: the threat of preemptive war met with preemptive resignation. That's a tragedy the Greeks might recognize.

• Popular culture, as usual, tends to reflect the popular imagination, often in unconscious ways. And it's no surprise that we're not dreaming sweet dreams of peace these days. Which is to say that, Viggo Mortensen's noble protestations to the contrary, no one can view The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers--in which Mortensen stars as a swaggering hero who trumps well-meaning but ineffectual appeasers by saddling up and facing the baddies head on--without feeling the slightly disturbing undertow of war-making propaganda. (This current is just as strong, and more troubling, if you agree with Mortensen that the rich West bears more resemblance to the diabolical wizard Saruman, what with his clear-cutting policies and military-industrial complex, than to the besieged, frightened population holed up at Helm's Deep.) And no one could watch the current, world-ending season of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, the zeitgeist's pulpiest byproduct, without noticing that our intrepid heroine has solemnly vowed that the era of fighting vampires reactively, only after they've shown their fangs, is over; from now on, it's full-scale war, and if Buffy must go she'll go down kickboxing. If she had added that demon inspections are just a shell game that buys time for the Hellmouth to develop its weapons programs, I don't think we'd have blinked.

• If some of our pop culture manages to speak to the darker angels of our nature, most of it, admittedly, is in blissful denial. So it is that Disney's animated Aladdin, a shamelessly Orientalist confection that came out in the aftermath of the Gulf War, has been recycled onstage at Disney's California Adventure on the eve of a potential replay. This 40-minute "musical spectacular," as Disney CEO Michael Eisner referred to it repeatedly in a pre-unveiling curtain speech last week, raises the bar for theme-park entertainment but isn't going to have Julie Taymor shaking in her boots. A special-effects-heavy trifle with booming, piped-in music and lavish costumes, Aladdin is more Barnum than Broadway, and it will neither increase nor decrease understanding among warring cultures, though it does have a bit of non-traditional casting for the books: the wheelchair-bound Jennifer Kumiyama, who's used more as a motorized, accessorized moving set piece than as a performer. I was gratified to see that Michael K. Lee and Orville Mendoza, the indelible leads of East West Players' definitive Pacific Overtures of 1998, have landed such a sweet gig (as Aladdin and the Genie, respectively).

• I'm convinced that Renaissance man Ken Roht can do anything: sing, dance, act, choreograph, direct, compose. So I'm not exactly surprised when he turns up in strange places, doing unexpected things--I'm just pleasantly baffled and curious. His last opus was a dance performance piece inspired by the glories of 99-cent stores, staged so briefly around the holidays at Evidence Room that I missed it. He just e-mailed me news of his appearance in a "world premiere rock opera" called Visions, for which someone named simply Dimitris has set "inspiring words of great visionaries" to music. We're talking the usual suspects: Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Princess Diana. Wrote Roht breathlessly, "Not since the Led Zeppelin 'Memories' Expo in '82 have there been so many desperate rock-tenor eunuchs under one roof," promising "20 too-high rock anthems in one show!" The accomplished Ann Closs-Farley did the costumes (God will appear in a "a purple suit and scarfette," reports Roht). Visions will unfurl for a three-week run, Jan. 24-Feb. 2, at Los Angeles Theatre Center, where Roht once did amazing, description-defying work with another late visionary, Reza Abdoh. While I'm sure Dimitris has much to offer the world, it's an acute loss that Abdoh isn't around to make some challenging, disruptive work at this fraught cultural moment.