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With all its high-tech spectacle and stagecraft, Richard Foreman’s first new work in a decade revels in the retro. Travis Just’s electric screeches and industrial soundscapes scream dark metal, but the hyper-stylized acting and symbol-laden staging of Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, all in service of the script’s rippling mirror-imagings and the staging’s archly clever varied-angle repetitions, recall the kinds of theatrical happenings I remember seeing in the 1980s.
At the same time, the collaboration of Foreman, Just, and Object Collection, under the direction of Kara Feely, triggers a distinctive creative force that packs a 21st-century wallop.
Beautiful Madeline Harvey and Handsome Roger Vincent
There’s no story per se. The show is an intense, bewildering, sometimes funny meditation on reality and fiction, on experience and fantasy, on being and nothingness. Two people, Madeline Harvey and Roger Vincent, enact and re-enact a meeting (chance? fate?) in and around a nameless cafe along a nameless boulevard in a nameless city. Are they the real people they presumably feel themselves to be? Are they characters in a play?
The script proposes (and proposes again, and proposes again) a two-dimensionality that may be the essence of these beings. It may not be an accident that the play “flattens” both by bestowing upon them given names as surnames (Harvey, Vincent). The colorful minor characters surrounding them are listed in the program with first names (only), but these names are never spoken, rendering the nature of their existence as ambiguous as that of the leads.
Those others serve as narrators who recite Foreman’s quasi-poetic book in a variety of self-conscious styles and tones. Sometimes they yield the floor to the booming recorded voice of Foreman himself. That grants the words an extra ring of deep meaning even amid the puzzlement that the lines evoke in the listener.
Glory and Madness
The glory of this production is the stagecraft, from acting and music to lighting and design. The maddening part is that it makes its point in the first act, which focuses on Madeline and the cafe, and then, on a completely revamped set, with the color drained out and a noir/sci-fi environs established, it repeats itself from Roger’s point of view (sort of). If the monsters and aliens, the gravid symbolism, and the use of the enormously deep La MaMa stage added something to the meaning, I couldn’t suss it out, as I had lost patience with the repetitive material. A feast for the eye and ear it remained, but what had been a particolored retro repast became for the mind a chore.
Spectacular and maddening, retro and immanent, self-serious and funny, compelling and confounding, Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey is the surrealistic result of a meeting of overflowingly creative minds. It runs through Dec. 22 at La MaMa.
