Illuminating Illusion: "War of the Worlds"
by Dorothy Chansky
"War of the Worlds"
Brooklyn Academy of
Music, Harvey Lichtenstein Theater
October 4-8, 2000. (CLOSED)
Part of the Next Wave Festival
Information about tickets and scheduling:
www.bam.org
The title "War of the Worlds" is really a double
entendre. At the obvious level it points to the life
of Orson Welles, the subject of auteur director Anne
Bogart’s latest creation (with script by Naomi
Iizuka). But the piece is also about conflicting
views of truth.
Consider the very opening. A natty Orson Welles (played by Stephen Webber) announces that he is here to “set the story straight.” Two minutes and a cataclysmic lighting change later he announces that his focus is magic and nothing counts but the illusion he wants to create.
Bogart’s program note states that the piece is about the American confusion between news and entertainment. Welles seems to want to put the true workings of the psyche into entertainment. The media powers battle for a titillating version of actual events. The explosive lighting effects (by designer Mimi Jordan Sherin), which often illuminate the audience, are like so many bombs exploding in wartime. The fight is for who sets the parameters, or, in the terms of film or narrative, how the story will be framed.
“Frame” is probably the biggest image, metaphor, and idea in the show. As the Welles character says at one point, “it’s as plain as day. Its about the frame.” The dominant set piece is a metal frame on wheels that can glide in to contain a scene, or be rolled out to make way for a little chaos or transition. And if what is framed seems to be more orderly than what isn’t, that hardly makes it more truthful. Just, perhaps, better directed. Or susceptible to re-editing in a way that memory rarely is. Welles says, late in the game, that it makes him “nervous not being able to change anything. I think it comes from being in the theatre.”
Significantly, nothing from Welles’s work in the theatre is depicted here. It’s as though his real life begins for America when he takes to the airwaves in the 1938 "War of the Worlds." Next stop in the skyrocketing career is Hollywood.
Key moments from Welles’s films (mostly "Citizen Kane") recur throughout The "War of the Worlds." But so do imaginary moments seemingly lifted from Welles’s unspoken memories. The ghost of his mother appears unexpectedly and repeatedly. Sometimes we see her in a white dress holding a birthday cake. Sometimes she shows up against a panel of wallpaper redolent of the nineteenth century Wisconsin home of Welles’s childhood. Sometimes we simply hear her voice calling his name.
Retrospect, flashback, and memory. Sure. But there’s more. Even as we watch Welles’ life unfolding in what seems to be his telling of the story, there’s a parallel version being constructed by assorted media spinmeisters. These are portrayed like two competing Greek choruses. One is a cadre at work during Welles’s lifetime. This quartet usually line up at radio microphones to broadcast spicy data that walks a thin line between news and gossip. The other foursome, studio associates and sometime friends, want to hunt down the facts for a truthful obituary. Following Welles’s death, they seem concerned about getting to the bottom of what made him tick, but it’s unclear whether they want accuracy or shock value.
Iizuka’s script dovetails with Bogart’s methods. An energetic and impetuous Welles announces that his movies will not adhere to any formula. Rather, they’ll be “more like a seance -- an extended dream.” The production works very much this way. One performer (Ellen Lauren) does protean duty as a series of Hollywood actresses over several decades. She always appears in the same platinum wig and black gown with a plunging neckline, but she is a host of people. Furniture glides in and is thrown out. Actors perform scenes with beam projectors trained on them. The performers themselves are using what look like everyday, nondescript gestures; their shadows, owing to careful choreography, manage to flirt, grab, dip, dance, and transgress. The actual bodies creating dual, simultaneous sets of actions reinforce the idea that truth and illusion coexist, but that which is which depends on the frame of reference.
As Welles ages -- badly -- he keeps wanting to try new things and keeps finding himself caught in the frames others wish him to fit. “I’m done with that; I’m on to something else,” he announces after the umpteenth question about "Citizen Kane." But it’s easier to have our icons in recognizable frames than slipping into uncharted terrain.
In keeping with the dreamscape, "War of the Worlds" is as haunting on an auditory level as it is visually. (The soundscape is by Darron L. West.) Thunder often separates one scene from another. Patriotic music and snippets of “Hooray for Hollywood” contrast with a crumbling, bloated, and desperate Welles. Finally, the aging lion, furious, isolated, and frustrated, has a tantrum center stage amidst a verbal avalanche of a hundred films in which he had a hand. The publicity barage spells “star.” The man in front of us semiphores “disaster.”
"War of the Worlds" is ultimately a better paean to the theatre than to Welles. Many public icons with complicated psyches and public personas too limited to accommodate their evolving thinking could have served as the springboard for Bogart’s inventive kind of theatrical investigation. But few other artists and ensembles have the command that Bogart and the SITI Company do of the language of the theatre. Every movement, down to the flick of a wrist, has valence in their work. Every image in their crisply specific montages is arresting. Every voice is unique and rich. Every light cue both calls attention to itself and makes meaning. As Welles finally reminds us, “Magic is timeless. It never gets old.” Bogart’s theatre embodies that truth. [Chansky]
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