Featured Post: Alexis Soloski brilliantly Bashes Bogart & Mee (Theatreforte)

I keep an eye on all things Anne Bogart related, and it's kind of legendary among us SITI-addicts that she's only ever received maybe 2 or 3 positive reviews of her work in NYC.

That trend continues with Alexis Soloski's lite-drubbing of Hotel Cassiopeia at BAM (video preview here). Somehow though, Soloski has provided some of the best descriptions of Mee & Bogart's work that I've ever read.

If you're not familiar with their work, this graph would be a great place to start ...

Both Bogart and Mee are collage artists themselves, so basing a play around Cornell must have seemed a tasty prospect. Mee's plays pillage from classic texts, from his own work as a historian, from books, magazine articles, and webpages. Bogart assembles her pieces from various forms and styles, "like a bird that goes and pulls different things and makes a nest," she has said.

This is just a great little turn of phrase ... (emphasis mine).

in 2001 they debuted bobrauschenbergamerica, another play based around an artist enamored of found objects. In that latter piece, like a pomo Godot, Robert Rauschenberg never appeared. But in Hotel Cassiopeia, Cornell (Barney O'Hanlon) never leaves the stage.

How about the theatrical equivalent of hyperlinks? (Which is also a great description of my own original works. I'm using that in all my grant applications from now on.)

While Cornell mostly contents himself with reciting lines from his diaries and letters, the other characters speak passages from Colette, sing Cole Porter songs, or declaim a dialogue culled from a popular bird-watching website. These interpolations make Mee's dramaturgy distinct, yet also somewhat frustrating. Yes, Cornell liked to observe the birds in his backyard—he even invited them into his kitchen to peck at crumbs. But does this fact require the inclusion of the interview with "Mr. and Mrs. American Birdwatching"? Do these asides - the theatrical equivalent of hyperlinks — deepen our understanding of Cornell or expand the dramatic experience? These digressions keep the piece surface and shallow, avoiding the emotional lives of the characters. Too often they seem like an indulgent substitute for actual playwriting.

This has been a common criticism of the play, that it doesn't add up to much. Admittedly, I didn't quite "get it" until my second viewing. During the first viewing, I was satisfied enough with its surface beauty (Soloski calls it "lovely-looking if rather vacant".) to be entranced.

The human heart of the play, though, is in tiny moments that take a close viewing (and maybe multiple-viewings) to catch. In fact, in Louisville, it was staged on a thrust, so when I watched it from the side, I literally did not see some of those details. Is that a fault of the work, as in an error? Maybe. Who can ever know what an artist's true goals are?

At any rate, this is one of those rare negative reviews that has actually expanded my appreciation of the work and the artists involved. Bravo, Ms. Soloski?

Read the whole review here.