Hello everyone it's good to be here, thanks for coming.
We're having a great time in New York. Just being here always puts me in a better general mood. (Until it's 1am and we're riding the train with a boatload of moaning homeless people and I feel guilty about getting a new jacket. But that's another story.)
The Suicide Kings - In Spite of Everything
This was a good show and I'm glad I saw it.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement, I know. But I really did like it. Read on.
Last year and this, I have found that a lot of the work at Under the Radar leaves me firmly between two poles of opinion. Often, I find a few things to love about it, a few things that are really original and exciting, and a bunch of things that bugged the heck out of me. Often, those things have to do with direction, or at least that's my perspective. My wife and I have the theory that actors bug here because she's an actor, and the directing bugs me because I'm a director. Really though, I imagine that if you're a writer/performer with a vision, it must be difficult to find just the right director to bring your work to fruition.
Anyway.
Here's a summary of the show, so I don't have to write one. I do want to mention that the press photo on the UTR site is totally misleading.
The show nicely diverse narrative, jumping from the interrogation, to the day in question, to some straight-forward first person poetry, to testimonies from a couple of characters. The Kings each play a few different characters, including themselves.
The last 15 minutes of this show broke my heart and almost made up for any reservations I had before then. About that time, they enact a reversal of the events at Columbine. As they work backwards through moments of death and the thoughts of the killers, the reveal all the possibilities, all the moments that might have led them elsewhere. All the ways the day could have ended differently, which inevitably leaves you thinking about all the opportunities the world had to alter the course of those young men's lives.
What irked me most about this show was the relative lack of dynamics. The last 15 minutes aside, the only dynamic was loud. The Suicide Kings were pretty mad in high school, and they're still carrying a lot of that about. It's not that they didn't have good reason to have been angry, it's just that it doesn't help the cause of their work that much. It's kind of like people who make a nice dinner and cover everything in salt and black pepper. Eventually, you can't taste anything else, even though there's a lot of good flavor. (Ew, I'm not fond of that sentence, looking back, but I'm gonna let it stand. It's pretty accurate.)
It's admirable theat the Kings insist on honesty about their gang-membership, fight-picking, pimple-popping pasts, but too often their anger overwhelms their intellect and humor. What they're saying is great, but they just plain yell to much.
Check this out. That's a video of Rupert on Def Poetry. (All three of the Kings have been featured on the show.) From about 1:10 to 1:30 he's getting pretty intense (and not without reason). Well, in the show, he keeps bringing this voice back again and again. In his eyes, you could see he was really wanting to connect with the audience and get a rise out of us. Maybe we were quieter than their previous crowds, who knows. They all did it from time to time though.
Okay, I'm gonna stop harping on that now.
Luckily, the S. Kings are full of heart. Their portrayal of the killer's best friend and the killer's father are well-considered, finely acted, and quite moving.
I also really loved Rupert's story near the end about returning to a scene of adolescent humiliation and the joy he takes in teaching. Jamie's story of divorced fatherhood was also funny and touching. I really liked watching Geoff perform, but I do't remember if he had a longer, personal piece like those. I definitely wanted to see more of him.
I think they might like to know that while we sat at a coffee shop after the show so I could take these notes, my wife was writing a poem of everything that's been difficult for her lately.
As for the directing, by Marc Bamuthi Joseph - a Hip-Hop Theater Festival alumnus, soon to be of Humana fame - it was pretty good, but had the weaknesses I expected. One of my complaints about a lot of the HHTF pieces I've seen has been is that they just need a director who's willing to be honest and kick a little butt. A lot of those pieces have long, boring sections that could be trimmed-up, or metaphors that are very unclear, or simply don't make great use of the stage. A lot of the performers of these pieces are making a transition from the stationary microphone to using the whole stage, and so some of these difficulties are to be expected.
In this case, I'm talking about the long pauses between some of the scenes, which seem to be mainly about making costume changes. The Kings are adept enough as performers that they don't really need many different costumes. The Cannibal Corpse t-shirt, stocking cap, and the trench-coats do help tell the story, but other than that the costumes were largely superfluous. Especially the fat suit. Especially that. Ugh. The show has a lot of fluidity as it is, so I'll bet if you cut some costume changes, you could make the whole thing flow just as nicely.
For what it was, a piece that combined different kinds of story-telling while 3 actors played a lot of characters, it was oddly tame in terms of naturalism. I guess I would have liked to have seen some of the naturalistic narrative moments get some more metaphorical staging to aid the themes of the piece, or at least make it more interesting. Having seen Bamuthi's work a couple of times, I know he know how to do that. Given Bamuthi's predilections as a performer - I could definitely see his touch here and there - I'm surprised he didn't help them to put the physicality of the performance into the same-lock step as their verbal co-ordinations. Clearly, the guys were willing to contort themselves and push to the edge of their considerable abilities.
Also, the down-right corner of the stage was virtually unused. Maybe there was a lighting issue.
So, hopefully it doesn't need to be said that I was impressed by the Suicide Kings a lot, and have spent this much space talking about their show because I think it's worthwhile, and I hope they'll keep working and take it to the next level.
