Diana Moves
Consolidated Works
Through Aug 29.
Vetala
JEM Arts Center
Through Aug 28.
Diana Moves very much wants to be liked. From the advertising stencils that spatter the sidewalks out front to the coordinated digital videos that illustrate and complement the onstage action, all the outward trappings of this musical solicit your attention, your interest, your sympathy. Writers Rob Knop and Sheila Callaghan have set the musical during the height of grunge, not in Seattle, but in Portland and L.A., and seem to intend by this geographical sleight of hand to spark the nostalgia of Seattle audiences while avoiding the trap of parochialism. And of course, it helps the show that arguments over whether the music seems “authentic” or not distract from the real question of whether the emotions do.
Sitting through Diana Moves feels a lot like watching a sadistic Lars von Trier movie. As actor Meg McLynn ably portrays the growth and several transformations of protagonist Leslie Danko–from a sweet though criminally neglected child of a junkie to a 17-year-old high-school dropout with a permanent limp who is carrying the child of either her smarmy boyfriend or her mother’s dealer (she’s not sure which)–you have to wonder, how much torture is enough? Couldn’t we have stopped after the despondent child throws herself off a banister, or after her mom refuses to bring the kid to physical therapy, thereby crippling her for life? Why must she be bullied, raped, and impregnated as well? After a certain point, the audience stops identifying with McLynn (as audiences did with Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves or Björk in Dancer in the Dark) and either numbly disengages from her poisonous emotions, or, more disturbingly, begins to take pleasure in her humiliation. The basic components of this production are fine–the performances are okay, the music is okay, and I liked some of the attention-hogging digital animation. But I cannot feel an ounce of redemption in a coda that places an emotionally battered teenager supine in a hospital, gazing up at her stupid boyfriend and whimpering about love.
In a smaller, subtler production on the south side of town, Vetala is another original work with a potentially problematic premise. Seattleite Sam Anderson spent ten months in South and Southeast Asia gathering theater and performance material for this play, which is based on a series of Sanskrit fables and infused with traditions as far-flung as karaoke, Balinese shadow puppetry, and Bollywood melodrama. It could have had the excessively reverent scent of cultural tourism or the discordant patchwork feel of any number of fusion experiments, but Vetala evades those pitfalls with clever writing, inventive staging, and a particularly smashing performance by Mishelle Apalategui.
Apalategui plays a corpse reanimated by the Vetala, an incorporeal demon-spirit that uses the bodies in a graveyard as its playthings–puppets, really, in a series of often-hilarious narratives staged for a wayward king. The king, played a bit doofishly by Sam Wilson, has been sent to fetch a body from the Vetala’s graveyard; loath to give up even one of its corpses–which, after all, it has put some effort into protecting from decomposition–the Vetala forces him to sit through a series of riddling scenes. From the tale of a courtesan cursed to cycle through a tragic love story from a past life to a Bollywood sex farce packed with jokes about the male lover’s special friend, the spell of these fables depends to a great extent on the physical abilities of the actors, whose tasks sometimes edge toward dance theater. All of the actors playing the Vetala are adequate performers, but Mishelle Apalategui carries the ensemble with her limp-to-poised rendering of a spirit infusion and roles ranging from a carefree child to a credulous, hunchbacked crone. And then there’s the musical accompaniment, by DJ Advent, Deepayan Acharjya, and (on the day I went) James Wetzel, which provides a perfect cushion of sound to protect these stories from the bustle of Georgetown and the late-night flight patterns outside.
