The Transcendent Mundane

Martha Enson originally wanted to perform Rubble Women on a
giant pile of rocks. Too bad she didn’t get her wish. Seattle’s face is
pockmarked with construction sites, and seeing Enson’s impressionistic
new play about the Trümmerfrauen (the Berlin women who cleaned
their bombed-out city after World War II) in one of them would’ve added
a level of texture and depth that Rubble Women sometimes
wants.

“I had a hard time letting go of the outdoor version,” Enson says.
“But we had to do it this time of year—and if we’d done it
outside, we’d never get an audience and we’d all be sick.”

Enson’s second choice, the storage warehouse for a furniture maker,
is an appropriate alternative. Down an alley of patched concrete, just
a block from the rubbly crater where Consolidated Works used to be, the
warehouse resembles a bunker, concrete and cold. (At future
performances, Enson hopes to serve hot potatoes to the audience. They
didn’t make it on opening weekend.) The stark set and
lighting—which relies on the type of massive, 10
million–candlepower flashlights that old Vietnamese men use for
squid-fishing off piers in Elliott Bay—gives Rubble Women the feeling of life immediately after wartime.

The Allies, Enson says, gave more food rations to physical laborers
than desk workers, so many women became Trümmerfrauen to feed
themselves and whatever remnants of their families had survived the
war. Others were simply conscripted. The bombing of Berlin destroyed
approximately one-third of the city’s apartments and left 75 million
cubic meters of rubble. The women cleared it away with shovels and
wheelbarrows: housecleaning writ very, very large.

Her script, developed with and directed by Sheila Daniels, is a
pastiche of history, fairy tales, and vaudevillian clowning. (The cast
has a shared cirque background: Enson performed and directed at
Teatro Zinzanni between 2001 and 2005 and studied at the Ecole Jacques
Lecoq in Paris with fellow cast member Carina Jingrot; Kajsa
Ingemansson majored in
“ensemble-based physical theater” at
Dell’Arte International in California.) The rubble women play hot
potato with their stones or cradle them like babies. They do
impersonations (of chickens and men) and perform playful stripteases
for each other, pulling their black fingerless gloves off with their
teeth and slinking out of their dun lavender smocks.

In addition to Trümmerfrauen, the
actresses also play
fairy-tale characters: the Little Match Girl (Tracy Hyland),
Scheherazade (Enson), Hecuba (Mik Kuhlman), and Psyche (Jingrot), all
grubbing around the postwar detritus. They tell their stories of love
and betrayal and deals with the devil, stacking mythological time on
historical time on narrative time. A list of shared experiences,

enumerated by the actors, is deployed as a kind of universal
thread to sew all the different layers together, a bid for
universality: “The first dance with your husband… The first time you
can make it all the way across the monkey bars… The first time you
don’t care if he comes inside you… The first time your child saves
you…”

Ironically, Rubble Women‘s universalism may be its undoing.
Instead of digging into the specifics of one image or story, it glances
off the surface of many. For a play about war and wreckage, Rubble
Women feels like a pretty, shallow thing.

Critics across America and Europe have been hyperventilating over
the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. The New York Times called its
latest show, No Dice, “wondrous” and “a tour de force.” Lane
Czaplinski, director of On the Boards, says he was discussing Nature
Theater with some theater programmers from Northern Europe. They told
him: “A work like No Dice only comes along once
every 10
years.”

The New York–based company takes its name from the last
chapter in Franz Kafka’s Amerika. The hero, a 17-year-old
immigrant looking for a job and a life, finds a welcoming flyer:
“Personnel is being hired for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma! The Great
Nature Theater of Oklahoma is calling you! It’s calling today only!…
All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward! We are the
theater that has a place for everyone, everyone in his place!”

Pavol Liska, one of Nature Theater’s codirectors, moved from
Slovakia to Oklahoma when he was 18. “He lived there for a year,” says
Kelly Copper, the other codirector. “He labored under the delusion that
he would find this theater. When he did not—we had to make it up
ourselves.”

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma (“anyone who wants to be an artist,
step forward!”) is a fitting namesake for a company dedicated to
exploring the transcendent mundane. One of its previous
shows—Poetics: a ballet brut—was a dance by
nondancers. Its next show—Rambo Solo—will be a
one-man reenactment of the first Rambo movie, made in a studio
apartment with a budget of $100. And No Dice, which On the
Boards is bringing to an empty office this weekend, is a four-hour epic
of scavenged materials.

The company culled the text from over 100 hours of telephone
conversations recorded while people sat at their boring desk jobs. “We
would joke,” Copper wrote, “that this was
corporate-sponsored
art.” The movement came from three sources: an instructional video on
how to perform street magic, people dancing at clubs, and the gestures
of Liska’s mother as she spoke in Slovak to the uncomprehending
company. Nature Theater then organized the gestures using a deck of
cards (they can start anywhere in the series, but must go in order) and
a game the actors play with each other during the performance.

Does relying on found materials and games, instead of writing and
blocking, feel like an abdication of their jobs as artists? No, Copper
answers—the precision and games keep the performance fresh and
the actors from slipping into autopilot. Whether the audience
understands the system, she says, is irrelevant: “It just keeps
everyone in the same room in the present moment,” she wrote, “working
hard to be understood.”