Sex in the city of uncertainty
March 11, 2005 | 12:00am
If there is one word that is inscrutable and relative, it has to be "love." "Relationship" is a close second.
In New Voice Company’s production of David Hare’s The Blue Room, the characters – all played convincingly by Jenny Jamora and Jamie Wilson – engage in a doomed attempt to search for love or something like it, to pin that ineffable whatever down.
The Blue Room, which was staged recently at the Republic of Malate, is an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Reigen. Reigen spurred an obscenity suit when it premiered in 1921, the same era when erotically charged works like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer got heat from an ultra-prudish society. It reminds me of Lou Reed’s immortal line in Sweet Jane: "Those were different times…" We now live in a more open-minded society, yet sex in some circles is still regarded with puritanical dread.
Dig the concept of The Blue Room, which was directed by Rabbi Gannaban: Ten 10-minute plays, 10 meditations on "men and women, sex and social class, actors and the theater," and 10 takes on relationships that are interconnected like an erotic daisy chain. Like a 10-bar blues played by two lonely figures about love, betrayal and everything else in between.
Jamora navigates a host of characters such as the Girl, the Au Pair, the Married, Woman, the Model and the Actress. Wilson takes on the Cab Driver, the Student, the Politician, the Aristocrat and the pretentious Playwright (who beams, "Journalists are writers – in the same way as rats are animals…" or something to that effect). All are searching, consciously or unconsciously, for a bit of affection and attention.
Some characters settle for the closest thing: Fornication (the F-word). Some go through their ordinary humdrum lives in between climax and longing, memory and desire. Some treat sex like salvation in the dark; and some, a commodity. Some make good use of time and their bodies before everything in the cosmos goes kaput. Since, as one character nonchalantly says, "Everything ends badly because in the end everyone dies."
What’s interesting about this play is that the members of the audience see Jamora and Wilson dressing up for each sketch through a thin white screen. Viewers literally see them transform into their respective characters by putting on (or taking off) each article of clothing. Viewers become voyeurs in a play about secret affairs and silent hideaways. Appropriate.
The stage is bare, save for a couple of beds and other props ushered on and off stage, or those microphones hanging from the ceiling intertwined with flowers. Of course, the minimalist stage serves as an extension of the bleakness each character feels. In the beginning is the void, and then two characters show up who attempt to fill each other’s emptiness with either love or illusion.
At the end of each sketch, the characters are not handed with redemption wrapped in a convenient sing-and-dance package complete with blinking lights and closing curtains. There is much ambiguity in The Blue Room. In some cases, the characters are left hanging in half-resolutions. Isn’t that what real life is like?
That’s what I love about New Voice Company productions. The last one I watched was Cabaret at the Music Museum late last year. As the curtains rolled down, the members of the audience (including this writer) looked unnerved as the Nazi flag was unfurled, and with a hint of menace hovering over the characters – including Jamora, who played one of the German belles, and Wilson. (Jamie, by the way, was brilliant as the cross-dressing Emcee who functioned as the one-man Greek chorus.) There were song-and-dance numbers all right ("Life is a cabaret, old chum…"), but they were pumped with irony.
"Everything ends badly because in the end everyone dies." Yes, but before that happens, let there be trysts to keep bodies and beds busy.
In last week’s YS issue, I wrote about some of the most misunderstood words in the English language. Czech writer Milan Kundera devoted a whole section in The Unbearable Lightness of Being to these tricky linguistic items. It’s called "A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words," which I wrongly titled in last week’s column. Well, mistakes usually happen when you deal with words, since language is one crafty beast to deal with.
Due to a deluge of letters from readers (four and a half, actually – including my ex-PE instructor who’s as tall as Pinocchio’s annoying cricket sidekick), here are another set of entries for the "fictionary."
"It’s a Nikon EM," I proudly beamed. It was recently purchased from one of the STAR photographers for a princely sum.
"Oh, that’s a girl’s camera," he dismissed.
Oh, so I have girl’s camera. Big deal. At least I don’t have a clown’s name, I silently muttered. I left him to speak with Sideshow Bob at the buffet table.
"Isagani," my girlfriend informed the person.
"Oh, I have a friend whose relatives were named after flowers – like Ylang-Ylang, Kalachuchi, etc."
Great, if it’s not a newscaster who looks like Aiza Seguerra then it’s a bunch of flowers that smell like the dead.
Upon hearing the line "My blood runs cold," the boys in the squad were supposed to lift this girl over their shoulders for the grand finale. They did, on cue. Aaaack! The girl nearly lost her head because she came too close to the rotating ceiling fan. Talk about school spirit. She nearly became a school spirit.
Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah…
"Who says it’s art, and who says it’s shit?" Perry Farrel of Jane’s Addiction once asked. In the case of Piero Manzoni (who once canned his feces and managed to sell them to prestigious galleries), the difference is nil. Dung in a can? Of course, there’s a profound explanation for it.
What about MMDA art, then? Ten thousand years from now, aliens will uncover walls filled with them. "&*###@@@@@@@ (Oh, Neanderthal Men,)" they will conclude, and then proceed to obliterate the planet.
Carl Barât of The Libertines looks like Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. Bono of U2 looks like Robin Williams. Ozzy Osbourne looks like Godzilla. Try to guess which local celebrity fortune-teller looks like Michael Jackson. How about the local songbird who also looks like the troubled pop legend who sang Mariah, er, Man in the Mirror?
I learned that the same guy went to see Britney Spears, Pink, Avril Lavigne and the Spice Girls in concert. He soiled his pants when Emma "Baby Spice" Bunton sang a verse in Two Become One, and sent his ex-girlfriend a copy of Britney’s Crazy single as a token of his wuv, er, love. It turned out that his ex is also a huge fan of Soundgarden. Somewhere in the world there is a discarded Britney single and a guy who dreams he were Stinky Spice.
Another guy hung out with us: A nerd who wore Michael Jackson pants and who thought rock n’ roll began with Green Day’s "Dookie" album. In one drinking session, "Dookie" brought along a friend: a guy who was into Anne Rice, who once wore a freakin’ cape to a poetry reading, and who fashions himself as a "vampire." It was the suckiest thing I’ve ever heard.
We went to this small carinderia near UST that specializes in cheap beer, goat meat and toilets that don’t flush. "Lestat" drank beer and ate fish crackers as if he were the Prince of Darkness on a biting binge in a small Romanian town. He stuffed himself silly. Then suddenly, he turned red. Fidgeted. Pivoted. He started puking gross, yellow, fishy, crunchy stuff on the table.
The mass of the vomit was probably equal to the guy’s weight. Even the goats complained of the mess. Someone commented that there was no need to buy more pulatan because "Lestat" recycled it for us.
Vomit Boy emptied the entire contents of his stomach – beer, fish crackers, even words.
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