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The Big Show: A Reimagination of Eugene O'Neill's Thirst Through the Life Story of Frances Farmer

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/eugeoneirevi.35.1.0130

2161-4318

Zander Brietzke,

Theater, Performance, and Music History

The irony of The Big Show was apparent from the beginning. The performance, after all, was only scheduled to run forty minutes. The setting did not amount to much either: a small, narrow, whitewashed gallery space littered with bits of theatrical paraphernalia such as naked lightbulbs, stepladders, a slide projector, some suspended clotheslines, a stage manager's console and work station. Director Charlie Sutton (of Kinky Boots fame), Starbucks in hand, hopped up on a chair to welcome the audience and explain that the performers had only rehearsed for a few hours. Indeed, the Monday matinee performance occurred on the traditional day off for professional actors. At this point, the director could not have done more to create low expectations for what might unfold.Mr. Sutton went on to say that The Big Show was the name of a radio program in 1950 designed to save the radio industry from the popular onslaught of television. Hosted by Tallulah Bankhead, The Big Show was chock full of major stars and personalities bent on holding onto a share of the entertainment market. Sutton envisioned O'Neill's one-act Thirst as one such means to capture an audience (perhaps because Tallulah had starred in Hitchcock's Lifeboat in 1944), and he had previously recorded a new version of the play as if it were an old-time radio broadcast. Meanwhile, he announced that the life of Frances Farmer was his chief concern in the performance. Sutton labeled “extreme circumstances” as the common link between the lifeboat survivors in O'Neill's little play and Frances Farmer during her sad days locked away in a mental institution.The audience would hear the recording of Thirst interspersed among the choreographed dance episodes of Farmer's life that they watched, including domestic scenes with her mother; enticement and later exploitation by first Hollywood and then Broadway; mental breakdown; incarceration; shock therapy; rape; and homecoming. There was no seating for the audience. Instead, Sutton encouraged the audience to move around the space and follow the performers as they acted within four chalk-drawn circles on the concrete floor. The only rule imposed upon the audience was to remain outside the circumference of a circle in which the actors were playing.The performers, young, attractive, and athletic, danced very well. Broadway veteran Rachelle Rak, as Frances, charismatically held the center of the production, while Purdie Baumann and Kristine Bendul supported her as asylum inmates, and Alex Michael Stoll added weight as the oppressive male orderly. The choreography was at its best when the performers physically engaged each other as if in a fight for survival. Mr. Stoll lifted Ms. Rak several times effortlessly and with intricate moves that simultaneously connoted the vulnerability of the actress and the violence done to her. The emotional climax of the performance occurred in a rape scene in which Ms. Baumann and Ms. Bendul donned army hats and belts to indicate their military roles and then synchronized repeated dives at Ms. Rak's prostrate body and suspended themselves over her. The meaning of repetition was clear. In general, the stylized representations of behavior through dance were more effective than any literal gestures. Likewise, the few spoken words of the performers, usually meant to clarify meanings, carried less significance than a series of expressive bodily movements. The actors did not need to say a thing to get their points across.The electric charge of bodies in space and in proximity to each other and the audience contrasted greatly with the cool version of Thirst as a radio play. The recording performed by Rachel de Benedet, Kyle Taylor Parker, and Eric Leviton crackled with proper diction and disembodied menace. The audience did not hear the entire play by any means, but only elliptical episodes to cover scene transitions on the floor as well as to provide commentary on the staged action. In O'Neill's play, the characters drift at sea, surrounded by water, while they slowly go mad from heat and dehydration. The female character, called “The Dancer,” offers to give first her diamond necklace and then her body to a sailor in exchange for water. Finally, she dies and falls prey to the hungry sharks that have encircled the boat. Poignantly, Frances calls repeatedly for a glass of water on her knees from within a circle at the end of the performance.Safe from a seat at some distance from the stage often one is provided no end of pure aesthetic, if not voyeuristic, pleasure of the entire human body in motion. The Big Show, however, granted no such remove from which to take in the dance. Instead, the audience stood around and scrambled to see what there was to see. Indeed, the bodies in motion were seen through other bodies, and one had to jostle for position in order to get an unobstructed view, which often came at the price of being on the front line and too close to the actors as they brushed past to get to another circle, too close to the perspiration on their skin, too much mutual invasion of personal space to count as mere aesthetic. It felt uncomfortable. It felt predatory. The true connection to O'Neill's play finally dawned as inescapable. The audience circled about the dancers of Frances Farmer's life story as the sharks did in O'Neill's Thirst. Each species relished its role equally as consumer.