Dada Delight at Capital Fringe

A wee bit more Capital Fringe Festival blogging. Tonight I saw Manifesto! -- a production of Happenstance Theater -- at the Source on 14th Street. Verdict? Terrific.

The hour-long piece is a (very) playful homage to the Dadaist movement -- which has enjoyed a bit of a critical renaissance in the past few years. The big exposure came from a much-ballyhooed 2006 retrospective that toured major museums in Washington, New York and Paris. But there's also been a number of scholarly reexaminations of the phenomenon -- including The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (University of Chicago Press) and a slew of books from MIT Press that expand the scope of criticism on the movement to its manifestations in Eastern Europe and the Netherlands and to marginalized figures such as Francis Picabia.

So what does Happenstance do with Dada? Well, first, and best, they foreground the physical comedy of Dadaist performance -- the frenetic clowning, the farts, and the high-pitched exotic nonsense of it all. They remind the audience, even at a knowing remove, that Dada was meant to insult and offend and even physically repel those who were not in on its nihilistic joking.

Second, the company's mash-up of various texts reads Dada back into its particular milieu of contested avant-gardism. Sure, Dada was a revolt against the nationalism, capitalism and imperialism that created the First World War. But it was also a movement that bloodied the nose of other competing movements -- especially other artistic "isms" that included the Futurism spearheaded by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, which was co-opted and corroded by its adherents' preening, vulgar delight in war and destruction. It's no accident that Happenstance's production literally kills off and chalk marks the body of a Futurist, or that it presents capitalism and communism in a sado-masochistic tango that tickles, slaps and collapses in on itself.

The performances by Mark Jaster, Sabrina Mandell and Scott Burgess (as the clowns who staff a "Cabaret Révolte"), Maia DeSanti (the cabaret's hostess) and by Taffety Punk Theatre Company's Lise Bruneau and Marcus Kyd (who embody any number of the "isms" at war in the piece) are a winning blend of craft and playful anarchy. It's a rare thing to see texts which are largely the province of art historians and literary critics brought to life and brought to laughter. Happenstance is to be congratulated for doing so.

There are three more performances of Manifesto! -- Sunday, July 20, Wednesday, July 23 and Saturday, July 26. Tickets are here.

The cover of Theo van Doesburgs' 1923 brochure Wat is Dada is in the public domain.

Marat/Sade: A Forum Rave

I went to the opening night of Forum Theatre's production of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade -- better known as Marat/Sade -- in DC tonight.

Bottom line: This production of Peter Weiss' play is miraculous.

Let's start with the handicap: Marat/Sade is a quintessentially 1960s play. Playwright Peter Weiss hijacked the continuing immediacy of the French Revolution in post-1945 politics (with more than a nod to Georg Buchner's 1835 play Danton's Death). Just check out the movie based on the Royal Shakespeare Company's staggeringly brilliant 1967 production of the play -- all atom bombs and sexual revolution.

But director Michael Dove re-imagines this play so wonderfully in the Forum production, however, that you will (at least for the moment) forget the RSC version. Where RSC director Peter Brook went for anarchic sex and apocalypse, Dove angles for something more tangible and contemporary: madness, sensuality and war.

In 2008, the easy route for a director of Marat/Sade would be to angle for the stagecraft and song of the play: Armageddon as cabaret. And the actors who carry the music of this production -- Jesse Terrill (who wrote dazzling new music for this staging), Barbara Papendorp, Lisa Lias, Colin Smith, Michael Grew, Ashley Ivey, Colin Smith and Emre Izat -- skilfully inhabit the songs and placards that Weiss writes into the play.

For me, however, the center of the play is the fierce dialectic between Marat (Danny Gavigan) and the Marquis de Sade (Jonathon Church). Dove's version foregrounds this bitter conflict, and uses it as the engine of the play, enlisting the animating energy embodied in the pivotal roles of Charlotte Corday (Katy Carcuff), Simonne Evrard (Helen Parfumi) and the rabble-rousing priest Jacques Roux (Eric Messner) to spur it along. (Corday's assassination of Marat is downright sexy.)

The danger of doing Marat/Sade in 2008 is indulging in perverse nostalgia -- leaning on Bobby Kennedy and mutual assured destruction and a Europe where revolution is taking the barricades against the bourgeoisie. Forum's Marat/Sade scrolls forward to an America where war and religion and history are contested categories. The questions that this Marat/Sade poses are worth pondering. The Forum production pushes forward in all directions -- the futility of revolution is (almost) fun; assassination is as sexual as it is brutal, and politics is a carousel of sensual brutality.

Tickets -- and they are highly recommended -- are here.