‘This was supposed to be fun,” a performer protests during Juliana F. May’s “Commentary = not thing.” If you’d read the show’s advance billing, you might have been wondering the same thing.
May, winner of New York Live Arts’ first Jeff Duncan Award for choreography, described her show as a “modern-dance opera” that was “part Stephen Sondheim and part the B-52s,” but you won’t hear a scrap of either. Somewhere between writing the press release and making the piece, she switched gears and ended up with a postmodern version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
The stripped-down production — with actual stripping — didn’t have any music at all for the first half-hour. May ignored the theater’s usual bleacher seating and brought us onto the stage in folding chairs.
She uses the dance floor as a dog track of despair. Two men and one woman go round and round, at first in a sprint, then making tense, quick gestures. One man, the tall, thin Ben Asriel, sets up folding chairs and a low table while darker, scruffier Kayvon Pourazar has a repetitive, pointless argument with a slender Maggie Thom.
When your attention shifts back to Asriel, he’s sitting buck naked, and the other two strip shortly after. The argument — fragments of a marital spat — repeats endlessly, pointlessly. In a way, it’s much like real life, except here nobody’s wearing any clothing.
There’s some nervous humor while they’re parading around nude, and Thom complains to no one in particular that she’d rather “know what your a – – crack looked like so it wouldn’t be a surprise.” But most of the show is in earnest. Again on the march, the trio forms a locomotive and gropes one another. Sometimes it seems smutty, sometimes as innocent as toddlers. They go round and round, until disappearing, without warning, behind a curtain.
The rest of the piece has more dancing in it. The three move in obsessive repeating snippets, together but never combining.
A new argument starts up. The same angry statements — “Why are you being so nice to me?” — get bounced from person to person, and finally Thom sings them. Here’s where the piece gets into trouble: The cast are trained dancers, not actors or singers. Thom could barely be heard over the recorded score.
As the stage dims to black, the music gets louder and louder, hammering like a drum corps. There’s a crash, and it’s all over.
If the piece wasn’t always coherent, at least it had its moments. May seems more interested in her process than her product, but she was able to expose emotions as well as skin.