Never Mind Language. Excess Is Easy to Translate.
Daniel Veronese's 'Women Dreamt Horses,' one of the four plays in the Buenos Aires in Translation festival running at P.S. 122 through Nov. 19, begins with a 'Blech!'
A frail-looking woman (April Sweeney) opens her mouth to talk and vomits all over herself. The five other casually dressed characters onstage stare blankly as she composes herself and then vomits again. After racing to the bathroom, she washes her mouth, returns and repeats the whole messy process about a dozen or so times.
This kind of absurd excess should prepare you for the rest of the festival, which includes, by my count, three dysfunctional families, two incestuous relationships, multiple murders, a topless retarded girl, wrestling sisters, boxing brothers, a few head locks and at least two characters losing their lunch.
Two years ago, when it was announced that the Australian-born Vallejo Gantner was taking over as artistic director of P.S. 122, he said he wanted to create more cross-cultural exchanges between this East Village institution and the rest of the world. By presenting (along with creative producer Shoshana Polanco) this ambitious series -- which pairs Argentine writers with American directors -- he has succeeded in making the downtown scene a little less provincial, even if the artistic results are mixed, at best.
A variety of styles is on display, ranging from the farcical ('Panic') to the dreamily melodramatic ('Women Dreamt Horses'); from a multimedia drama in which the past keeps intruding on the present ('Ex-Antwone') to a futuristic fairy tale ('A Kingdom, a Country or a Wasteland, in the Snow').
What these dramas share, for the most part, is a dark, often violent worldview expressed with aggressive, crude and highly physical staging. Jean Graham-Jones translated all four shows, and his verbose work can occasionally sound off-key. ('I'm not indifferent to your drama' a character in 'Panic' says.) One gets the sense that the directors are often trying to overcome the language and cultural barriers with rough and tumble stagings. The idea being: You don't need a translator to explain vomiting.
'Women Dreamt Horses' is a caustic play about three brothers and their failing family business, set at a dinner party gone wrong. In the hands of the director, Jay Scheib, it breaks out into fight night at P.S. 122. And the bruising (and bruised) actors aren't playing around with stylized shadow boxing. Their swings connect. Bettina (Zishan Ugurlu) slaps her husband, Roger (Jorge Alberto Rubio), on his bald head so many times that it sounds like applause, and he returns the favor with a bull rush that must have knocked her breath away.
Once again Mr. Scheib, whose past productions include a 'Medea' told in reverse narrative order, will not be accused of conceptual subtlety, but his show does have a kind of visceral energy and anger, and it's not out of keeping with the script. 'You know what I'm realizing,' Bettina says in a line that seems like the inspiration for the entire production. 'Violence is the topic of our times.'
'A Kingdom, a Country or a Wasteland, in the Snow,' by Lola Arias, a post-apocalyptic drama about a terrible family secret, also begins with a grappling match. The sisters Lisa (Andrea Moro Winslow) and Luba (Hayli Henderson), who live in a chilly wasteland with their parents, toss each other across the stage with abandon.
The sibling rivalry heats up when, while hunting for rabbits, the sisters find an orphan boy whom they see as husband material. This development worries their father (James Lloyd Reynolds) whose guilty face indicates that he knows something about the orphan that he's not telling us.
Ms. Arias, whose writing has a tactile, sensual quality, sneaks in images of fetuses and drowning idiots to prepare you for the horrors to come. And even if the play's shocks are hardly original, the director, Yana Ross, finds clever ways to stage them.
'Ex-Antwone' -- a fragmented dream of a play by Federico León, who is described in the program as a protégé of the experimental theater legend Robert Wilson -- takes place in the present, but just barely. Antwone, played moodily by Miguel Govea, seems stuck in his memories, which keep intruding on his day with his girlfriend, Stella (performed with wide-eyed warmth by Liz Dahmen), who provides what seems to be the sole comfort in his life.
Neither of these characters comes alive quite like the woman on the television set hanging above them, Antwone's shifty-eyed mother (Corrine Edgerly). This paranoid nag hectors him throughout the show. It's an exuberant hoot of a performance that could explain a lifetime of neuroses.
Perhaps the most disappointing show was Rafael Spreglburd's 'Panic,' a tedious two-hour farce produced with the Theater of a Two-Headed Calf (and directed by Brooke O'Harra), about a vulgar family scrambling to find a key to unlock a safe-deposit box that belonged to the patriarch who recently died.
It starts as a promising parody of horror movies, with the requisite violins and stark lighting, but quickly broadens its sights to, well, just about anything in pursuit of zaniness (a cop dressed like a stripper, incest played for laughs). There might be a cutting satire of bourgeois family values somewhere inside this lackadaisically paced production, but if so, it's lost in translation.
The festival continues through Nov. 19 at P.S. 122, 150 First Avenue, at Ninth Street; (212) 352-3101.
THEATER REVIEW
Correction:  November 16, 2006, Thursday  A theater review on Monday about the Buenos Aires in Translation festival, at Performance Space 122 in the East Village, referred incorrectly to the translator of the festival's four plays. The translator, Jean Graham-Jones, is a woman.