Border crossings
A hanging ghost light and themes of breaking through boundaries loosely link the two one-acts of Dual Citizens, at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble through March 28. The two solo pieces also tap the mystery that is essential to raising performance, beyond merely reflective and entertaining, to art. However, while one uses mystery to stimulate our curiosity about the characters and ourselves, the other falls victim to it. It’s a fine line, but it's the difference between being pulled onboard a train of exploration, and being left on the platform with nothing to sift through but our own baggage.
Both Anna Skubik’s Broken Nails: A Marlene Dietrich Dialogue and Anthony Nikolchev’s Look, What I Don’t Understand involve travel. The journeys in Nails concern Dietrich’s effects, which were moved from her Paris apartment and shipped to Berlin following her death in 1992, and the effect she has on a young woman’s self-discovery. In Don’t Understand, we seem to be constantly moving from location to location and back and forth in time, as we hopscotch through a history of one family’s exodus from overrun European homeland to over-protective new American home.
In Nails, which Skubik conceived and Romuald Wieza-Pokojski wrote and directed, the lights come up on a young woman reclining on a large trunk. She is awakened by the wheeze of locomotive engines and German station announcements. Contact with the trunk, representing Dietrich’s legacy, puts the woman in a reverie. She becomes the personal assistant for the star during her final days. Skubik provides the voice for Dietrich, represented by a life-size puppet. The dynamic between the women operates on several levels: famous and unknown, master and servant, and end-of-life versus starting out. The central theme, however, is the harmful effects – on the haves and have-nots – of our obsession with feminine beauty.
Like Greta Garbo, and to a lesser degree Marilyn Monroe, Dietrich came to embody physical perfection. Skubik reminds us that men could be overwhelmed by simply looking at her photograph. But, while Garbo went into self-exile before cameras could document her aging, and Monroe died in her mid-thirties, Dietrich stayed in the public eye into her 80s. The cost of all that, and the resentment a young woman feels for those who participate in setting these absurd standards, are palpable in this hour-long piece.
Technically, Skubik’s piece is a marvel. Her puppeteering is effortlessly subtle and this Dietrich seems to live and breath. A brief shoulder-massage by the assistant is puppeteer hall-of-fame material as we feel the stress and bone-weariness ease out of the boneless puppet.
Where Nails is dreamlike, the world of Nikolchev’s Look, What I Don’t Understand is nightmarish. The versatile unit set he designed begins as a tiny chain-link cage, then flips back to become a small building with a door, and stairs rising on either side. The program lists one unifying director and four other directors for each of the hour-long play's parts. With more production resources we might have had the helpful establishing projections and light cues that are taken for granted in larger houses. Still, these pieces embrace a barebones, poor theater aesthetic, and storytelling must be the spine. It may be too much to try taking us to so many places without returning to a central narrator touchstone. At least for an American unfamiliar with the specifics. And, using a five-person directing team may make the fractured flashbacks even more splintered.
The cage represents a containment area for people immigrating into the U.S. From the initial image – in which an innocent man is unfairly detained – we quickly move back to scenes in Bulgaria that precipitate him leaving. We also make trips to the Congo and elsewhere as we follow this man’s history, and get a sense of the harsh conditions and brutality that forced him out. But throughout, we feel we are clinging to the coattails of someone racing through his own memory, changing personalities and locations.
Both plays share a wonderful, gritty post-War Europe starkness. Both artist bios state an ongoing commitment “to continue the Dual Citizens project to eliminate passports.” America may be a little unsympathetic to easing border restrictions these days. But the kind of imaginative travel available in Nails, and possible in a less jagged Look will always be welcome.
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