By Marilyn Lester****There’s a lot to digest in JoAnne Akalaitis’s BAD NEWS! i was there… but this immersive and site-specific feast of a work at NYU’s Skirball Theatre is well worth dining on. Splendidly written, directed (by Akalaitis) and acted, the piece is a spectacular up-close-and-personal experience—storytelling par excellance. By connecting the tales of the ancients to our own times, using heightened speech and movement, Akalaitis has created a powerful commentary on the human condition and how theater especially, of all the arts, is a medium of collective sharing, catharsis and healing.
BAD NEWS! i was there… owes its gravitas to three centuries of classical Greek theater—but then, so much of modern theater (and culture) stands on the shoulders of those impressive ancient Greeks. For any kid who read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology in school, or anyone who’s investigated the works of Joseph Campbell can tell you, myth is mighty. Mary Zimmerman’s award-winning Metamorphosis most recently demonstrated the power and relevance of Greek myth and history for modern audiences. Akalaitis takes the experience further from the proscenium to you-are-there involvement. History, after all, has a habit of repeating itself. Birth, death, madness, murder, infanticide, suicide, war and much more… well, bad news is everywhere and so are the messengers who deliver it.
The show is a banquet of sight and sound—specific choreographed movement, spoken text, multi-harmony singing, music and sound effects (such as temple bells and drum beats). The narrative is taken from the works of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Jean Racine and Berthold Brecht, spoken and sung mostly in English, but also interwoven with Greek, Latin, German and French. The awaiting audience in the theater lobby (where there’s also an art installation) is first treated to the set-up by eight principal actors. Split into four groups, the audience is then led by guides—supplementary actor-singers who carry lanterns—to four successive stations in the theater and its environs, where two of the principals tell their stories.
“I was there, and I will tell you everything!” is the passionate refrain that links stories, parts of stories and the larger whole of the experience as it moves along. Repetition is key to the journey; it fuses the stories and emphasizes their power. Finally, the collected audience is gathered on the empty stage as the eight principals recite from the the oldest surviving play in Western literature: Aeschylus’ The Persians, the story of the battle of Salamis.
For the most part, the stories are gruesome, typified perhaps, by one of the most well-known of them, the tale of Oedipus who unknowingly marries his mother, kills his father and gouges his own eyes out at his mother’s suicide. What becomes evident, though, in BAD NEWS!i was there… is that gruesomeness lives on in our own times. A thorough read of any daily newspaper these days is proof of that.
Early on, drop boxes in the theater space were evident. Audience members were invited to write their own (anonymous) stories of BAD NEWS to be shared at a post-performance gathering. Thus was the tradition of the ancient Greek messenger speech and the role of storyteller throughout history spotlighted and made personal. In ways big and small ultimately we are all storytellers and messengers with our parts to play. Who among us has not voiced the equivalent of “I was there; I will tell you everything! It is very much food for thought.
Bad News! i was there…. has an original score by Bruce Odland, visual design by Julie Archer and lighting by Jennifer Tipton. The eight superbly talented actors are: Katie Lee Hill (Medea), Jenny Ikedea (Thyestes), Rocco Sisto (The Bacchae), Kelly Curran (Phèdre), Howard Overshown (Oedipus), Henry Jenkinson (Antigone), Jasai Chase Owens (Orestes) and Rachel Christopher (Hecuba).
BAD NEWS! i was there… at the NYU Skirball Theater from September 6-8, 2019
All photos by IAN DOUGLAS
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