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The press release describes All is Almost Still (the title derives from a Brecht poem) as "in the absurdist tradition of Beckett and Pinter," which sets an immediate challenge for a playwright: how to keep an audience "hooked" into what happens on stage while what happens on stage is steeped in a vision of life where people can have no meaningful relationships and where they cannot change anything or communicate anything.
The grand dukes of adsurdism -- Beckett and Pinter and, to someextent, Ionesco -- essentially use circularity and repetition of speech and action to turn the non-action of the absurdist life into viable stage action (think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's endless question-games or the three-hat vaudeville routine of Vladimir and Estragon in Godot or the gibberish spoken with such meaningful intensity in The Bald Soprano). Change that actually changes anything may not ever occur in the world on the stage, but that doesn't mean the journey into and through oblivion can't be funny, touching, maddening, heartbreaking, violent, and even energizing.
Playwright Adam Seelig, in All is Almost Still, however, takes another route, choosing to subject his audience to a two-and-a-half hour grinding "radical reinterpretation" of the story of Jacob, upon which, according to the press release, "the playwright imposes the constraints of modern domesticity, bringing in traces of de-evolution through images of our own racist and classist history."
Seelig sets an appropriately adsurdist miseen scène: a hermetically sealed apartment where three unnamed people live: a bed-ridden elderly man who may or may not be an impotent God and a man and a woman who alternate being a painter and the old man's servant. (In Act I, the man plays the servant, the woman the painter; in Act II, they reverse the roles.) A ladder reclines against the back wall topped by a frosted, cracked basement-style window through which one could only possibly see shadows in blurred movement. The old man has separated his bed from the rest of his room by a mesh wall with a single opening (resembling the wall of a confessional). In the room outside the old man's chamber sits the painter contemplating a large grey rock that rests, squat and mysterious, in the middle of the living room.
Seelig also sets in motion appropriately absurdist activity. The old man has a window out of which he gazes, and throughout the two days that the play covers, the old man waits for the appearance of a walker with a dog, and each day ends with the old man "faking" the arrival by creating a shadow-puppet against the back wall with two walking fingers while the servant maps the walker's route with a pencil in a large book. Act II repeats Act I, though not exactly, theellipses and elisions meant to indicate, in good absurdist tradition, a change where no real change has taken place.
To fill in the time between the old man's anticipation and the walker's arrival, the servant tries to feed him four "meals": a pear, an orange, a red apple, and two eggs. The old man has various reactions to the offerings: he simply can't take the pear, the orange's beauty overwhelms him, the apple becomes a prop for a parody of William Tell, and theeggs (one of which is returned to the servant as a gift) remain uncracked. At one point, under the prodding of the old man, the servant tries to climb to the top of the ladder in order to catch a full glimpse of the passing walker, but each time the servant fails to reach the top and must return to the mundane reaches of the sealed apartment and the invalid's demands.
While the servant moves to and fro, the painter prepares to begin painting, but the preparation seems, in some way, to prevent any actual painting going forward. (Against the wall rest a dozen or so canvases -- they may not be finished or even touched.) The servant and painter exchange banalities and philosophies and the painter constantly threatens to go into the old man's bedroom (the old man and the painter, apparently, have never met each other -- instead, each has formed a vision of the other untested by real touch or sight).
But despite the possibility that tomorrow the ladder may be climbed, the walker glimpsed, the orangeeaten, by theend of the play, clearly nothing has "changed" or ever will, the notion of "possibility" is just a whistle past the graveyard, and life has doomed the three to continue in their meaningless alterations and gavottes. As the lights fade down, the blackness that always lurks at theedges of this world (the servant always complains that they need more light) comes flooding in and levels everything out.
What "radical" point Seelig wants to make by all of this, and how he wants that "point," as he says in his press release, to "challenge [the] audience... to take a closer look at their own daily existence," never comes through clearly. If anything, Jacob's story is about taking robust action in the world (even if it means cheating and lying), not about giving in to futility anderror. Jacob went on to be the literal and figurative father of Israel, but Seelig's "family" goes on to become nothing but what it already is. And the story of Jacob's dream and his wrestle with the angel signifies a vision of life in which God literally links heaven and earth, and that ascent and descent on the ladder stands for the acquisition of divine knowledge and its dispersion throughout the world (as Maimonides points out in his references to the story). Here, no one learns anything they did not already know, and since they live in a self-referential world, any knowledge they have simply re-cycles without having a chance to evolve.
The direction, done by the playwright, contributes to this lack of clarity. Seelig paces the show in a way that constantly underlines the absurdity of the absurdity, as if he didn't trust the audience to "get" just how absurd his absurd world really really is. This over-attention flattens rather than heightens the world on stage, makes everything move at a glacial pace, and forces the actors into monochrome and portentious renditions that allow them no leeway to find any humor or lightnesses. (At least we get to laugh at Vladimir and Estragon's hat routine.)
Nathan Heverin's set design makes good use of the 78th Street Theatre Lab's narrow space. Raquel Davis and Josh Bradford's lighting design effectively define the play's different playing areas and provide "mood" without "moodiness." Iracel Rivero's costumes are appropriately drab and shapeless, mimicking the world in which the characters find themselves. But despite these adequate production values, All is Almost Still fails to do what a good play must do: dramatizeevents in a way that not only draws an audience in but continues to keep them interested in the world before them. It is one thing, over coffee and Gauloises, to opine that life is meaningless, that change is a mirage. But jejune coffee'd commentary does not a play make, and Seelig has failed to make the translation from café table to theatre space in a way that makes the audience's two-and-a-half hours richer at theend than it was at the beginning.
All is Almost Still
Written and directed by
Adam Seelig
with
Craig Evans
Billie James
Lawrence Merritt
The 78th Street Theatre Lab
New York, NY
May 19-30, 2004
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