When we think of Boston theater, we're likely to think first of the downtown touring houses—the Wilbur, the Colonial, the Schubert—and the university-connected institutions, the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) at Harvard and the Huntington at B.U. But last week I saw three shows in out-of-the-way venues with distinctly non-mainstream styles and themes.
One of them is actually an A.R.T. show, but isn't even in a theater. The other two, both involving former Valley residents, are tucked into fringe arts centers. One of them is a contender for World's Weirdest Musical, the other a political thriller about the genocide that overwhelmed Rwanda in the 1990s.
"The overwhelming" is English for "lokeli," by which Rwandans refer to the genocidal massacres in which up to a million people were savagely murdered, often by their own neighbors. The indiscriminate killing of ethnic Tutsis by the majority Hutus climaxed a centuries-old scenario, as The Overwhelming, now playing at Company One, emphasizes. The Tutsi/Hutu antagonism was largely manufactured by colonial powers that created a ruling Tutsi class to help the Europeans control the native majority.
J.T. Rogers' fascinating, flawed play unfolds in the days before the 1994 massacre was unleashed. It places a visiting white American professor, his African-American wife and teenage son in a Rwanda simmering with tension and intrigue. The plot, paralleling Graham Greene's The Third Man, employs a fairly standard cast of characters. Besides the innocent, ignorant Americans caught up in events they don't comprehend and can't control, there are cynical expatriates, corrupt bureaucrats and a variety of locals, from the suspiciously ingratiating to the suspiciously aloof.
Some of the plotting is awkward and the playwright sometimes gets bogged down filling us in on Rwandan history. But director Shawn LaCount—who earned his graduate degree at UMass—keeps things moving and finds the right balance between dramatic momentum and historical detail. The performances of his 11-member cast range from more than adequate to astonishing.
Company One, a resident theater of the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End, focuses on contemporary plays with probing themes. This season's lineup revolves around issues of race, with the next two shows set in the Civil Rights and Civil War eras.
Murdered Sleep
Sleep No More, part of A.R.T.'s current "Shakespeare Exploded" season, has been described as "art installation meets video game meets theater" and as "Macbeth meets Hitchcock." Performed all over an abandoned school in Brookline, it was created by Punchdrunk, a British ensemble specializing in what they call "immersive theater."
The title comes from Macbeth's anguished outcry after killing King Duncan: "Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep.'" And the experience is very like a waking dream, one that's poised to turn into a nightmare at any moment, invoking a very Hitchcockian sense of suspense.
Almost every room of the three-story schoolhouse has been transformed into cinematically detailed settings, from the stylish salons and bedrooms of '30s-era movies to medieval churchyards and ruined mini-landscapes. Everything is dimly illuminated by candles and strategic spotlights, and pervaded by a shifting soundtrack of Jazz Age standards, themes from Hitchcock films and a menacing drone that floats down the hallways.
The audience, fitted with eerie white masks and cautioned not to speak, is let loose to wander through this shadowy maze at will. As in a dream, there's no order or logic to it. We drift through uninhabited rooms, examining the paraphernalia on desks and in closets, then suddenly enter a scene in progress, wordlessly enacted by elegant figures in period evening dress.
The Macbeth narrative is fragmented, abstracted and encountered in random order by our random choices (this is the video-game connection). There's a slow-motion banquet scene attended by the bloody ghost of murdered Banquo, who then walks through the knot of spectators and into a fragrant grove of pines, which begin to move—an echo of Shakespeare's climactic scene. There's a room full of claw-foot bathtubs, one of them filled with bloody water where Lady Macbeth tries to wash away her guilt.
Woven into the Shakespearean dreamscape are threads of Hitchcock films, especially Rebecca, the Gothic mystery set in a creepy mansion with a dark secret. In what I take to be an oblique reference to that story's outcome, we see, in a room hung with baby dolls suspended over an empty cradle, a man violently strangling a pregnant woman, who then gets up and wheels away a pram containing not a baby but a package wrapped in newsprint.
We are like voyeurs, in the action but not of it. But then, without warning, the theatrical "immersion" goes deeper. One of my companions is grabbed and hustled down a staircase into a dark chamber where she's briefly abandoned. Elsewhere, a young woman sticks needles into an apple, then turns with a searching look—and takes me by the hand. She leads me into a small sitting room, locks the door, whispers a sad story about a lost and lonely woman, gives me a sweet, frightened kiss and leads me out again.
At least, I think that's what happened. Or maybe it was all a dream.
The Angry Inch
One of my favorite musicals is Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a bizarre little number that sends up cabaret performance and one-woman bio-shows, a deceptively tacky, hilariously offensive and ultimately moving exploration of transgendered angst and the search for identity, with the most raucously tuneful score since Tommy.
Created and originally performed by John Cameron Mitchell, with songs by Stephen Trask, Hedwig purports to be a late-night set by the title character in a grotty cellar club that's within earshot of the stadium where her former lover and musical partner is headlining. Hedwig is bitter and twisted, not just from the injustices of showbiz but because of a botched sex-change operation that left her with neither gender's genitalia, just "an angry inch"—also the name of her surly backing group.
The current Boston-area production is mounted by Blue Spruce Theatre at the Arsenal Center for the Arts, a multi-purpose venue in a converted industrial building in Watertown. It stars Danny Bryck, a graduate of the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School. He's every, er, inch the cheap chanteuse, from his knee-high red platform boots to the heart-shaped nimbus of platinum wig above his sparkle-encrusted makeup. His Hedwig is a tour-de-camp, a high-energy display of narcissism, bravura and despair. Kevin Mark Kline's production is raw and raunchy, with a tight four-piece band and a nice supporting turn by A. Tully as the frustrated drag artist Yitzhak.
The Overwhelming: Through Nov. 21, Company One at Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St., Boston, (617) 933-8600, www.companyone.org.
Hedwig and the Angry Inch: Through Nov. 22, Blue Spruce Theatre, Arsenal Center for the Arts, 321 Arsenal St., Watertown, (617) 923-8487, www.bluesprucetheatre.org.
Sleep No More: Through Jan. 3, Old Lincoln School, 194 Boylston St., Brookline, (617) 547-8300, www.americanrepertorytheater.org.
