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Review
An Oak Tree
Barrow St. Theater
December 11, 2006
Van Loan
vanloan@nyconstage.org
Tim Crouch's latest performance piece (or theatrical phenomenon as it is billed)
while utterly original is also highly conceptual. The back story of the piece is
that a young girl has been killed in a car accident. Her grieving father in his
anguished state has accidentally entered a provincial side show of a traveling
stage hypnotist. The hypnotist happens to be the person who killed the man's
daughter. When the hypnotist asks for volunteers from the audience, the father
accepts.
What happens next is Mr. Crouch's basic concern. How much of our conscious
awareness has actually been suggested by outside sources? How much of this
awareness is adapted to fit the reality of a situation? How much reality can a
person live with and how much needs to be suppressed? How does a human being
live with the consciousness of their own mortality?
The process that the author uses to delve into these questions provides the
fascination of the evening. Each night, a different actor (male or female) plays
the suffering parent. They have no knowledge of the script or have any
pre-existing dialogue from Mr. Crouch. He relays the situation and the
appropriate responses to the actor via an ear phone which the actor is wearing.
The actor is then required to spontaneously recreate the needed emotion.
There are a few inherent problems with the evening. The set-up is a little dense
and information heavy and at 70 minutes, Mr. Crouch uses up a lot of time
preparing us for the "event". However, he is an engaging and hypnotic (no pun
intended) performer and at times summons up the magnetism of Brian Friel's Faith
Healer and at others the seediness of Archie Rich in Osborne's The Entertainer.
The second is the actor playing the "father". It is a part that calls upon the
improvisational skills of an actor and a necessary spontaneity that not all
actors possess. The evening I attended the father was played by the accomplished
stage actor David Rasche (on his night off from MTC's Regrets Only). After some
hesitation (and initial skepticism), he acquitted himself admirably. Although
after the performance, he said to some well-wishers, "I really didn't do
anything!" Was this a modest actor or an accurate description of the evening? A
little of both.
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