Architecting

P.S. 122

January 18, 2009

Reviewed by Vanloan

vanloan@nyconstage.org

Architecting, the captivating and often riveting new performance piece at P.S. 122 is the latest effort of TEAM or Theater of the Emerging American Moment. Winner of the 2008 Fringe First award in Edinburgh, it's a corset drama set in post-Katrina New Orleans. No, it's the story of how the South will rebuild itself again. No, it's how we "architect" our lives to survive disasters both natural and man-made. But, it's really about what Margaret Mitchell thought of the David O. Selznick's movie version of her epic novel Gone With The Wind. You catch my drift; it's all of these things and more. Architecting is a multi-level, cerebral circus that defines challenging theater at its best.

The play opens in a ramshackle bar in New Orleans' Ninth Ward after the Katrina catastrophe. One of the patrons is Henry Adams (Jake Margolin) the German- American architectural engineer, famous for Baltimore's Belvedere Hotel. That he died in 1929 immediately establishes the time-tripping dimensions of the play. He is expounding on the most architecturally perfect structure existing in the world; the Gothic masterpiece Chartres Cathedral. Mellie (Jill Frutkin), the rockabilly hostess at the bar is amused by Adams until Carrie (Libby King) arrives to announce the bar has been condemned to make way for a new planned community development. It will hopefully provide a new communal order to the devastation that hurricane Katrina wrought. This storyline is ingeniously juxtaposed against another story of rebuilding; the reconstruction of the South after the Civil War as seen through the eyes of author Margaret (Peggy) Mitchell (the exquisite Jessica Almasy). She in turn is dealing with a young Hollywood producer (Frank Boyd) who is intent on remaking the film Gone With The Wind devoid of any racial content. He has hired a black director (Margolin again although the actor is white) to 'revisit' the work. And this time around, Scarlett O'Hara (a captivating Kristin Claire Sieh) is decidedly having a lot more to say as to how the role should be played.

The entire piece is a dizzying, mind-tripping joy ride of ideas and emotions. The rapid fire, split-focus narrative at times plays out like a movie (especially those involving the GWTW "remake"). The movie constantly verges on the brink of disaster as the racial tensions of the period undercut those of the present. Carrie's struggles to complete the new development run afoul of bureaucratic snags and her own self-doubts (as Mitchell slyly puts it "there's as much money to be made in empire destruction as there is in empire building"). The ongoing themes of self-actualization and rebirth clash with the pull of the recognizable and commonplace. Yet, at 150 minutes the piece sometimes bites of more than it can chew which is not necessarily a bad thing. This is especially true after intermission when we encounter Caroline (Seih again) who is on her way to Atlanta to audition for the Scarlett role in the remake and the young gas station attendant (Boyd) who agrees to drive her. After the hard-driving brainy theme park of a first act, it's hard for the adrenaline to slow down to accommodate the romantic emotionalism of the second although both actors are quite engaging. Director Rachel Chavkin does a cracker-jack job of pacing the piece which at times moves with the velocity of a hurricane. Brian Scott's witty video design is instrumental in keeping all the singular elements of the work in place and in conjunction with Jake Heinrichs' lighting provides a solid base for TEAM's leap-frogging mise-en-scene. It's epic experimental theater at its best from a company that's engineering a breathtaking trajectory for itself.

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