Enchanting ‘ghost Light’
and transcends, the enduring clichés of a profession, finding a hypnotic circularity in a craft that is, after all, about recreating the same images and words night after night after night.
Featuring sets by Brett J. Banakis and lighting by Eric Southern, transforms the compact, contemporary Claire Tow into a labyrinthine, old-fashioned show palace. Audience members are led in groups onstage and backstage; through dressing, storage and rehearsal rooms; and only at the very last into the sort of seats to which they are accustomed.
I had met this dying diva earlier. That was in her dressing room; I brought her roses, which had been plopped into my arms by a stage manager. She wore gold lamé (Montana Levi Blanco is the costume designer) and the perfume of gaudy desperation.
She asked us, far too eagerly, if we had really loved her performance. She then recruited an audience member to run lines with her from a new script. Funny thing, though — those lines were identical to what she had said earlier in talking to us, uh, spontaneously.
The blurring of truth and illusion is a continuing motif in So is the endless repetitiveness of life in the theatre — for its ushers and cleaners and technicians, as well as for those who speak the words decreed by a playwright.
“I have this recurring monologue,” says a man we encounter in a hallway. He’s dressed up in the style of a Beckett hobo, and as he delivers his set speech, in a wan funnel of light, he factors the playwright who created him into the equation, asking us to imagine a dramatist’s writing a character in an endless creative loop that erases the boundaries between past, present and future. There is also the handsome man in white tie and tails who collects and cherishes all the lines that have ever been cut from scripts. And a ravishing actress in a beaded gown who is made to repeat fragments of one speech — about lying for a living — as the lights are adjusted during a tech rehearsal.
A woman with improbable eyelashes and a Pierrot’s face has us gather around an upright piano as she sings a sad tale of a minstrel. The music throughout — always hopelessly romantic — is by Sean Hagerty. Morris wrote the script, which is full of the pretensions, posturing, mythologising and hokiness that will always be part of the religion of theatre.
Be warned: You may be asked to take part in the rehearsal of a pastiche Elizabethan play, overseen by an actormanager dressed in the image of William Shakespeare. Or to help conjure the sound and visual effects for a woman in a rowboat reaching for the moon. Or to arrange a model set. You’ll never be asked to take centre stage, though. These restless phantoms would never cede that cherished spot. But don’t underestimate your power, either. Your attention, dear audience, is what keeps these spirits alive.