Characters’ essence in twin solo shows
One of the most magical things actors can do is when they find something physical — a posture, a stride, a way of holding the facial muscles — that brims with a character’s unique essence, that silently communicates a whole, one-ofa-kind life. The gesture is rigorously hewn of anything trite or default, so that what’s left is a physical choice only one person in the world — that particular character — would make.
The best part of fools-Fury’s “Role Call,” a double bill of solo shows that opened Monday, Oct. 9, at Nohspace under Ben Yalom’s direction, is how both performers, Michelle Haner and Debórah Eliezer, finely carve a central character’s physicality.
In “Sheryl, Hamlet and Me,” Haner shines as Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and author of “Lean In.” Sandberg and Haner were dormmates Haner’s freshman year at Harvard, but Haner emphasizes in the program and in the show itself that her interpretation takes great liberties rather than adhering to her vague memories of their acquaintanceship.
In Haner’s rendering, Sandberg always has a faraway squint, whether she’s at home, hurling herself into a warrior yoga pose while issuing commands to her hologram assistant, or about to address a crowd, smiling, waving, pointing knowingly at a favorite audience member. It’s the gaze of someone whose eyes never stray from the prize, for whom the big picture is the only picture, who can take single-word criticisms of her image, culled from covertly harvested data, and instantly envision a multipronged strategy to tackle each one.
Yet Haner doesn’t merely poke fun at the billionaire, which would be too easy. There is a life-and-death earnestness in Sandberg’s every pursuit, both her altruistic ones and her aggrandizing ones, that gives underdog charm to someone who’s on top of of the world yet always on guard for threats.
Less successful is Haner’s attempt to juxtapose Sandberg’s career path with her own as a theater director, lately of a high school “Hamlet” production; she announces the contrast but then fails to develop it. Less successful still is her attempt to put Sandberg and her own avatar in dialogue, through video phone calls, with a platonic ideal of Hamlet, the centuries-old character. Cumbersome explanation doesn’t fortify the rickety premise, but a few gems emerge later, in the form of Haner’s shrewd insights into Shakespeare’s tragedy. To deliver his verse, you must “taste” his words. Ophelia isn’t sad, but radical. Hamlet isn’t just melancholy or vengeful; he wants the crown his uncle has stolen.
In Eliezer’s “(dis) Place [d],” the character that stands out is her father, whom she portrays at multiple ages: as a child growing up Jewish in Baghdad, as a young man spying for the Zionist underground and as an elderly man painting pictures in a nursing home, often unable to speak or remember who his daughter is. In every age of his life, Eliezer gives him an echo of the same expression: a congenital confusion at all things the universe might throw at him, coupled with a mighty shrug. It’s like the subtext of all his lines is, “I don’t get it, but what does it matter?”
Eliezer tells her father’s story in an effort to stake a proud claim to her own identity as an Arab Jew in an America that assumes all Jews are of Eastern European origin; that gets antsy when it can’t put someone into a neatly circumscribed ethnic, racial and religious box; that hears “Iraqi” and immediately thinks “terrorist.” She doesn’t clearly define the myriad characters along her father’s journey, though, and the drama suffers for all the history she tries to impart.
She’s at her most powerful when she veers away from her father, whose past she can never fully know, and looks inward: “I claim every story that was never told to me,” she declares. Then: “I claim the map.” But her physicality belies her. As she speaks, she’s wrestling or dancing with something that’s invisible and constantly shape-shifting, always just escaping her grasp.