Utopia’ taps into sensory experience
Squelch! Scratch! Crunch! Bing! goes Cutting Ball Theater’s “Utopia.” Beepitybopboopbip! Maybe an animated sequence with a dancing chicken. How about some finger puppets? And then, before a 22minute dance interlude, a morsel of profundity: “Whenever we cry or sweat,” intones Harriet ( Jasmine Milan Williams), “we cry or sweat seawater.”
Such is the cacophony, the collage, the cornucopia of playwright Charles L. Mee, the mischiefmaker and wonder weaver whose world premiere commission became available for streaming on Friday, Oct. 16.
If you’re already an old hand with pandemicera digital theater, you might think you know the drill: “Brady Bunch” boxes; split screens; actors’ disparate sheltersinplace juryrigged to suggest a single, continuous set as best as small budgets allow.
“Utopia” uses all those devices, but the feeling in this piece — a collaboration with RAWdance ( dance sequences) and Creativity Explored ( animations) — is not one of limitation or substitution. It’s one of loosening, lightness and liberation.
The show’s premise is that you’re peoplewatching at a cafe through the eyes of a 9yearold girl, Tilly ( Chloe Fong), as couples at other tables and passersby inspire her to imagine different ways one might build a life.
But don’t worry if you don’t grasp so wispy a framing device. The point here isn’t to follow coherent narratives, though a few periodically emerge. There are Evie ( Regina Morones) and Harriet ( Milan Williams), imagining what it would be like to fall in love at first sight as they peer over menus. There are Herbert ( Gabriel Montoya) and Edmund ( Chris Steele), who transform from hohum felt caps to noir glamour at the succulently pronounced word “cicada.” There are Jennifer ( Sharon Shao) and Bob ( Joel Chapman), considering moving in together, though not until Jennifer makes clear to Bob the kind of person she is, that she doesn’t “straighten up” the domicile, and that he’s not allowed to say later that he wasn’t aware and feel annoyed or disappointed.
The point, rather, is to speculate, to roll with words and ideas that move like confetti or like lavalamp globs. The point is to sink into rich language that summons the body and sensory experience at a time when we’re so disconnected from all the other bodies around us. Characters are always imagining what it would be like to be a tree, an elephant, a “bed full of butterflies.” They’re forever pouring forth images that make your fingertips, taste buds and eardrums bristle: “seaweed,” “salt on watermelon,” a “brown itchy blanket,” “little thuds of bugs.”
James Ard’s sound design is a hero in this effort, making a digital play down‘
right fleshy. When a character gulps down tea, it’s as if you hear a glistening epiglottis lurch from one pipe to another and back again. When another takes a crunchy bite, it’s as if you hear individual atoms rend.
Director Ariel Craft infuses the show with a spirit of play, of joy. “Utopia” takes ridiculousness seriously; it believes that silliness is worth committing to, that there’s meaning in abandon. Untethered by the constraints of realism, her cast of nine suggests just how wideranging the actor’s instrument is: the way an idea lifts Milan Williams’ whole being, as if she were a ballet dancer whooshed skyward by invisible air vents; the way she and Morones make an erotic boundary out of the line that divides their screens; the way Montoya makes the camera into something more complex than a mere confidante. His Herbert loves shoes — “I won’t say how many shoes I’ve got, but I’ve no regrets about any of them” — and it’s not exactly that he needs to confess his love; it’s more that he wants us to know how OK with himself he is, and if we’re too dense to appreciate the greatness, well, that’s just fine, too. He doesn’t need us.
Throughout its running time, “Utopia” is interspersed with gorgeous excerpts from RAWdance, filmed in groves, in parks, at the beach, but the piece as a whole might be illserved by the more than 20 minutes of dance at the end of the video, after the dialoguedriven elements felt like they’d reached a satisfying conclusion. Much as choreographer Katie Wong tries to make connections to earlier segments — with costume pieces suggesting previous characters, bits of text replaying, the animals discussed earlier finding choreographic echoes — it feels like a whole new piece awkwardly grafted on.
Even with the letdown at the end, “Utopia” still stands as an extraordinary document of what artists can achieve under lockdown — how far their imaginations can leap, how fervently they can say “yes” to a choice, how richly they can execute.