Drivein show strives to bring poem to life
If you’re a fan of radio drama, whether it’s something you got interested in during the pandemic or well before, you probably cherish the art form’s unique intimacy — the way the voices seem to bounce around inside your head, the way you can listen as you are, whether you’re hiding under the covers or doing chores.
In “The Waste Land,” Oakland Theater Project’s drivein theatrical adaptation of the T.S. Eliot poem, that quality finds wondrous new life.
You see performer Lisa Ramirez through your windshield, on a small plot of earth in the parking lot behind the Flax art supply store in Oakland.
She’s in the flesh, and this show, which opened Sunday, April 11, is the first work of live theater in California that the Actors’ Equity Association union has allowed to be performed before an inperson audience since the coronavirus lockdown.
You hear Ramirez, though, via microphone fed live to an FM radio station, which means that aural proximity makes up for and bridges visual mediation and distance. When she takes in her first breath to speak, you hear lungs inflate even more vividly than if you had a frontrow seat in a tiny black box theater. Encased in a car, you might even harbor the illusion that you’re seeing a private performance and that
you can’t be seen yourself.
Oakland Theater Project had to demonstrate strict safety precautions for Actors’ Equity Association to approve “The Waste Land.” Cars are required, and audiences can’t leave them except to use a restroom.
Ramirez never goes inside because the Flax store’s ventilation wouldn’t pass union muster, so she has to use her car as a dressing room, and the theater had to rent hera portable restroom.
To cram up to 17 cars into the Flax’s lot, parking attendants use toy lightsabers to guide each vehicle.
But the show, which is adapted for the stage by John Wilkins and directed by Michael Socrates Moran, doesn’t always live up to its innovative concept or herculean effort.
A projected montage at the beginning announces grand ambitions, showing images from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic (not long before “The Waste Land” was composed) to World War II and the civil rights era up to now. Ramirez drifts in front of them and then runs in place, as if to escape the freight of the past. (Erin Gilley did projections design.) But it can’t be escaped, the sequence implies; we’re still bearing it, breathing it.
As the show progresses, though, images keep making painfully literal connections to our era. “Falling towers?” Ramirez says. We see the twin towers on fire. “Hooded hordes?” We see women in hijab.
If much of the deathhaunted poem eludes the concretes of theater — human on the ground before us, speaking these tingling, mysterious words for, perhaps, some reason — a few characters materialize who seem ripe for the stage: a bartender, sloshy in his braggadocio; a fisherman, waiting for “testimony of summer nights” to bob past in a river below; a fortuneteller, Madame Sosostris, who seems so addled by her vision that she needs to spit it out as quickly as possible.
Few performers can conjure and maintain surreality like Ramirez, a frequent Oakland Theater Project collaborator. Summoning a trance and then holding herself and her audience in it, she manifests a cosmic imagination and a mighty spiritual endurance. Her vibe is partly that of a Homeric bard, but perhaps more that of a Shakespearean wise fool — one animated from the ground up by some horrible truth or cosmic joke the rest of us can’t see or translate.
Lighting, by Stephanie Anne Johnson, is primarily footlights, which gives a ghostly, sadclown quality to Ramirez’s already evocative features. But if she’s a messenger from the beyond, her tidings of doom bear only a vague, dull ache.