Gravity & Grace: Triumphant portrayal of failure
It’s rare, in a pragmatic country like ours, to encounter a play that so willingly foregrounds its intellectualism – but Gravity & Grace, showing as part of the Festival of the Arts, does just that.
Its notional subject is the cult art-world figure Chris Kraus, a hard-to-categorise American writer who spent her formative years in New Zealand. Its real subject, though, is artistic failure.
The play is loosely adapted from Kraus’ account of a film she made – also called Gravity & Grace – that was a critical and commercial disaster. Jumping back and forward in time, and canvassing her intellectual and personal influences along the way, Kraus ponders her film’s failure, and with it her sense of self, her sexuality and her place in the art world.
Reflecting the play’s focus on memory and performance, the set is complex but integrated. Often the actors are being filmed on-stage, their image projected on to a rear screen even while they perform directly to the audience.
The stage becomes in effect a series of mini-stages, each of them beautifully conceived and connected to the larger whole: a glowing white light-box that also projects on to the screen; a mock film set off to one side; a desk at which Kraus writes and reflects; a backstage room in which various characters perform behind a gauze veil.
The action, likewise, shifts from a disastrous Berlin film-market appearance to the even more disastrous filming in Auckland, incorporating excerpts from Kraus’ eccentric shows and her life with the celebrated theoretician Sylvère Lotringer. Despite all the jumping around and the layering of images, the play remains largely anchored in reality, with little of the destabilising qualities of something like I Love Dick, the genre-bending book that – intertwining fact and fiction in unknowable quantities – remains Kraus’ best-known work.
Dominating the play, Karin McCracken turns in a luminous performance as Kraus, capturing her odd combination of utter determination and immense vulnerability.
Much of the show concerns Kraus’ intellectual enthusiasms, notably the French philosopher and mystic Simone Veil, the left-wing German terrorist Ulrike Meinhof and the American artist Paul Thek.
This necessitates relatively long expositions on the lives and theories of each figure, sections that McCracken handles with charm but which can nonetheless feel stodgy. The show also drags a touch towards the end, and the finale seems almost too safe, operating at a lower wattage than what went before.
But in many respects Gravity & Grace is a triumph. Consistently funny, visually inventive and rich in ideas, it draws memorable performances not just from McCracken but also from the small supporting cast – Nī Dekkers-Reihana, Simon Leary, Sam Snedden and Rongopai Tickell – each of whom convincingly plays multiple roles, from Andy Warhol through to wayward film crew members. Only the Meinhof impersonation risks veering into caricature.
Throughout the play, as Kraus excavates the painful elements of her unsuccess, she gains in substance with the audience, even as her film disappears from view.
That, in turn, points to a wider irony, one that the show implicitly acknowledges without ever hammering it home: it is precisely through these accounts of failure that Kraus has attained the art-world – and to some extent wider – success that she so long craved.