Performance

Brewsie and Willie

Gertrude Stein’s 1946 novella Brewsie and Willie explores and articulates the anxieties of a group of young American soldiers  and nurses caught in the limbo between the end of the World War II and their return home to civilian life. Stunningly adapted and staged as a performance by director Travis Preston and performed by the remarkable ensemble The Poor Dog Group, the shifting kaleidescope of Stein’s ellipical language resonates with surprising clarity and insight, expressing concerns that are eerily contemporary.

The pure physicality of the ensemble’s performance not only embodies the rhythms and cadences of the words, but the emotional and intellectual schisms that confront and confound them, as they await an uncertain future. The incessent need of  the two main protagonists, Brewsie and Willie, to give form and shape to these questions creates both an explosive energy and controlled tension, drawing all the others into a wrenching  personal and political debate. Their hopes and fears, idealism and sense of futility, reveal deeply imbedded and often contradictory  values in the American psyche - the idea of the pioneer, the frontier spirit, individualism and the self-made man, progress  vs. tradition,  and the unsettled and unsettling matters of race, and sex.

Questions and challenges reverberate about the oppressiveness of capitalism, the destructiveness of industrialism, the emptiness of consumerism, the lies of the media, the necessity of work and the meaninglessness of a job in which you are a faceless cog in the wheel. It is as if they anticipate the deadening comformity of corporate and suburban life of the 1950s. And ironically the questions they raise are the very ones their children will act on in the social and political revolutions of the 1960s. The same questions any new college graduate might face today.

Staged under a canopy parachute in a raw penthouse loft space with windows looking out at an anonymous city skyline, and shadowy projections of hotel signs on the walls, the set blurs the boundaries between then and now, inside and outside. The soldiers pace and spar, ramble and stand at attention, on a canvas floor strewn with piles of sandbags, their rants underscored by the improvisational wails of a melancholy saxophone.

Produced by Cal Arts Center for New Performance, the discipline and precision of this beautifully orchestrated work, demonstrates what great experimental theater can be, and pays tribute to the exceptional talents of a collaborative team of musicians and designers too many to mention, as well as the performers and director.”Brewsie and Willie” may end on August 1, but new work by The Poor Dog Group, as well as Travis Preston’s next production, will be seen in Los Angeles in the future.

Words: Jacki Apple (www.jackiapple.com)

• Performances: Wednesday-Sunday through August 1st
• 533 S, Los Angeles Street, 7th floor penthouse, L.A. 90013
• Tickets: brownpapertickets.com