Rorschach Delivers A Scorcher
⊆ July 5th, 2006 by courtney | ˜By: Debbie Minter Jackson
The Arabian Night ~ Rorschach Theatre
Described as a “sleek and sensual thriller following crossed paths and conflicting desires,” The Arabian Night is filled with unexpected twists, fantasy, and reckoning with the past on a hot summer night. Prior to the obligatory cell phone announcement, while the audience is still arriving and finding seats, a scantily clad woman tosses and turns uncomfortably sleeping on a couch in an upstairs apartment while another actor in custodial coveralls enters and appears to be working on the set. Putting the actors in place even before the play begins blends time and realities from the onset, setting the stage for the unexpected.
The play unfolds through a series of monologues in real time as they occur. Action begins when a woman laden down with plastic bags filled with groceries enters from the audience, proceeds up the steep slanted ramp and tries to unlock the door with her massive set of keys. She speaks her thoughts describing her intentions and actions as she struggles up the ramp to her floor, stopping in freezing positions along the way while others share their tales. Welcome to a hot unsettling evening at Rorschach where beyond being a fly on the wall, you’ve actually burrowed deep into people’s brains to hear their thoughts and experiences, past, present and future-unnerving.
So unnerving in fact, that the piece is mercifully only sixty minutes. That’s about all the time one can remain transfixed in this alternate reality where time, material substance, and heated emotions are all mixed up and bubbling in a simmering cauldron, ready to boil over. Watching the accomplished band of actors sustain the tension in true ensemble fashion is worth the price of the ticket. The script has them interjecting into each other’s lines and careening off of phrases requiring that each be totally engaged and fully responsive for the entire script. There can be no dallying or daydreaming between lines since everybody is on stage and fully emotionally committed at all times. Furthermore, each character is often entangled in an intense physical or emotional struggle with something that won’t budge, be it an unreachable lock, an irritating thought, a stuck elevator door, a recalcitrant memory, or even being zapped inside a liquor bottle- yes, it’s that kind of evening.
The scenic/set design by Tim Getman (first time for this talented actor) plays a featured role with the prominent and horrendous zigzag ramp from Hell and nice touches of black tile coursing in a pattern throughout. The pronounced outline of an elevator also worked so effectively, that when it “stopped” between floors confining long-limbed Matt Dunphy inside, we totally commiserated with his thrashing about frantically trying to escape. The hot air in the theater got hotter and heavier as he struggled through every person’s nightmare of being trapped and confined. That his love interest Fatima, played with sizzling intensity by Nelina Giridhar, was only feet away calling his name desperately searching for him crystallized the agony of those moments–very effectively orchestrated and performed.
Jessica Hansen is translucent as the roommate Franziska, frozen in her own short-term memory loss with no recollection of the day’s events, or even sometimes, who or where she is. She maintains a deer in the headlights lost waif quality throughout her roommate’s final ravings, and is irresistible to the men who get sudden ravenous urges to kiss her. Only then do the effects of a long-standing curse start to play out, and what started as a normal, routine day withers in blistering recollections of a kidnapped little blond girl in a sheik’s harem.
Rorschach is notorious for its blazingly innovative style and in your face, cutting edge approach to theater. They’ve met their match with this stylized script by young German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig, renown for “helping to reinvent storytelling” with unconventional dramatic forms. Directed by Jenny McConnell Frederick with unflinching intensity, The Arabian Night embodies the theater’s intention to “lure audiences beyond the limits of ordinary theatrical experience so they may discover new elements of their own humanity.” Rorschach delivers the totally unexpected, again.
