The Cloudism Project from Borealis Theatre seeks to create an “atmosphere” for a unique interactive experience. What we get is a clever, but in fact, conventional play.
Perhaps this was the audience’s fault: passive or active, no audience gets more out of a play than they put in, but it’s also true that when an audience doesn’t go where the production wants it to go, there was a miscalculation somewhere in the production.
Performance wise, I hold the cast blameless. The Cloudism cast of eight performers approach their characters with sincerity, and importantly, have fun doing it.
The play they have created underwhelms me, though. The Cloudism Project is about an hour and a half of entertainment split into two more or less unrelated stories using a completely different set of characters.
“When the Earth Moves” begins with a character named Light dancing across the stage in a trance. She interrupts her dance to pull fellow cast members, planted in the audience, onto the stage. As the new characters reveal their personalities, the audience is invited to sing whatever song they feel is appropriate, in hopes of creating a beautiful cacophony. But this audience, as a whole, was too timid to accept the challenge. This part was actually fun, and a little awkward.
Afterwards, the story loses its promise. The characters, eager to explore the confines of their world, go through some humorous on-stage motions, then creatively use the backstage area as a setting, with the aid of their outdoor voices. Returning, they bring a box full of props with them. After emptying the contents on the floor, they act out one fantasy after another, culminating in an attempt to build a spaceship. I kept wondering what they were trying to accomplish. But more importantly, I wondered how they expected the audience to respond. If this was supposed to be an interactive performance, how was the crowd’s response supposed to affect the story?
“(This is) No Play” is a bit more compelling. Though the story feels more scripted, they don’t try so hard to involve the audience, yet find some surprising ways to force the audience into the story. This story relies on the element of surprise, so I can’t tell you too much, but I will give you the set-up. The stage is darkened; the only light comes from a succession of sources: first a flashlight, then a floor lamp, then a set of flickering house lights. As the characters gather in this unknown space, they muse of their fear of dark, and later on their greater fear of the light.
I will say no more than that. The cast, with all good notions has created a work that is a labor of love, but probably one that needs a little more thinking.
The Cloudism Project has 3 performances, ending July 27, 2012, at The Shop at Fort Fringe, 607 New York Ave NW, Washington, DC.
Details and tickets
Steve rates this 2 out of a possible 5.
(I can guarantee, that is.)
Thanks for the honest review, Steve. I am so very glad to see your appreciation of our cast’s wonderful energy and dedication. I wish we could have entertained you further in the first half of the show. One note I would like to make now, though, is that we removed from our program the brief descriptions of our three pieces composing the whole that we had been using to sell the show to potential audiences. With those descriptions (available in the blurb in the Fringe Program), we labeled the first piece, When the Earth Moves, “an expressionist drama about play”; the second, Cloud Sense, “a playful clowning interlude”; and the third, (This Is) No Play, “a happening disguised as a thriller”. We made a point of pointing out that we were not staging a “happening” in the first piece. Though there is a story presented about audience interaction, there isn’t a whole lot of it made very convenient — or intentionally telegraphed. It’s far more of a conventional play than the following material in the show, actually.
In our opening night’s show that you came to, we made the last twentv-plus minutes of our show your opportunity to help out these characters in their (spoilers) conundrum. It appears as though you have decided there were times when what interactive choices one might be likely to have made as an audience member were unclear.
That may be, but really, in the first piece, the intention has always been to have a “drama” in that spot, a “play”. You may have noticed the fourth wall was quite intact for most of those characters. As far as seeing a lack of connection between the first and third pieces — they are quite thematically united, and rather pointedly tied together by an inverse of the basic narrative of the other. One is meant to complement the other. As for the exact plot or exact amount of interactivity with the audience achieved, I can guaranteed we will have a great deal of variation from performance to performance, especially now that we’ve opened. I’m extremely excited about Saturday afternoon’s show coming up.