CHAMBER MUSIC
Possibly this absurdist piece just doesn’t appeal to my sensibilities. Absurdist theater generally leaves me pretty cold; I tend to feel that playwrights who create such works spend more energy bandying about clever theatrical non sequiturs than using those non sequiturs to illuminate any end. Certainly that was my response to Chamber Music.
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The proceedings, of course, are a complete shambles, as each tends to her own personal mania or they all bicker among themselves. Joan of Arc (Kathleen Dunne), for example, keeps complaining that she hears voices and that her armored pants are rusting. The only person apparently uninvolved in the madness is Amelia Earhart (Rachel Singer)–and the play implies she may be Earhart. She simply watches from a distance, wearing an exhausted, defeated smile. Each of the other women enacts the stereotype of her historical precedent: Osa Johnson (Julie Standora) stalks mosquitoes, Mrs. Mozart (Karen Gundersen) plays records of her husband’s music, Gertrude Stein (Jill Towsley) records the minutes of the meeting in ridiculously repetitive fashion, and Isabella (Louise Bylicki) sits silently throughout most of the play with a black veil covering her face.
Finally Susan B. Anthony (Elliot Jackson) mentions that the women’s wing may be attacked by the men’s wing–immediate measures must be taken to confront and alleviate the danger. This crisis finally brings some stakes to the characters’ situation, and the last half of the play is dramatically much more successful than the first. But despite that success, the impending threat seems so arbitrary that the play is deprived of weight. Had danger been looming over the proceedings from the very beginning, my involvement with the characters and their situation would have been much greater.
