TWO PEOPLE CAME OVER–WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY SO WE PLAYED WITH THE DOG AND OUR MINDS WANDERED
Einstein made one great mistake, according to Dr. Sherman Susman. (Susman appears as himself–a solid-state physicist with the Argonne National Laboratory–in Michael K. Meyers’s new performance piece.) Einstein wanted to order chaos according to classical periodic formulas. Such an effort misapprehends the very nature of chaos, which defies formulaic description. Rather, says Dr. Susman, we must “seek out the motif in the disorder.” Or, as a disembodied voice tells us late in the show, “keep your eyes moving.”
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Meyers has taken these two related, deceptively simple directives and turned them into a richly textured, carefully articulated, and curiously beautiful theater work, Two People Came Over–We Didn’t Know What to Say so We Played With the Dog and Our Minds Wandered. This slow, contemplative piece, presenting in effect a series of glimpsed moments, is as intelligent and creative as it is captivating. Meyers is not threatened by chaos, and is too insightful an artist to rehash the idea that contemporary culture is disintegrating into disorder. Instead he embraces the chaotic, and recognizes the barely perceptible structures lurking there. They are structures grasped through intuition rather than reason, by association rather than logic. Though on the surface his piece may seem senseless and haphazard, it carefully orchestrates delicately shaded ambiguities, which combine to make for an emotionally packed evening.
These American actors try to duplicate the experience of their Chinese counterparts, a struggle that is plainly futile yet charmingly sincere. Interestingly, the Chinese performers are almost always inaudible, as if the “authentic” sources were intentionally distanced from us. Near the end of the piece, Emmrick and Boerma have their secondhand stories down pat–but they are still cheap imitations, performed in flat, nonactorly styles that seem intentionally distanced. Yet we know (or at least we think we know) that these stories are somehow “true,” based on the real-life experiences of Min and Jiang. What the American actors give us, then, are idiosyncratic re-creations of others’ memories. Memories that, as a program note says, “often become rounded and dim versions of themselves.”
Lauri Macklin’s and Meyers’s choreography is singularly successful: five dancers (Adrian Danzig, Bill Dietz, Macklin, Patricia Mowen, and Bryan Saner) alternately perform easy soft-shoe routines or nervously scurry about as though caught in a home movie running a touch too fast. This scurrying is expertly executed, especially during one part when the dancers perform a sequence “backward,” like a film in reverse motion, and then suddenly perform the sequence again “forward.” Saner is particularly riveting, scuttling about with such ferocity that I feared his legs would snap off.
