Welcoming the Santa Claus of Randomness

“Match-Play”
Rude Mechs & Deborah Hay
New York Live Arts
New York, NY
October 8, 2015

by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2015 by Martha Sherman

“Match-Play” isn’t dance theater, despite its co-credit to Deborah Hay. It is dance-inflected theater. When the Austin-based experimental theater group Rude Mechs created the piece a decade ago, Hay offered them her 2004 choreographic score for “Match.” It was a dance frame around four players, two men and two women, and a mysterious choreographic score that challenged the performers with a mélange of notable and hidden metaphors for “The Match.” Hay worked with the original cast to share her dance practice, a meditative focus on consciousness, as they described: “by challenging the performers to use every cell in their bodies to perceive the uniqueness and originality of time and space.” How that translated to “Match-Play” was both inscrutable and very entertaining.

Barney O'Hanlon in "Match-Play" Photo ©Ian Douglas

The set suggested a story told in the 1950s – a table telephone on a cord, a TV with rabbit ears, and kitchen floors made of linoleum. There were also, though, a chimney structure in the corner that provided a Rapunzel-like entrance for one of the characters, who slid out its high window on a rope, and the enormous letters “OX” on the edge of the stage -- this wasn’t a standard suburban home.

The answering machine talked in a Godlike voice-over (narrated by sound designer Robert S. Fisher.) He was named Costello, and offered both obscure wisdom and warnings (“Houses are the containers that give you what you deserve.”)  In addition to the overarching narration, Costello also performed in several scenes as a small puppet hanging from various dangling hooks, the machine clothed in short pants (In a beach scene, he wore sunglasses.)

A mix of weirdness and naturalism wove through every scene. In an extended, fully house-lit opening, Mechs’ co-founder, Lana Lesley (called Lana in the play,) sat in a plastic kitchen chair next to the retro TV, and used her expressive face, eyes, hands, and even skin to “talk” silently and sociably to an unseen companion (and maybe just to herself.)

Lesley’s more verbal roommates were Barney (O’Hanlon, a guest artist from SITI Company) who answered the phone that became Costello, and Heather (Hanna) who sat in the kitchen conversing with a neighboring cow. Their fourth roommate, Thomas (Graves) returned from Paris with a suitcase and stories to tell, only to discover he’d been displaced as a roommate, by Costello. The other housemates weren’t sure they could accommodate Thomas any more. The shifting relationships of the four – and their guru-like answering machine – were the focus of both the dialogue and the dance.

O’Hanlon was the leader of the group, and the performer whose personality was most expressed through dance, as he broke into jerky, frenetic movement on the stage. Loose and limber, he paced with arms as well as legs, and his neck and back moved chaotically. When he announced that it was time for a party, he led his companions racing and bumping around the stage, transforming themselves with party hats. Their frenzied party game was a competition with matches – both real and metaphoric.

Richard Foreman’s journals provided some of the strange images and dialogue for “Match-Play,” including some party match dialogue. If Hay was godmother to this piece, Foreman was its other progenitor, supplying most notably, a scene in which Hanna and Graves found a Head in a Box in the kitchen. The “OX” on the edge of the stage was Foreman’s idea as well; it was a machine that “produces a window to eternal truth” – and the cast broke it apart like a piñata, spilling bubbles of white plastic (those truths?) across the stage.

Many of Hay’s choreographic notes lent themselves to staging, with randomly offered choices, spoken and movement-related instructions. The actors followed her script in their own identifiable constructions, like her suggestion that two characters “simultaneously break into a traveling movement dialogue, and with and without physical contact, and a quietly spoken, untranslatable substitute for a real conversation, with silences.” Following along with Hay’s script (which was included in the printed program) became one of the ways the audience could “Match-Play,” too.

As good ambassadors of Austin, the Rude Mechs are quite adept at keeping things weird. In “Match-Play,” they deftly meshed elements from Hay’s practice, Foreman’s journals, and their own explorations of relationship and consciousness to have some fun with us. And indeed they did.

Top:Thomas Graves, Barney O'Hanlon, and Lana Lesley in "Match-Play" Photo ©Ian Douglas

Bottom: Barney O'Hanlon, Heather Hanna, and Thomas Graves in "Match-Play" Photo ©Ian Douglas

copyright © 2015 by Martha Sherman