LEARNING TO FLY IN RED BANK
Green thumb: Acclaimed director-choreographer Martha Clarke brings a new production of her Garden of Earthly Delights to the stage at Two River Theater this week. (Photo by Erin Baiano)
By TOM CHESEK
Here at Red Bank oRBit, we’re not used to being in the company of certifiable geniuses.
Let’s rephrase that. The people that we’ve met and talked with for our stories — be they artists or performers, noted chefs or entrepeneurs, makers of great sandwiches or vintage scooter enthusiasts — are all pretty much at the top of their game. But a recipient of the MacArthur Award, the sought-after arts endowment better known as a “genius grant?” That’s something else entirely.
Martha Clarke is just such a person. As a world-renowned choreographer and stage director, she’s won two Obies, one LA Drama Critics Circle Award, a couple of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and fifteen(!) from the National Endowment for the Arts. She was one of the co-founders of the jaw-droppingly innovative Pilobolus Dance Theatre, as well as the Crowsnest group. And, she travels everywhere with her two pomeranians — always a good look for legendary creative types and James Bond villains alike.
For the past couple of weeks, Clarke and her company of dancers, musicians and technical wizards have been holed up inside Red Bank’s Two River Theater, rehearsing a new and revised production of her 1984 career-making work Garden of Earthly Delights. Featuring a newly modified score by formidable composer Richard Peaslee, it’s a 70-minute piece (produced with a NEA grant “for the remaking of an American classic”) that begins previews tomorrow and runs through September 14 in Red Bank — whereupon it moves on to an October engagement at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Manhattan.
You’ve probably noticed the quasi-erotic posters for the production around town; a campaign that’s aroused more than a wee bit of interest in this hard-to-define show without words. The details are easier to pin down when you learn that Garden of Earthly Delights is based upon a 500-year old painting of the same name by the Dutch master Hieronymous Bosch, visionary chronicler of nightmare realms and final-days prophecy.
In Bosch’s three-panel “triptych” masterwork, a vision of Adam and Eve in Eden is balanced against a particularly mind-bending scene from Hell. In between is a blasphemous bacchanal populated by naked hedonists, oversized fruits and animals, strange sea-beings and flying humans. Predating both blotter acid and Roger Dean album covers by centuries, it’s quite an accomplishment.
Employing a cast of fourteen performers — including a cellist, a percussionist and a player of Renaissance wind instruments, all of whom mingle with the other cast members onstage — Clarke aims to transform the Two River’s mainstage Joan and Robert Rechnitz auditorium into a fully dimensional realization of Bosch’s impossible scenes. To that end, she’ll be the first director to utilize the room’s state-of-the-art “flying” capabilities — which means that when this production “goes up” in the coming days, a great deal of the action will be more “over the audience’s heads” than usual.
We met up with Martha Clarke as the director was finessing the fine points of a relatively quiet break in the action. Dispatching her two poms to be walked by an assistant, Clarke found a few moments to give us the Garden tour.
Acid triptych: The circa-1504 painting by Hieronymous Bosch that inspired Martha Clarke’s stage work has been called “an erotic derangement that turns us all into voyeurs.”
MARTHA CLARKE: This is my bete noire (indicates scene on stage). It’s a sweet part of the production, and I don’t like doing sweet choreography.
RED BANK ORBIT: You get much more satisfaction from visualizing Hell?
The Hell part is very theatrical. There are times when it bombards you with very violent imagery. But it can’t be nothing but startling images; it has to be modulated at times, so you can (pantomimes punching a hole into someone’s gut) pull your fist out. Anyway, to me, Hell is ultimately about transitions, not necessarily violence.
I understand that the production has been condensed from four segments in the original production, to just three parts here.
Heaven, Hell, and the Seven Deadly Sins. They’re just names, really; the painting is a triptych, and it made more sense to have three sections. But it’s not condensed; if anything it’s a little bit longer. Nothing has been removed since it was first done.
In the Seven Deadly Sins, how do you convey the sin of Sloth and keep things moving?
Sloth? A guy vomits and sleeps in it.
So, you obviously had some different ideas about how to present this material. What was the most compelling factor in your decision to restage it?
It’s been twenty-one years since I’ve revisited this piece; I wanted to take a look at it again after all these years. We got the grant to do it from the NEA. I’ve also done much more aerial work since then, and this theater is set up to handle that.
Who is Flying by Foy?
Flying by Foy is a Las Vegas-based company. Major, international fly people. They were the ones who did Peter Pan with Mary Martin on Broadway years ago, and they worked with the cast. The dancers went out to Vegas to train with them.
So just to clarify, there is no spoken dialogue in this piece? It’s all conveyed through dance?
This actually is a theater piece. There is a dance element to it, but I prefer a dramatic arc. This is a story told without words; told through movement, music and subtext. And flying.
Not having seen it, I’m supposing that it recreates the Bosch painting as faithfully as possible.
The painting is inhabited by many, many people. We’re only working with a fairly small group, but…it’s sensuous; there’s humor and beauty in it. Light and dark.
But not a family-friendly show by any means?
It can be controversial. There’s fornication in it; it’s not for young audiences.
Do actors take their clothes off?
No, not at all. If you’ve seen the ads and the posters — they actually made two versions of that image, one with nipples and one without — the cast is dressed in very sheer outfits, but not nude.
Since you’re moving up to the city after a couple of weeks down here, are you essentially having to direct two distinctly different productions, each geared to a different venue?
We’re working with a generous space here in Red Bank. Then in New York, we’re not going to have the wing space we have here. We don’t have an apron when we get to New York either, so I’m doing a little bit of this (pats her head, rubs her belly).
It’s been a very pressured rehearsal process, but it’ll be wonderful when we get there. We shall overcome.
Running preview performances tomorrow and Thursday, Garden of Earthly Delights continues its limited engagement in Red Bank through September 14. For ticket reservations, availability and all the details, bring it here.
Tomorrow in oRBit: Not only couldn’t the real live Poet Laureate make it to the party, but according to a new play, life as a future Dead Poet isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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September 02, 2008
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[...] an interview that appeared here in Red Bank oRBit last week, famed director Clarke pointed out some of the [...]
September 12th, 2008 at 5:30 am