Theater: Mee No Like
You had to sympathize with the technical crew, which doggedly called cues from a corner of the huge rectangular space where 3-Legged Dogs premiere of Charles Mees Fire Islandanother grueling and fractured narrative by the playwrightis currently on display. From beach chairs and cushions for audience members to sit in, to tubs of cold beer ready for fishing from icy waters, to two colossal screens showing high-definition films of scenes that are also performed live, the anything-can-happen atmosphere was left entirely in the crews capable hands.
Along the shorter walls of the space, meanwhile, stood another pair of giant screens; 3-Legged Dogs website explains that these utilize a technology called the Eyeliner that displays images not only in high-definition but also in three-dimensions, amplifying the otherworldliness of the overall environment.
Let me note at this point that Fire Island, for all of its flimsiness and faults, has the virtue of being the kind of play in which you never feel like youll miss something crucial if you have to answer natures call. Mees patchwork of vignetteslargely a meditation on the vagaries of heterosexual love on a spit of land world-famous for its historic relationship to the gay communityis as blissfully unstructured as a Sunday in July.
So when one audience member, ostensibly wanting to relieve his bladder (and his boredom, I suspect), got up to visit the mens room, no one thought twice. Taking a route that discreetly led him behind one of the Eyeliner screens, he collided violently with it, causing a sound blast like crackling metal and causing distortion to whatever absurd onscreen image happened to be seen on it in that moment.
Cut to a shot of the technical crew, immobilized from shock, hands literally plastered to their cheeks like mugging Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. You could see dollar signs register in their eyes as grant money from who knows where slipped from their grasp.
But hey, at least this incident represented some drama, which is considerably more than one can say for the dramatically barren Fire Island. Ever since his haunting and evocative Another Person is a Foreign Country back in 1991, Ive enjoyed Mees work. But lately, with Signature Theatre Companys odd and disappointing season of new Mee plays and now this, Im beginning to think his lauded collage-based writing style has become more pose than probe, more pretense than perceptive.
As staged by 3-Legged Dog artistic director Kevin Cunningham, if theres any overall thrust to Fire Island, its about appealing to your sense of novelty: selling hot dogs, hamburgers and sausage patties before and after the show; having much of the onstage dialogue echo the dialogue on screen; having the actors, such as one wielding a knife, play scenes inches from your lounging, beer-swilling face.
But as someone whos enjoyed many weekends on Cherry Grove, I found it nothing less than offensive for Mee to devote most of his play to straight people, and boring ones at that (the opening onscreen credits give a big, wet thank-you kiss to the community). The result is that although the energetic 13-actor cast is most game for anything Cunningham or Mee might have them dopulling each others pants down, cooing at a table, lecturing us about religiosity and loveFire Island feels nothing like the Fire Island I adore.
Even if the piece took placeon stage or screenin one of the other two-dozen-plus Fire Island areas that arent linked to the gay world, you have to question the general raison detre: a filmed sequence with a naked woman interrupting a shower with her boyfriend to pee; a live sequence in which a man proposes to a woman before their apparent first date. Compared to all this, the presence of an onstage bandespecially Albert Kuvezin, a Tuvan throat singerwas music to my ears. Or maybe that was the crash.
Through May 3. 3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich St. (below Rector St.), 212-352-3101; $30.