"Five Days in March" by chelfitsch on 2/21/09 in Chicago

chelfitsch is a Japanese theater company that uses the vernacular everyday language and pairs it with movement that is created from unconscious gestures used in conversation. I loved this show but can't say that I got it. Any piece of art that is immediately accessible is something of a disappointment to me and so the somewhat inaccessibility of this piece didn't bother me. It's the kind of thing I'd like to see again to try to make more sense of. While a few people did walk out during intermission, this might be a very exciting piece for those of us who value experimentation and are comfortable with ambiguity.

The play tells three related stories that are conveyed through a series of fragments. Thus, three tales are being spun at once but the audience doesn't get a sense of completion until the end of the play. The language is very much the vernacular of young people -- perhaps teenagers or folks in their early 20's. The play's inhabitants all have part time jobs and live with the ironic sensibility of youth (for example, they purposely go to see bad movies). The first story is about a young man who meets a girl at the movies whom he likes. She, like him, is odd and knows it. They clearly like each other but don't know quite how to talk to each other. In talking about the music in the movie they've just seen, he thinks out loud about his opinion, not being attached at all to these opinions. He's talking as though he has some authority but really has none. The girl, however, takes his opinions as signs of his disinterest and goes home feeling that she's blown it. Having suggested that they meet at a concert the next night, she thinks he has rejected her and thus doens't show up but he does. A friend who has accompanied that young man meets a different girl at the concert. They hit it off and rent a sex hotel room for five days, as referenced by the title of the play, because that's what they can afford. They fuck dozens of time, sometimes with condoms and other times without, and go their separate ways at the end. She's not happy to separate forever but is afraid to say so. At the same time, two boys are participating in a protest rally and march against America's invasion of Iraq. One boy is happy to be in the periphery (he's not a hard core protester, he says). In all three stories a potentially successful friendship is eclipsed by a lapse in communication.

The action of the play is conveyed almost completely through storytelling. Whether the characters are speaking directly to the audience, to each other, or an imaginary audience of friends is uncertain. Perhaps it's all three. Every now and then, one of the actors seems to embody a partucular character but which character is embodied by which actor changes over time. Two different actors take turns playing the boy who is held up in the sex hotels for five days, for example. While the actors might be speakig directly to the audience, the feel of the storytelling is not like a docudrama. Not like a "Laramie Project" with a journalistic feel. It's rather like overhearing a conversation. In fact, it even feels differently than a narrator who tells parts of a story directly to the audience.

While the plays uses the vernacular of youth speak, the blocking is close to movement (or dance). These gestures, collected and reworked by the director, are raised to the level of movement (which I'm using as a dance term to emphasize the choreography of an individual). Thus, in a way, the actors are dancing while speaking. It would be inaccurate to say that they are dancing but they are certainly choreographed. The intersection of this choreography with dialogue makes for the sense of tis piece but also its peculiarity. Gesture, of course, always accompanies dialogue. But in this piece the movement accompanies the dialogue but often not at the places where tey would typically intersect. It's sort of like starting the sound in a film 10 minutes after the images start to roll. There's a relationship between what is seen and what is heard but they don't feel quite synced up. As a result, one pays more attention to both the language and the movement because one tries to sync them in one's head. It's a similar kind of work is that required to bring the fragments of the storytelling together into one coherent narrative.