Under the Radar Keeps Rollin’ Along

When Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II first adapted Edna Ferber’s epic novel “Show Boat” for the stage, in the nineteen-twenties, they were the wild-eyed experimenters of their day. The American musical before 1927 had been light stuff—part operetta, part revue—a merry playground for sparklers like George M. Cohan and Cole Porter. Hammerstein and Kern, though, wanted to make something unprecedented: a musical with the weight of grand opera, but built out of the blocks of vernacular entertainment.

Now, as part of the Under the Radar festival in New York, David Herskovits and his Target Margin Theatre endorse the pioneering show’s nearly hundred-year-old claim to experimentalism, with “Show/Boat: A River,” a collaboration with N.Y.U. Skirball (playing there through January 26th). Herskovits’s adaptation, apart from two interpolated songs, remains largely faithful to Hammerstein and Kern, though he rejects the original’s upholstered lushness, and keeps his aesthetic as bare as a skull.

This is a “Show/Boat” that expects you to come in knowing the often shocking plot of “Show Boat.” Even if you remember its outline, you may be scrabbling for purchase: Herskovits—a scamp who sometimes casts two actors in a single role, and then has them perform simultaneously—and his set designer, Kaye Voyce, offer very little in terms of illustration. The stage is almost always empty, except for a curtain or a scrim; Herskovits deliberately makes it difficult to know if a scene is “actually” happening or if we’re watching a play-within-the-play. An office water cooler sits off to the right, against the proscenium column at the Skirball, and I assume only real “Boat”-heads will recognize it as the “water barrel,” where the central romantic couple, the ingénue Magnolia (Rebbekah Vega-Romero) and her gambler sweetheart, Ravenal (Philip Themio Stoddard), will eventually bill and coo.

Other types of signposting, though, are less subtle. For instance, performers wear satin sashes that say “WHITE” if they play a white character. Stephanie Weeks, a Black actress and director who is a frequent Target Margin collaborator, wears one of these WHITE sashes as Julie, the showboat’s leading lady, as does Edwin Joseph, playing her husband and co-star, Steve. During a run-through for one of the boat’s many melodramas, a Mississippi sheriff storms in, tipped off that Julie is secretly biracial. Steve, perhaps inspired by the characters he plays, cuts Julie’s hand and drinks her blood to fulfill the letter of the state’s “one drop” law. Ferber (and then Hammerstein) was careful to show us that the gesture is dramatic and romantic—and also temporary. Steve will abandon Julie later, the big galoot.

Performers, in a mix of period and modern-day rehearsal dress, designed by Dina El-Aziz, occasionally “mark” their lines, as if they’re in a run-through, or they deliver them in the didactic italics of a lecturer. Familiar lines sound deliberately strange. The house lights are still fully up when Weeks, wearing street clothes, speaks the shifting lyrics of the opening number, which Hammerstein himself changed more than once. “Listen,” she says, leaning forward intently. “N-word—work on de Mississippi.” She has already edited the slur as she completes the line. “Black people work while de white folks play.”

The way we constantly rehearse identity, particularly racial identity, is the central concern of both “Show Boat” and “Show/Boat,” which may be why we haven’t seen a major theatrical revival in New York since the nineteen-nineties. (The original 1927 version of the show is now in the public domain.) Maybe producers shy from staging the scene at the 1893 World’s Fair, where the showboaters visit the “Dahomey Village” and listen to the exhibited villagers singing in Hammerstein’s faux-African nonsense language. In Target Margin’s finest intervention, the co-music director Dionne McClain-Freeney interpolates the Zulu traditional song “Dumisa” here. (In the original, the “Zulus” confess that they are actually actors from New York, another of Hammerstein’s sly comments on performance.)

The musical—both the original and this production of it—can sometimes go slack in its second half, when the plot starts hopscotching forward in time. The excitement of Herskovits’s wrongfooting, Brechtian energy is most relevant in the first half, and it fades a little as the narrative itself lurches. Luckily, Weeks, as Julie, operates at an intensity far different from that of the performances around her, and whenever she appears—too briefly, really—the event surges forward. There are other motive forces, too: the show’s great song, “Ol’ Man River,” sung in throbbing baritone by Alvin Crawford, as the stevedore Joe, forms a current that pulls the show with it.

The American theatre does have to grapple with the audacity and the legacy of “Show Boat,” and its long confinement behind copyright has meant that no production before this one has really been able to do so. That may be why “Show/Boat” feels like a first salvo, a still-raw response, which demands further conversation. If you watch the 1951 movie of “Show Boat,” say, you can easily forget the desolation of “Ol’ Man River” ’s lyrics, as Joe smiles benignly, warbling them to the camera across the boat’s frothing wake. But, in Herskovits’s anti-illusionist production, every lyric remains a shock. Listen, Herskovits insists, to the words that closed the first great American musical. You won’t have heard anything bleaker or more radical in the ninety-seven years since:

I get weary and sick of tryin’
I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’
But Ol’ Man River,
He just keeps rollin’ along!

This year’s Under the Radar festival has, so far, been full of such deliberate excruciations. In “The 7th Voyage of Egon Tichy [redux],” a multimedia adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem story that uses in-camera-editing trickery to multiply one performer into many, the titular Tichy (Joshua William Gelb) encounters versions of himself from his future—and tries to club them into submission. The show was originally a digital theatre piece made in Gelb’s own closet, during the pandemic shutdown, and it has been extended, almost doubled, by this transfer into the “real” world. (The show itself, despite its virtuosic live-video manipulation, can also feel, in its repetition, like a frying pan over the head.)

At New York Live Arts, the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula mourned a family he never knew: after travelling to an ancestral village to investigate his lineage, he could not discover the names of any women forebears. He commissioned an artist to make eight small wooden representations of these anonymous missing women, and his dance, the sorrowful “My Body, My Archive,” is performed on a thin layer of red dirt, in a circle of these votives. A living audience watches, but you can tell that Linyekula’s attention is focussed on the statues’ silence, rather than the audience’s.

Even the beautifully imagined, sweet-natured, kid-friendly show “Dead as a Dodo,” by the extraordinary Wakka Wakka puppetry collective, written and directed by Gwendolyn Warnock and Kirjan Waage, involves a skeleton child and his skeletal bird friend, hopping around in the glittering dark of a far-future afterlife. The boy needs to find a bone, because he’s only working with a single arm and a single leg, but the creepy King of Bones stymies him, grudging him any existence at all. In the underworld, resurgent life itself poses an even greater threat to the child: it mysteriously summons his extinct sidekick back to flesh, and feathers, and the surface. (As the dodo rises out of the Stygian realms, the human finds himself left behind. We messed up our chance in the light.)

Last year’s festival season also pivoted around thinking about the posthuman, but many of those shows saw an apocalyptic Earth in Edenic terms; I fondly remember a dreamy opera called “mourning” that imagined the world without us, for instance. This year, several of the productions again painted the end of things, but this time the colors were darker: again and again, I found myself at shows that seemed to have been disinterred, rather than staged. I will admit, it was getting me down.

So it was a surprise and a delight to see the rough-and-tumble “Marie Antoinette,” created and directed by the performance artist Ann Liv Young, staged by the festival (after an initial run in Young’s apartment) in a Brooklyn warehouse. For anyone familiar with Young—a shock connoisseur whose œuvre has included such wild transgressions as tampon-hurling, graphic sexual performance, body fluids, and racial provocation—the idea that her latest might be a kind of respite from the horrors elsewhere would seem bizarre. In this show, though, she cedes much of the emotional landscape to two of her actors, Tom Ruth and Alex Sabina, who play Louis XVI and his wife, Marie, in a series of loosely connected, improvised scenarios.

Young doesn’t let that control go lightly, though. She describes her own performance as “live directing”: standing onstage alongside the performers, she bullies and bothers them, while constantly talking to the audience about the actors’ mental health—the artists suffer from a range of issues, including agoraphobia, traumatic brain injury, and depression. Young sets the pair strange tasks, like hurling uncooked dough at a wall (possibly a reference to letting the people eat cake) or kissing each other through that same lump of dough, or screaming in an audience member’s face. “CLOSER!” she says, urging the emotionally labile Sabina nearly into someone’s lap. She also describes their cognitive issues in terms that often incite their protest. “It’s anxiety disorder,” interrupts Sabina, when Young tells us that she has paranoia. But Young, who spends much of the show with a boom box on one shoulder, just cues up another loud song.

There’s clearly dominance play at work, here: Young wears a long muslin nightdress, and she bosses the show’s various helpers and enablers around, while Ruth and Sabina must navigate the stage in nude body stockings and white face paint so heavy that it looks as if both performers just got pied. These body stockings make the performers particularly vulnerable. The night I saw it, one theatregoer hurled the dough lump back onstage and accidentally walloped Tom Ruth right in the Louis. Fortunately, Ruth has an elegant hauteur to call on in these situations. “Please don’t throw it at his groin,” Ann Liv Young said, protective for once.

It's that warmth between Young and the actors, particularly as they bicker, that makes “Marie Antoinette” as secretly lovely as a candle flame. Young is still her cannonball self: she berates an audience member who guffaws at a wrong moment, cruelly enough that I’m worried he might never see another show. “Do you think mental illness is funny?” she demanded, after courting laughter. But she’s also talking in what I think are frank terms about her own violence-filled childhood; about the importance and difficulty of not treating mental illness like a third rail; about the feeling of being thrown away; about being a princess, like Marie, in a kingdom that hates you. Ruth and Sabina are playing the scenes she has devised, but it’s their willingness to do it, even while grumbling, that gives us a sense that we’re more in their company than in hers. “I’m just so fuckin’ sad,” Sabina said, at one point. “I’ll let you take that line again,” Young said. Sabina nodded. “She hates it when we swear,” she said, and twinkled, hiking up her body stocking, totally at her ease and in control next to the outrageous queen of the avant-garde. ♦