threevoices
October 31, 2001

Those who know Bottom's Dream know this is a demanding company that insists on plays that crack open language and revel in its physical beauty and emotional possibilities. Its playwrights refuse easy expression, groping at words and fragments and toying with them until they renew their meaning. This is language rejuvenated, snapping and humming, proving pliant and newly elastic. While one might want to lament that this is the only company in town to consistently commission and perform these works, it is proving the best equipped to do so.

The current production is a threesome of monologues, linked mostly by their stylistic ingenuity and inventive blending of memory, fantasy, paranoia, and desire. The evening begins with Ruth Margraff's world premiere The Burlesque Flogging, fashioned from her new full-length play Red Frogs. The inimitable Alice Dodd creates a heavily stylized Penny, maid to wealthy Romance novelist and talk show hostess Beatifica Strata. We experience a brief, vivid explosion of Penny's rambunctious thoughts as she wrestles with her daily fate, dusting off knickknacks for a woman she envies, hates, and desires. Dodd grasps this language wholeheartedly, finding the emotional core of such lines as, "You'll yes remove my tint of slaughter oil framed and hung up in my loss... Beat the part of me that's sticking out!" She moves sleekly from sentimental visions of childhood to warped sexual fantasies of submission and dominance to spasms of self-hatred.

Eric Ehn's nevertire, also a world premiere, is the second installment of the Dante-inspired Chokecherry Trilogy. (Part One, which the group presented last year, dealt with the troubled relationship between a sympathetic teacher and a 7-year-old disabled child given up to adoption at birth, as they journey into the underworld.) Part Two, presumably a kind of purgatory--to follow the Dante parallel--focuses on the adopted child's birthmother. Jennifer Griffin brings to life a mentally disturbed homeless woman--at times beaming with joy and light, at others tugging at her many scars or at a Polaroid of the child (Beatrice) she gave up. Griffin is wholly honest, convincing enough to puncture the barrier of the rarified language usage so that we accept these words as the very utterances her confused heart is fighting to express.

The West Coast premiere of Mac Wellman's The Land of Fog and Whistles is the imagined story of Pluto, a world destroyed nine times over by Plutonium. It's a wild chronicle of those nine civilizations, told by a Scheherazade of sorts (Bonita Friedericy). We are 300 years in the future, at a colony of toxic waste dump employees. A ghostly narrator arrives to tell a story of worlds past, much like wild, absurd creation myths. The first world, we learn, was "thick cloth and cinnamon"; the second, "porkpie hats, furbelows, Cheez Whiz, elastic straps, and a certain sense of purely personal entitlement." The most linguistically sensuous of the three pieces, it leaves us with a picture of life in this universe as silly, depraved, magical, and doomed. The broadly talented Friedericy--at home with the language playwrights--controls her stories' moods like a skillful chef, blending humor, critique, and an overarching, ominous tone.

Director James Martin has worked wonders with these actors, obviously insisting that every difficult line be laboriously unpacked but performed with seeming effortlessness. Younwha Kong's hard, stark lighting adds drama and deep shadows to stylish sets by Ken Roht. Sound designer par excellence John Zalewski lines the final piece with rumbling, complicated voiceovers, adding music and significant detail.

-Laura Weinert