`Snow' is less about comprehending than viewing
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Theater review
"Snow," written and directed by John Jesurun. Produced by New City Theatre. Wednesday-Saturday through Dec. 2 at the First Christian Church, Seattle. $12-$15. 206-328-4683.
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Has it really come to this? That life is something happening around us, while we're busy watching images of it flicker across the screen?
No, I am not referring to the current national election spectacle which has had Americans glued to their TV sets and computers even more than usual in recent days.
The ever more confusing relationship between actuality and virtual reality is also the subject of "Snow" by award-winning New York theater auteur John Jesurun. Commissioned by New City Theatre, this ingenious, droll but arid mind-game of a show is having its world premiere at Capitol Hill's First Christian Church through Dec. 2 - a run two weeks shorter than originally planned.
Like some of his previous multi-media explorations, Jesurun's "Snow" has a plot, characters and dialogue but an unorthodox relationship to its spectators.
Audience members are seated in a square, walled-off room at the center of a larger performance space designed by Jesurun and scenic collaborator Sally Fredkin. Meanwhile, the cast of "Snow" (four human beings, and a mobile robotic camera supplemented with a human voice) perform their roles out of immediate sight but close at hand, in a nearby hallway and in adjacent cubicles. Their actions are captured live on video cameras and relayed to the audience via four overhead screens.
Since Jesurun's fable about media run amok in a remote-control world is set in a TV studio, "Snow" is both a deconstruction of media voyeurism and an experience of it. We look on, from up close yet at a remove, as the aging TV movie star Cricket (Valerie Charles) learns she's a high-tech pawn of the information age and a victim of cyber- stalking.
Though the storyline has sinister intimations, "Snow" is less about comprehending than watching. Sometimes all four screens in the viewing room are showing the same thing. Or four different images may compete for your attention. Should you fix your gaze on Cricket as she performs a ludicrous scene from one of her movies? Or watch a goldfish swirling lazily in its bowl? Or ponder a mysterious figure walking down a corridor? Or glimpse the studio control room? Or does it matter?
"Jesurun wants us to look at how our minds have been conditioned, at how media have changed our perceptions of the world," wrote critic C. Carr of "Deep Sleep," an earlier piece by the director-writer.
A related examination appears to be going on here, along with a mordant critique of how our over-mediated culture has thoroughly co-opted actors. It's a running joke in "Snow" that Cricket's bosses are contemptuous of her alleged "talent" and arty pretensions. All they need is her physical form and voice, which by anatomical accident are perfect vehicles for the high-tech shadow business that is the studio's real scam.
"Snow" proceeds quite efficiently, given the demands of synchronizing 20 video cameras with the movements of the performers, the clever music by Black Beetle and Rebecca Moore, and other elements.
But with what one presumes is deliberate irony, Jesurun's mixed-media style is often the antithesis of slick. Some of the video images are grainy. The acting - by Charles as the bitchy Cricket, Mary Ewald and Peter Crook as stressed-out studio execs and Jose Abaoagas a blind screenwriter - tends to be strident, over the top.
And while an underlying theme is how the new-media marketplace renders language powerless at the altar of visual imagery, Jesurun gives all his characters (including that faceless robotic one, voiced by Peter Sorenson) much to say, in an eccentric patois of soap-opera lingo and pop-cult trivia, poetic and technical gobbledygook, and hard-boiled backstage banter.
That Jesurun has the originality and multitrack mind to conjure and question this ring of hyper-media hell is never in doubt. But there's an arty, downtown-New York flatness to his aesthetic that can make "Snow" more fun to theorize about later than to watch for 75 minutes. Like the tele-world it critiques, and implicates us in, it often feels like there's both more and less here than meets the naked eye.