This past January, New York’s Metropolitan Playhouse ran Hawthornucopia, a series of theatrical adaptations of works by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
I attended Amber Reed’s adaptation of The Minister’s Black Veil. The Playhouse’ website touted this production as “an anti-theatrical desecration of Hawthorne’s famous story about the consequences of a small-town minister’s sartorial derring-do. Performed by an all-star cast of grad students, office workers, and root vegetables.” An apt description, but only if one understands “anti-theatrical” and “desecration” in the most positive of lights.
Reed, a member of the Joyce Cho theater company, took her anti-theater and desecration seriously. If the well made play was a carpet, Reed turned the carpet over to its seam side and made drama with the threads sticking out, the dust and debris swept under. In The Minister’s Black Veil, she worked with the rudiments of acting, production, and blocking. Her characters behaved like actors in rehearsal, reading off scripts and index cards (which were discarded after use, making a mess). Uncomfortable on stage, characters spent as much time off it as possible, sitting along the periphery with the audience. Reed’s actors were, of course, non-actors, but since they could thwart only so many expectations, vegetables were cast. One could argue the entire cast consisted of anti-actors, playing anti-characters. Each actor, human and veggie alike, seemed to play each character at some point. Name placards were worn so the audience knew who was who when.
Of course, all this “anti” matter is proof not of the play’s lack of dramatic wallop, but of its innovation. Conventions might have been desecrated and dispatched, but drama was not. New conventions–of characterization and a finished product–rose up in their predecessors’ stead, and the show went on.
I was particularly touched by Reed’s inclusion of root vegetables. Underrepresented in the acting profession and often relegated, unfairly, to the kitchen, the vegetables did a fine job. It made one wonder how The Matrix trilogy would have fared had Keanu Reeves been replaced by a gourd. A gourd that said, “Woah.”