chelfitsch's Five Days in March, On the Boards, etc.
chelfitsch's Five Days in March at Maaitheater Studio in Brussels in 2007. Photo copyright Michele Rossignol.
Before we even start getting into the coolness of chelfitsch's performance last weekend at On the Boards, we need to apologize for something: We try to make sure to let readers know about events in time to get tickets, but for the second time this season, OtB sold out before we started plugging. This is their 30th anniversary season, and the line-up has really rocked, so consider this your notice for the month.
Up next as part of the Northwest Series is Portland's tEEth with Grub, Feb. 12-14. It's dance. Sort of. And then early next month, there's the next installment of the Inter/National Series, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's No Dice, Mar. 5-8. This one is almost sold out already (tix still available at least for Sunday). One of NYC's most hyped performance groups, this will take place at an as-of-yet unnamed off-site locale, where the performers will serve the audience a bag-lunch dinner before diving into 100 hours or so of transcribed phone calls packed into just four hours. So be forewarned and get your tickets now. They're a steal at $20-$25 each.
As for chelfitsch's Five Days in March, the best way to understand it is as theatre made by, about, and in response to Japan's equivalent of Generation X. In the U.S. that term's been so degraded that all it conjures up is images of flannel-wearing slackers head-banging to Nirvana, but if you take a minute to recall, Gen X was a sort of lost generation, the youth of the 1980s who were the first generation to come of age in the era of American decline. Stagflation and Reaganomics upended the American economy in such a way as to allow massive speculative growth at the expense of wage growth. The average American's real income has been stagnant or in decline for thirty years, a fact obscured by short-term gains spawned by a series of speculative bubbles.
For Japan, it took one more decade. The artists of chelfitsch and the characters they create are the product of, or at least a response to, Japan's "Lost Decade" of the 1990s. The collapse of Japan's asset prices after the boom of the Eighties led to a prolonged period of economic stagnation, courtesy of what most economists agree was a liquidity crisis (or series of crises, depending on who you believe), which also happens to be what the U.S. is facing, so the example's instructive.
The point is, a generation came of age facing drastically different prospects than their parents did. First, theirs was a leisure and consumer culture, as opposed to the austerity of the post-war era, but second, it was also an era of low job prospects, with none of the guaranteed careers and futures their parents got under Japan's corporate Fordism, the engine of the post-war boom. So they do the same thing American hipsters do: They drink, go to concerts, play video games, screw off, have casual sex, and refuse to grow up, because, after all, what's there to grow up for?
And so in Five Days in March, the characters' stories unfold anticlimactically over five days in March 2003, against the backdrop of America's invasion of Iraq (so anticlimactically, in fact, that the invasion occurs on day three, in the middle rather than at the end). Set in the hip Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo, writer-director Toshiki Okada's characters are listless and largely affectless hipsters.
Their concerns are prosaic: condoms, allergies, Chapstick, payday. One character likes going to not-even-funny-bad horror movies; he meets a chick he might want to hook up with who makes fake food for ads; another guy spends five days (hence the title) holed up in a love hotel, screwing a girl whose name he doesn't know; another couple of guys try to take part in an anti-war protest, but they're not hardcore enough so they feel out of place. In the end, the war becomes almost an after-thought, something too big and important and real to actually find a place in the characters' psychic world, leaving them incapable of responding with anything more than a collective, Keanu Reeves-esque, "Whoa."
Story, though, isn't all there is to what chelfitsch does. Form has to follow content or all you get is the sort of unintentionally ironic contrast that can actually sap a work's power. (Think of David Fincher's Fight Club, which is a glamorous ad for anti-commercialism and creates an action movie story-line for postmodern ennui.) Responding to a hyper-mediated world of high-tech and pop culture, chelfitsch creates work by stripping down the production to its bare-bones. Something like eight actors present five or so characters; sometimes they perform as a character, but more often than not, they simply explain what happened to someone else, as though it was a story about a friend of theirs.
There's no set, just lighting changes which don't intend to be representational. The only props appear to be being used by the actor rather than his character. The blocking and movement is natural but abstract—sometimes a meme that's popped up a few times comes to have some concrete meaning (such as the actors rubbing their thighs, which eventually becomes a response to sex-induced chafing), but more often than not seems to exist for no other reason than to give the actors something to do without breaking the play's almost strident resistance to normal theatre convention.
But what's so hard to explain about it is that it's so good. It's intimate and real in way that seems completely at odds with the entire above explanation. Even in super-titled English, it's clear the actors are speaking a natural, hipster vernacular. The seem to be wearing street clothes. At intermission, you run into them smoking out front. It's as if a bunch of people just stood up out of the audience and decided to tell you funny stories about things that happened to friends of theirs.
Okada & co. may be responding artistically to complex social, cultural, and economic situations in Japan and the world, but the play remains deeply committed to its characters. They're sympathetic, in other words; chelfitsch likes these people, whatever their faults or short-comings or inanities, and this is what creates such a powerful contrast to the huge world-historical events unfolding around them.
