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Photo Jeff Zinn.
Risher Reddick (left) and Andrew Rein in WHAT’s “Mojo.” |
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WHAT’s ‘Mojo’ is missing some ingredients in its magic bag
Theater Review
By Reva Blau
Banner Correspondent
The British “Mojo,” the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater’s first play of the season, is not for the faint of heart. It begins in a desperate, jumpy place of no moral light or sanctity, creating a claustrophobic universe with blazing fast dialogue delivered in a working class British accent peppered with obscenity. And it stays there for a good two hours. But many, especially those who can stand it a second time, may find the brilliance of the language redemption enough.
It might be wise to say first what “Mojo,” by British playwright Jez Butterworth, is not. It is not a play about rock ‘n’ roll, at least rock ‘n’ roll as it can be heard on radio station Ocean 101. Rather it is, as New York Times critic Vincent Canby put it in a very positive review, “something to curl your hair, meaning that it’s seriously scary.”
The play won numerous awards and became an instant sensation when it premiered in London in 1995. It now kicks off the WHAT summer season at the original harbor theater location through June 16.
It is an incredibly challenging play and WHAT pulls it off with great panache and skill.
Mojo is set in London’s rock music scene of the late 1950s. As Dan Lombardo, WHAT’s dramaturg tells us in the program: before indie, before punk and before British flags appeared on Levi jeans, American-exported rock and blues hit Britain with tremendous force. What is not stated is the difference in feel that context makes.
True enough: A large jukebox is prominent on stage but we are definitely not at a White Castle eating burgers. Rather, we are in the bowels of a club in London’s Soho district jacked up on beer, cigarettes and amphetamines. Tea from a proper British tea set that is just as quickly swiped off the stage, is probably the only recognizable souvenir from the neighborhood south of Oxford Street and north of St, James park.
The play opens with Sweets (Risher Reddick) and Potts (Andrew Rein), high as kites, manically rehearsing how rich they will become on Silver Johnny,
the latest ’50s rock ‘n’ roll star, who, by mob affiliation, they own. They seem to think that a deal is being made in the next room between Ezra the owner of the club and Sam Ross. Neither of these shady characters ever shows up on stage in first part of the play. Instead, they project the awesome power of father figures through their important absence; an absence that also creates the richly poetic superstructure of Irish-British literature from Joyce through Beckett.
More men show up and it all gets ever more dodgy, until it goes seriously shambolic (Brit. slang: going to shambles) when the deal does not go through.
Baby, played by Adam Clem, is the post-traumatic son of Ezra, who is getting his just desserts. Then there’s Skinny Luke, who is tortured on a regular basis by Baby because he commits the crime of buying pleated pants with the same number of pleats as Baby. Mickey, as Ezra’s right-hand, controls them all, but the power among these desperate wannabes can flicker like a neon light.
Sweets has stolen his mother’s “slimming pills” from her medicine cabinet (yes, he probably still lives with his mother). Fed by little white pills (a.k.a. speed), these men talk a serious blue streak whose opaque brilliance is only matched by the sequined club that they have designed around their latest paper doll of a rock star. They also repetitively blame the pills on the betrayals that ensue. Their speech, which comes at you a million miles per hour makes poetry of hard-boiled working class London slang but only if you can catch it. Otherwise, it means nothing at all.
Adam Clem in the character of Baby recreates the banality of evil that perpetuates itself through abuser relationships as the victim ends up the abuser. Baby acts out his anger when his father is murdered, by swinging a theatrical sword, a symbol of phallus filled with as much pathos as bravura if there ever was one.
Ezra, by the way, finds his way on stage, but cut in half, and in two garbage cans, a clear reference to Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” where Hamm’s father and mother live in garbage cans. Particularly memorable is Baby’s expressionless voice as he talks about fond memories with his good ol’ Pop.
The set by Anita Fuchs, the lighting by Kevin Hardy and expressive sound design by Nathan Leigh recreate this underworld of lurid detail and soullessness.
WHAT audience members might very well find that this underworld is simply too foreign. Yet, if granted a pause and rewind button, audience members will find that the claustrophobic torpor of this underworld results in true poetry that clearly stands on the shoulders of modern literary giants, like Joyce, Beckett, William Butler Yeats.
It also shares space with Martin McDonagh, who wrote “The Pillowman.” Or, you could go for the British fascination with torture chambers, male bonding rituals and Dickensian orphans. But in order to catch those references, you may need to bone up on your British lit class from college.
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Twilight double features
Art Galleries from Provincetown to Orleans
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May 31st, 2007