Manifesto

Eight years ago, at Kiklos Teatro, a physical theatre school in Padova, Italy run by Giovanni Fusetti, a woman from New Zealand and I decided it would be fun to take our clowns and have them reenact the balcony scene from Romeo & Juliet. We spent a week cutting, memorizing, rehearsing and developing the piece and when the time came to perform, we fell flat on our faces. I won’t bore you with the details but the main criticism was that it might be interesting to see that scene played out by clowns, we had totally lost touch with the clowns’ relationship to the material. In the professors’ view, we didn’t even need to finish the text as long as the audience got some insight as to how they felt about performing it.

I was reminded of this while watching Happenstance Theatre’s production of Manifesto. Inspired by exhibits of DADA art at the National Gallery and the Société Anonyme (Phillips Collection) they have, according to their program, “taken texts and fragments of manifestos from futurists, Dadaists, Communists and Capitalists, and put them in the hands and mouths of characters who inhabit a café created by surrealists and run by clowns.”

If the description suggests many layers, the presentation is deceptively simple. At the beginning of the show a character billed as Middleman enters the stage and turns the light up to reveal the café. A woman billed as New Girl enters nervously: it is her first day and she is late. Middleman gives her a broom, asking her to sweep the place before opening. He is brisk and demanding and she follows his orders without question. The world they inhabit is brought slightly off Kilter by the presence of Bar Tender, who resides unseen behind the café bar and instructs New Girl via his voice and hands as to how things work at her new job.

Things take a turn for the stranger with the entrance of Hostess, who oversees the café. She exerts her authority over both New Girl and Middleman and with a nifty visual trick involving a spinning wheel and a cutout of a cerebrally sectioned face, maps out the physical and intellectual territories of the piece. The map explodes with the arrival of the first Visionary though.

There are two Visionaries in Manifesto and they spend a lot of time arguing the merits of Capitalism, Communism and Socialism. Their presence in the play is never quite explained but their function in the café is made vividly clear: they are there to bust up the joint and they do so with flair. Their conflicting viewpoints call the given world of the café into question and act as a catalyst for the strange and desperate behavior of the café’s employees.

The play is full of symbols, propaganda, props and confusion. Every time one of the characters gains some kind of footage, the Visionaries rip the carpet from under them and send them hurling once again into the sticky unknown.

Happenstance Theatre presents all this with far more intelligence and skill than our attempts to present the balcony scene. They fill the stage with dynamic images – Middleman’s initial entrance onto the stage and his final exit from it are sublimely poetic – and at times the dialectic captures their anarchic spirit. But where the show seems to be lacking, and why it reminded me of our scene in Padova, was its use of the text in bringing out the humanity in its clowns.

It’s a show that appeals to the intellect. It challenges certain western social structures and while it attempts to show how its characters (its clowns) are manipulated by or lost in or play with the conflicting theories, it never quite touches the emotional consequences, the conflicts of the soul, that clowns are perfect for conveying.

This is not so say they don’t come close. There is a wonderful sequence in which the characters wage war and all end up dead on the stage. There is also a funny leap of faith that Middleman, New Girl and Hostess must make from the top of a very small box. (Middleman jumps from the box and flies through the air. The image is compelling.) But too often the clowns come across as characters in a play performing what the script requires to convey it’s ideas rather than characters reacting to a set of ideas that are pushing them in uncomfortable directions or into uncomfortable positions.

I realize Happenstance may subscribe to a differently nuanced form of clown than I am used to, and the show is definitely worth seeing, but clowns are capable of illustrating the purity of human experience – happiness, rage, anger, frustration, confusion, lust, passion – and Manifesto while being an enjoyable and challenging show, doesn’t use this resource to its full potential.