Night Moves



Under the bridge: "C" searches for direction near 4th and Race.

Mark Lord’s poetic trek through Old City is a marvel of planning.

by Toby Zinman

Across

Big House (plays & spectacles), The National Showroom, 113-131 N. 2nd St., Sept. 7-10 & 12-16, 215-413-1318

A character, referred to as "C" appears; he/she is clad in an old paint-spattered fisherman’s raincoat, striped pants, a collapsed hat over a pale face. Under the quiet direction of a guide and his boombox, we follow C’s lurching gait at a cautious, curious distance. The "mad, naked summer night" is heavy with humidity.

There are four of these Cs, each followed by a group of about 25 audience members. Each group sees the same sights, although in a different order. (It is amazing that we never cross paths. Is there a Barrymore Award for logistics?) We are led on a revelatory walk around Old City created/directed by Mark Lord, King of the Peripatetic Show, a maker of theater that always surprises and often astonishes. This time he took Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself," one of the great American robust celebrations of life ("Rich appleblossomed earth! Smile, for your lover comes") and created a context of eerie contrasts.

C, a bum right out of Samuel Beckett (whose medium was despair, longing, helplessness) has ventured out of his hermetic seclusion to try to get "across" to life. A bridge is the symbol: the Ben Franklin Bridge, specifically, blue and bright against the night sky, which, when he glimpses it, lights his face with joy. (The "C" I followed was City Paper editor David Warner, whose nearly silent performance is both heartbreaking and appalling.) He staggers and capers and totters through the streets and at one point falls asleep under a tree and dreams a beautiful and terrible dream of a word graveyard. This surreal scene, so quiet and thrilling (don’t miss the sailboat, notice the watermelon as pillow) is accompanied by the sounds of the Hi-Speedline trains roaring by across the bridge.

Hiroshi Iwasaki designed the show, using every cobblestone, every beatup door and every rock, to brilliant purpose.

The "plot" premise is that on this very same night, dead souls, dressed in 19th century costumes — mostly, oddly, bridal — have emerged from death. We see them, about 35 actors — standing high up on windowsills, lying in basement alleyways, blowing bubbles in trees, singing in parking lots, draped languorously across steps, peering through broken windows — and they speak portions of Whitman’s poem to us. This is not always intelligible, and it becomes repetitious, although the cumulative effect is crucial: As audience member you begin to see everything as significant. Found moments: A real woman in a lighted window prunes a plant; A man is suddenly visible in his apartment: does he know we’re here at his front door? A portentous sign on a tree, embraced with wonder by C, reads "If you walk your dog, leash your dog."

The city — both our familiar Philadelphia and Whitman’s vision of "some vast and ruined city" — is alive with contrasts. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself." Mark Lord echoes Whitman and gives us a series of terrific contradictions: C trickles ashes from his hands as we hear, "Now in this spot I stand with my robust soul." A female soul laments, "Solitary in my backyard…" only to see another soul next to her speaking the same words. The basic contrast here is fundamental to Mark Lord’s vision: between the great "barbaric yawp" and the grim silence.

Across turns out to be a three-act play (there is travelling music instead of intermissions), and at the finale, all the audience groups converge, waiting, looking at a church, with its silhouetted cross and its lighted steeple clock. The four Cs (Warner, Mario Cotto, Katie Figueroa and Maggie Siff) meet in the empty street, about a city block distant. Then all the souls we have seen pour out of the church door at the head of the street and rush toward us — it is a gorgeous and terrifying curtain call.

This is what the Fringe is for: shows that simply cannot exist in a conventional venue or for an audience of conventional expectations. Wear comfortable shoes.