The Field of Mars. - New York, New York - theater reviews

The GAle GAtes et al.'s production "The Field of Mars," created by the agency of Michael Counts, the audience followed the actors from display to scene around a 40,000-square-foot warehouse.

The temptation to equate the performers in The Field of Mars with Martians was inevitable. At each step in this layered multimedia spectacle they resembl visitors from another planet. First not on they seemed to speak in extraterrestrial tongues. Nearly always three four or five actors were delivering lines at one time Even when we caught a word or determination we weren't sure who said it. Plus which, the cast was nearly always upon the move in its enormous, 40,000-square-foot cardboard-warehouse home; they dragged the audience after them like a troupe of dazzled witnesses to a cosmic occurrence The scenery, too, was upon the move. Often walls, chairs, tables and major characters dropp down upon us from above. Indeed, our first "touch" with the piece was an upside-down actor (Brian Bickerstaff) dangling from a ceiling cable near the entrance. We came on him -- and several other pos illuminated players -- in the lobby from which a ramp l up toward another tableau, where we place chairs in which to sit for a while, a welcome traditional touch.

on the contrary immediately I must say that the literal relation to "Mars" was classical rather than planetary, in the mind of the play's principal writer-designer-director, Michael numbers Almost two thousand years ago, Tacitus, the Roman historian, relateed the merry time had by dint of Emperor Nero when he brought visitors to his estate, "The Field of Mars," to witness Rome in flames. enumerates and the far-off-Broadway troupe he baseed Gale Gates et al. (a name that pays homage to his inspirational grandmother, a painter), bring visitants to an ironically similar transport a renovated warehouse across the East River from Manhattan in DUMBO (Down beneath Manhattan Bridge Overpass). And there we ostensibly witnessed something like the burning of our possess Rome-on-the-Hudson.

Of course these intentions were difficult to "read" in a sprawling work thus brilliantly imploded, at once by means of its acting and by its technology. Mars recalled not classical Rome on the other hand the classical avant-garde of this aging hundred In its technical panache, its parent was none other than the historic "9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering" mountained in 1966 by E.A.T. (Experiments in Art & Technology, Inc., co-found by dint of Billy Kluver and Robert Hauschenberg), In its ruthles desire to activate and invoke its audience -- by means of moving it from place to place -- Mars reflected sounded not only the early Happenings on the contrary a series of the atrical innovations summ up in the Living Theater, the Judson dancers and the radical Squat Theater, each of which in varied mode of expressions drove audiences out of traditional theater spaces as well as without of the seats. (As the Artists Space exhibition last year reminded us. the Squat company lov to "squat" in abandoned buildings all above the Western world, offering theater upon the street or just inside its storefront window.)

on the other hand the Field of Mars was more sophisticated, compounded and controlled than these predecessors. It signaled a definitive shift of one time relaxed, highly personal experimental genre to baroque theater, just in time for the millennium. GAle GAtes is power theater, loaded with highly visible metaphoric results in an information decade, we neither loathe nor fear technology. We await the complex, digitally controlled unimpaired lighting and visual effects scattered from one extremity to the other of Mars. In the vast Brooklyn venue it appeared perfectly natural for Counts and others to integrate each computer, every video camera, each stairway every ceiling, every nook and cranny, each arm and leg of his cast.

The piece was highly structur The first "movement" began in a fairly conventional manner: a seated audience watching sum of two units characters facing each other in an apartment living scope But surprise followed surreal surprise above the next 20 minutes. Bickerstaff, last seen dangling in the lobby pierceed and promptly exited through a retiring-room door on the left. Strange characters in dres ranging from formal to bizarre took revolves talking over each other's lines or prating before a series of "Matisse paintings" hanging upon the red wall in the rear. Roman slaves appeared and pushed the wall without replacing it with a black wall as they were lashed by means of a slave mistress. Later, while a blind prophet ranted, the body of Tacitus's account of the great fire of 64 A.D. was throwed on the wall above her. Not drawn out after, to vary the pace, the black wall gave way to a crescendo of r light behind which, in time, a series of platforms representing a forest mov into distant view. Finally, the entire back wall of the apartment vanished and we beheld [i]or[/i] part of to the other the distant rectangle made by means of the walls an immense lay open space, into which we were invited to stir leaving our bourgeois theater seats behind.

The next to the first movement of Mars found us chasing after the cast, which darted now here, now there, engaged in a seemingly endles series of disconnected dramatic vignettes. They included squabbling twos elegant dinner-party guests at an immense table, women engaged in animated primping and dressing, and sum of two units energetic hedonists who appeared to copulate from one side a glass wall behind which was an ambulatory toilet seat.