For a brief moment in 2002, the SITI Company staged its critically acclaimed production of “bobrauschenbergamerica” at the Athenaeum Theatre, giving local audiences a unique opportunity to step into the mind of the three-dimensional collage artist Bob Rauschenberg.
A collaboration between Anne Bogart, the troupe’s artistic director, and the playwright Charles L. Mee, the piece offered a non-linear, non-narrative rendering of Rauschenberg’s artistic sensibility. If Rauschenberg’s chosen medium was theater instead–or if his so-called “combine paintings” were suddenly to come alive and perform–it would look, sound and feel something like this show.
So it is with great anticipation that fans of Bogart and Mee look to the pair’s upcoming show, “Hotel Cassiopeia,” which takes another American collage artist as its subject: Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), a recluse known for the wooden boxes he constructed and filled with everyday objects and bric-a-brac.
Like its predecessor, the current show is not a literal biography, but aims to reveal the essence of Cornell–his process, and the emotions conveyed by his work–through an abstract collection of scenes. The production is at Court Theatre in Hyde Park.
Any event by the New York-based SITI Company (the acronym stands for Saratoga International Theatre Institute) is a big deal. The show may lack the commercial sex appeal of “The Pirate Queen” but it is no less important or influential. As Court artistic director Charles Newell puts it: “Anne Bogart is one of the premier directors working in American theater,” and her presence in Chicago helps reinforce the city’s reputation as a theatrical hub.
What distinguishes Bogart’s work from that of other directors is her approach. The actors in her company use a training technique she helped develop called Viewpoints, an alternative to Method acting–i.e. replicating the emotions of a scene based on one’s own experiences–that is common among American actors.
As Newell explains it: “Rather than deriving a [performance] from some sort of internal emotional process, Viewpoints is very much about finding physical gesture to reveal character and story. It’s very gestural. They think about the body in space, and how to define space by where the body is.” In short, the physicality of a performance.
Some might call this experimental or avant-garde, terms Newell says Bogart is not entirely comfortable with. A better description might be progressive. “There is a lot of interest from people in the theater community to learn Viewpoints, to be around Viewpoints, to be around Anne. This is really kind of the hot actor training technique in the country these days.”
So what does that mean for an audience?
Here is Bogart’s explanation: “You know, sometimes you watch plays and you feel like there’s an iron wall between everybody [on stage], and between the audience and the actors.” With Viewpoints, “there’s fluidity and a feeling that things don’t stop. That if somebody sits down, somebody else responds to that. Nothing happens on stage that is not felt by the other actors. And even if somebody’s cell phone rings in the audience, it becomes part of the performance.”
Bogart is a self-possessed speaker, and her thoughts come in quick, precise chunks. By contrast, a conversation with Mee is like a long, meandering walk through the park; he is often (and amusingly) apologetic for the incoherence of his replies. It suggests their collaborations are a meeting of yin and yang.
What they do have in common is a shared interest in the assemblagelike act of theatermaking, which inevitably drew Mee to the work of Rauschenberg, and later to the boxes of Cornell, an artist who “takes pieces of the real world”–thimbles, stuffed parrots, maps of the stars, children’s alphabet blocks, soap bubbles, whale teeth–“and puts them together like a hallucination, so that it has indisputable reality and [is a] dream state simultaneously.”
It is impossible to talk about “Hotel Cassiopeia” (which takes its title from a Cornell box) without referring back to the Rauschenberg piece. They are cousins, in a sense–the first two in a planned series of four. (The other artists on tap are James Castle, an unknown outsider artist, and Norman Rockwell.) The biggest difference, says Mee, is that Rauschenberg himself was never a character in the piece. Cornell appears on stage, primarily because his artwork “feels very abstract and not placed inside a human heart, somehow. So by having him present, you get the heart as well as the head.”
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`Hotel Cassiopeia’
When: Through Dec. 10
Where: Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave.
Price: $28-$54; 773-753-4472
