Willamette Week - April 25, 2003
by Steffen Silvis
Its new space has granted Liminal the freedom finally to expand on the philosophy of performance that the group has been constructing over the past five years. In its latest piece, Alex Reagan’s Three Plays Five Lives, an almost perfect synthesis of the troupe’s ideas has been created. As always, an oblique script (here three story strands woven into one piece) leads to crystalline clarity, with movement and sound girding its structure. But the energy of this enterprise has been notched upward.
What can only be described as the physical score, developed by Amanda Boekelheide, is the most astonishingly fierce and complex piece of stage action I’ve seen in Portland in years. Fresh back from her studies in Poland, Boekelheide is at the top of her art, and her fellow performers (Georgia Luce, Jeff Marchant, Madeleine Sanford and Patrick Wohlmut) are not far behind. Text, movement, video and sound (John Berendzen’s feedback-scaping provides a powerful undertow) - all the elements present in Liminal’s work collide here brilliantly under Bryan Markovitz’s direction. This piece is about guilt and longing, and about being snared by time and the times. It’s also one of the most exciting slices of theatrical experiment around at present, performed with that rarest of qualities: commitment.
Three Plays, Five Lives (2003)
Three Plays, Five Lives was three short plays about five people. Unlike a play in three acts, the three plays were performed simultaneously. The plays unfolded on three raked stages where dialogue and action overlapped to create a contrapuntal arrangement of voices, sound, images and movement.
The fragmented stories involved five people on the physical and psychological brink—five people desperate for change. In play one, a young architect longs to build his only masterpiece before a rare disease leaves him blind, and before the people in his town discover the murder that he and his closest friends have committed. In play two, the children of a dying world-famous artist destroy her priceless works of art while betraying her and each other. In play three, a group of foreign aid workers and a young politician wait for violence to erupt in a war-torn village.
Three Plays, Five Lives also focused on the collision of several independent elements of action and media in live space. The ubiquity of technology in the space forced performers to respond to its constant magnifying presence. John Berendzen’s sound design filled the space with sounds sampled in the live moment from the actors’ voices and movement that, when processed by a computer, became entirely new sonic landscapes. Catherine Egan’s video design projected dozens of recorded video clips and captured live action down on to the stages and the actors’ bodies.
Three Plays, Five Lives was produced in spring 2002 with the support of the Flintridge Foundation and the Regional Arts and Culture Council.
Directed by Bryan Markovitz. Performed by Amanda Boekelheide, Jeff Marchant, Georgia Luce, Madeleine Sanford and Patrick Wohlmut.
Amanda Boekelheide and John Berendzen each received a 2003 Portland Drammy award for the production—Amanda for movement direction, and John for sound design.
