I, Too, Wanna Be Punk

Broadway shows put me to sleep. But once in a while, they’ll put together a show that won’t let me go to sleep, like American Idiot. And it’s not only because I keep tapping feet and hands at the rapid beat of most of the songs that the musicians play really well (get the CD to compare). Personally, I don’t really care for the voices in the show, and find it more satisfying to have the original Green Day voices in my head.
So this, too, would put me to sleep if not for the visual explosion in front of me that resembles what I saw with my eyes closed the first time I heard this CD (it was something akin to those laser shows we had back in the days). Not that there are any laser shows here. The set is massive, with TV screens all over a two- or three-story high wall complete with stairs at the top of which one can observe a lone violinist is playing. The cellist travels under the stairs that the actors move around (and gets off while they transform it into a bus). The dancers execute moves I wouldn’t even dream of trying at home, and the whole choreography is fun to watch. And I really like the projections on the wall.
What I find puzzling, since I’m a wannabe punk, is that the end is anticlimactic. I didn’t want to be an American Idiot, in full agreement with the first song, didn’t want to be part of this alienation, but that’s where the show leads you. Calm down, you too tried to rebel, but look, this is Broadway after all.

Which leads me to another play I saw at NCTC, called The Little Dog Laughed, which is about actors in Hollywood who stay in their closet for fear of breaking their career, and the alienating forces that dictate a good story has to be heterosexual. My friend expressed his surprise, as it appeared anachronistic to him, but read the program notes and you’ll discover that Hollywood loves to conform, whatever the right wingers say. I thought a play like that belonged in mainstream theatres as an “issue play,” but then NCTC’s Decker theater is nice enough and located near the big mainstream opera and concert halls.

Unless you live in Potrero Hill, chances are you won’t know that there’s a small theatre on 18th Street that’s currently hosting the Asian American Theatre Company’s world premiere of a play by Philip Kan Gotanda called #5 Angry Red Drum. The title, a play on the reversed word “redrum” made famous in the movie The Shining, is more cryptic than Waiting for Godot, which you are inevitably reminded of. The play is filled with references to the well-known absurdist play, and the comical scenes (starting with Pick’s coming out of a hole in the dirt) are brutally overshadowed with scenes of conflict between two men who may or may not want to coexist. When the warmonger appears in their midst, he coaches Pick to murder Gorum. They finally kill the drummer boy, apparently because he’s different.
To many in the audience, the play illustrates the state of affairs in the twenty-first century, with wars going on that we’re trying to forget, and politically angry people who believe whatever Fox News feeds them. But beyond its meaning, the play was very well put together, and at the forefront of new theatre.