Dead City

["Dennis Moore" <clayboy56>]

Sanctifying The Quotidian: Sheila Callaghan's Dead City
by Kristen Palmer

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2006-05/theater/sanctifying-the-quotidian-dead-city

"The Upper East Side and toward the East River. 10:00am."

The day starts sunny and orange.

JEWEL

Beginning the brood. Five mighty steps.

In this opening, playwright Sheila Callaghan embeds the markers of her
play Dead City. These include precise locations and times, stage
directions open for designers to endow with theatrical magic, and
characters seemingly channeled from New York City streets, here for a
moment then carrying on into another day.

Director Daniella Topol, introduced to the play through the Lark
Theater's play development program, found herself drawn into the
characters, the play's original style, and its evident affection for
New York City. The aesthetic, ethnic, rhythmic, and material diversity
of the play brings the shared experience of living in New York onto
the page, and New Georges' production this June will bring it onto the
stage at the newly opened 3LD Art and Technology Center located three
blocks south of the WTC site.

This play will be the first of Callaghan's produced by New Georges
after a long association. This long association has benefited the
production process by enabling pre-production work to begin two and a
half years before going into rehearsals. Director Danielle Topol and
Set Designer Cameron Anderson were brought in at the beginning, with a
Sound Designer, Video Artist, Choreographer and Costume Designer
following soon after. For Callaghan, "collaborators bring a lot to the
table  their construction of the world and the themes they pull out."
Their theatricality influenced her vision of how the play operates in
space, leading to re-writes inspired by the ideas and materials
brought into the process.

In 3LD, a venue dedicated to ambitious and technically challenging
work, New Georges has a facilitating partner to bring this project
into fruition. To realize their mission, 3LD conducts workshops with
all participating artists on the capabilities and use of ISADORA, new
multi-media software, which, among other things, can project moving
video onto actor's bodies. By learning the possibilities and operation
of the technology as a group, a shared language developed among the
participants. This has led to an extraordinary amount of
cross-fertilization of ideas. During three weeks of rehearsal in the
performance space, they will have time to find and work at the edge
where human and technological elements meet and play as a duet 
seeking to work in concert, without one overwhelming or being imposed
on the other.

To Callaghan, this has felt like an ideal model. For New Georges, it's
worked well, complementing their mission to focus on relationships
amongst their participating artists. New Georges' Artistic Director
Susan Bernfield intends to use the process as a template for future
productions.

Bernfield's excitement about the production is palpable. New Georges
has had a long association with Callaghan and this play marks "a big
move forward for Sheila as the play goes, reflecting a maturity,
particularly in the writing of the generation gap between Samantha and
Jewel."

The play began in 2001, when Callaghan was in Minneapolis on a Jerome
Fellowship. Her prior play had been insular and claustrophobic, and
she sought to work on a project that could contain her strong sense of
the aural landscape while leaving space for designers to bring their
unique visual abilities. At the same time she'd just read James
Joyce's Ulysses. She put down the book and was filled with unmediated
impressions, but with no scaffold to hang them on. To address this,
she set herself the task of writing a scene for each chapter, a
companion play.

Originally the play was conceived as a fantasy set in New York.
Callaghan was seeking to write something purely theatrical. Working
from the idea Joyce set when he structured his novel of a day in
Dublin on Ulysses' trek home and back again, this would be a day in
New York  a dramatic account of the minutiae of the anti-epic. She
was inspired by how Joyce absorbed and filtered his city and the
experience of his time into his novel, and set out to do the same.
Then 9/11 occurred. The city changed and she found herself channeling
a very different world as she fulfilled the task she had set herself.

The result is a play loosely based on the book, one that has drawn
support from Playwright's Horizons, the Lark, The Public Theatre and
the current production team through its own merits as a play, (neither
the producer nor the director had read Ulysses before Dead City) and
then delights and surprises with its echoes and congruencies with the
novel. Dead City is not a dramatization of Joyce's book, or even an
adaptation. Callaghan describes it as a riff. It could also be
considered a channeling  the metempsychosis of an idea finding
manifestation in our time through Callaghan's play.

At the center of Dead City is Samantha, a middle-aged mother of a
college-aged daughter, whose marriage to a musician has become a void
after the death of a son. At the outset of the play, Samantha casually
crosses paths with an acquaintance hailing a cab. After a brief
conversation the woman says, "Death. It's an opiate. Numbs you to the
world. Taxi!" Death and loss permeate the lives of the characters,
resulting in alienation and loss from each other. Throughout the play,
connections and the demystification of fantasies are triggers to the
characters' individual reckonings with their own numbness  their
attempts to break out of the opiate trance and feel again.

Samantha's day brings her into accidental contact with Jewel, a young
poet, without material resources, banging around the city. Jewel's
losses, her mother's death and an aborted love child, hang over like
the "patches of barometric gloom" a Public Radio meteorologist calls
for at the beginning of the play. The two ricochet off one another as
the day unfolds. Jewel's muse is Patti Smith  seen by Callaghan as a
modern counterpart to Stephen Dedalus's Hamlet. A timeless figure
crossing generations that Samantha can share with Jewel, creating a
cultural connection with contemporary resonance. Smith emerged from
the wreckage of politics in the 70s. To Callaghan, harkening back to
that energy makes sense and asks the question, what heroes do we have
now? What art now is speaking for our times?

This more than anything answers the question, "why this play now?"
Currently theatre is uniquely positioned to take on that political
angst, perhaps because much of it operates on the periphery. Airwaves
are increasingly regulated, money drives film and music  but theatre?
This collaborative form has the potential to reflect this moment in
time, to hold the mirror up to nature and let us see ourselves anew.

The particular vision of Dead City reflects the uniqueness of each in
his or her own existence. In Callaghan's words, it touches on the,
"meaningful, beautiful, minor-hood  the sanctification of the
quotidian." Her structure, steeped in literary tradition and myth,
scaffolds ordinary experience and shares the journey from home and out
and back again so that when we find ourselves at the end of the day,
wherever our own home is, we can share in the depth of the visual
ending of the play in the marriage bed,

"A red circle appears around the bed. Projected: a red arrow with the
words, YOU ARE HERE.

They touch each other."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dead City will be performed May 26-June 24 at the 3LD Art & Technology
Center at 80 Greenwich St. Visit newgeorges.org for details.