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RaVe MaCaBRe The Other Side Theater ends its season with a problematic play by Irvine Welsh. BY STEFFEN SILVIS
243-2122 EXT. 343 After the success of his novel Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh became a publishing sensation. His backlist titles and forthcoming books were surrounded by the noise of celebrity, and Welsh was duly hailed as the voice of a generation, which is always a kiss of death. Indeed, with the release of Ecstasy, reassessment of Welsh's work began in earnest, and the "voice of a generation" was thought to be singing one note. Since then, silence has surrounded Welsh's career, and other writers, like Nick Hornby, have become the darlings of I-D and The Face. But it would be foolish to dismiss Welsh out of hand. Trainspotting is still a good book, and there's much in Marabou Stork Nightmares and Acid House that is startling. But like Kerouac, he has exhausted his particular teen beat, and nowhere is this more evident than in his play Headstate. Much of Welsh's fiction reads like scripts, so it isn't surprising that he tried his hand at playwriting. But the results, which also include a dramatization of Trainspotting, have been disappointing. Headstate is the typical Welsh set piece. Before the familiar ruins of a club-scene backdrop, the near-feral cull of council flats and dole queues live out their empty lives. They are scabs of existential wounds, longing for feelings that are dead or denied them. It's only through drugs and dance that they can simulate an emotional life through sensation, desperately clawing to the edge of temporary pleasure. Though they lack the will to act, they are cursed with clear sight of their situation, which breeds a gallows brand of humor, along with the realization that they are, at least, honest. With the strip-mall ethics of the West, where everything is commodified, what is the alternative to this spiritual black hole? Through hallucination and febrile lows, the characters sputter raw thoughts that brilliantly pinpoint the failings of modern society; at least they do in the best of Welsh's work. David Foster Wallace has spoken of Welsh's "marvellous admixture of nihilism and heartbreak," which imbues Trainspotting. But Headstate is overstated and obvious, suffering, like Ecstasy, from a bad dose of sameness. Here Welsh skints on any real character development, leaving behind no Begbies, Spuds or Sick Boys to consider. Though the Kaleyard School slammed with Billingsgate is still the style, here it's under the muse of gratuitousness. The Other Side Theater's production serves as a showcase for this young company's talent and energy. There are risks they take in both the material they choose and in their executions of it that few others in Portland can match. But the slimness of Welsh's piece aside, this production fails on fundamental levels. Although director Vanessa Rios y Valles has successfully captured Welsh's milieu, she has yet to find the right tone for the characters. At present, the actors deliver their lines, with few exceptions, in the full knife and cry of brawls. Welsh's lacerative humor almost vanishes in the constant shouting match, though actor Jennifer Hoyt strikes the right note once with a line about politics and meat, and actor Sean Doran manages on a few occasions to enjoy Welsh's cold sarcasm. Doran plays Martin, an HIV-positive raver who's trapped in his father's butcher shop (meat being one of the metaphors here that Welsh whips to raw). He lives with his heroin-addled friend Tina, played by Hoyt, and a psychoticoreigner named John, played by the superb Ryan Schaufler from Rhinoceros, whom Martin has trained like a dog. Then a woman named Mickey, played by Sydney Folts, enters their lives and further upsets the imbalance. Who Mickey is and what her hold on the other three is based on is never explained satisfactorily, nor is her eventual murder given credible motive. This, as well as the dire plans of what to do with her corpse, all groans under the yoke of contrived sensationalism that no amount of artistry could remedy. Where the Other Side players excel is in their physical performances. The piece begins and ends in a fevered rave, complete with strobe and stench of sweat. The actors expertly communicate the characters' brief but strained intimacies. The last scene, which becomes a danse macabre, is powerfully realized, as are many of the group scenes. But Rios y Valles has also erred in allowing the characters self-pity, which goes against Welsh's intentions and, at any rate, makes for dull theater. "Self-pity doesn't play" is one of those theatrical maxims worth brushing off at times. With more work given to the delineation of character, the Other Side's production could bring new life to this pre-rave programmer--though whether this piece is deserving of such attention is debatable. |
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