Handsome Roger Vincent (Daniel Allen Nelson) and beautiful Madeline Harvey (Maggie Hoffman) contemplate coexistence in new Richard Foreman play at La MaMa (photo by Maria Baranova)
SUPPOSE BEAUTIFUL MADELINE HARVEY
La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
The Ellen Stewart Theatre
66 East Fourth St. between Second Ave. & Bowery
Through December 22, $30-$35
www.lamama.org
objectcollection.us
“Don’t you get it?” the piped-in voice of eight-time Obie winner Richard Foreman asks in the downtown theater legend’s first play in ten years, Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, having a too-brief run at La MaMa through December 22.
There’s no need to worry if you don’t get it all, or even much of it, in this stirring adaptation from the Brooklyn-based ensemble Object Collection, presented as part of its twentieth anniversary season.
In a script note, director Kara Feely explains that Foreman, who founded the experimental Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 1968, shattering the idea of what live drama can be, wrote Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey without any assigned dialogue. She has arranged it into a vastly entertaining philosophical treatise on the very existence of humanity, as well as life itself, where characters are said to be paper-thin, like the printed pages of a script.
The bleak (yet hopeful?) narrative unfolds in a mysterious, existential café where handsome Roger Vincent (Daniel Allen Nelson), named after a character in Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano’s 1988 novella, Suspended Sentences, and beautiful Madeline Harvey (Maggie Hoffman) are perhaps destined to meet and fall in love — or not. The space, a kind of way station, has well-stocked bars at the right and left, a few tables in the middle, and a back wall of large windows that sometimes reflect the audience, as if we are there in the café with Roger, Madeline, narrators and Madeline and Roger doppelgängers Rita (Catrin Lloyd-Bollard) and Stephen (Avi Glickstein), and the Greek chorus of Bertrand (Nicolas Noreña), René (Timothy Scott), Louise (Yuki Kawahisa), and Charles (Alessandro Magania).
The chilly yet inviting and romantic set, by Peter Ksander, also features ten monitors playing abstract videos (designed by David Pym), accompanied by a live score composed by Travis Just and performed by Chloe Roe on guitar and voice, Jack Lynch on bass, sampling, and drum machines, and Just on saxophones, clarinets, and drum machines; all play synths as well.
Essentially, Madeline is getting off a bus, and she and Roger fall in love at first sight, but because it’s questionable whether either of them, or anyone in the café, actually exists, their future happiness is in doubt. Upon initially seeing Roger, Madeline says, “Here is the one who will certify to my existence,” as if we don’t exist on our own but only in the context of others.
Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey is another masterful work by Richard Foreman (photo by Maria Baranova)
As Madeline explains at one point, in poetic words delivered in a monotone: “No speaking about one’s inner life? Roger Vincent resembling everyone else — flat surface only — a PANCAKE-LIKE surface? . . . Now a surface PANCAKE-LIKE even in such good-bad times? Roger Vincent spread so thin — resulting in no depth at all but spread thin, flattened out to become so wide that Roger Vincent himself reaches the far edges of all that life might potentially spread out before Roger Vincent. And sometimes, Roger Vincent himself might be driven to accidentally express paper-thin ideas about his paper-thin life. On rare occasions, however, the no longer imaginable depth of things might surface in an unexpected explosion both banal and beautiful at once. On the other hand, a path followed diligently will often lose its appeal over time, and then more often than not the bottom falls out of life and whatever happens . . . ? Is no longer interesting.”
Props play a key role in the story, from red shoes, a red suitcase, a polka-dot skirt, and a small leather pocketbook to a briefcase, an orange, and a hat, as if clues. (The sharp costumes, which range from noirish to bizarrely aquatic and futuristic, are by Karen Boyer.) Various words jump out, typed in all caps in the script: SPACE VOIDS, TREASURES, TRUTH, MIRROR, FIRES, USELESS CATASTROPHE, and TWIST.
Meanwhile, Foreman, in a godlike manner that is sometimes enhanced by an almost blinding white light (the lighting is by Kate McGee, with sound by Robin Margolis), speaks of a world “within which the depth and intricacy and apparent solidness of this same world were REPLACED by a very DIFFERENT world in which ALL human beings were, well, so to say, paper-thin somehow, minus any enfolded depth. Mere surface alone, even if that surface seemed so clever and quick about the intricate ways of that same-such world. Which still had, you know, NO DEPTH? But suppose this only meant the scene of the action was now ELSEWHERE! No longer with human beings as such but, you know, ELSEWHERE! Even though this new THIN kind of being still participated, as of old, in many actions that were now ‘Elsewhere.’ As if within some fluid atmospheric field between people — which was now the place where the action was now taking place. No longer inside these very THIN human beings — instead permeated by some FLUID that enabled humans to now float on the surface of all things all the while BUFFETED by the ‘Elsewhere’ of a LIFE FORCE operating in new and unexpected ways on the surface of these people now lacking all inner depth. AND SUPPOSE it was really like this with people, HERE AND NOW?”
The work even calls into question its own existence. When Rita and Madeline are discussing the latter’s physical self and possible dissolving and disappearance, Madeline says, “And would it then be necessary to keep telling the stories of my life inside my own lifetime?” René posits, “So even if she didn’t exist . . . ,” to which Louise asks, “Did she exist?” and René concludes, “Would those stories still exist? But then, who or what would it be who was really existing?”
Maggie Hoffman stars as the mysterious title character in Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey (photo by Maria Baranova)
Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey is as much a 1980s-style downtown happening as it is a contemporary play; there’s a feeling that permeates through the theater that we’re watching something we never thought we would see again. The visual aesthetic is not paper-thin; the props and set are exquisitely curated and somewhat eerily seem as if they were transported directly from an ’80s production by someone who remembers the glee of discovering the thrift-store midcentury aesthetic — before the internet. At eighty minutes, it is just the right length; any shorter would have felt too quick, and any longer would have grown repetitive.
“All this serious thinking means things will always go wrong. But inevitably, I MUST think, so I must always go wrong,” Roger surmises. “Because one such as Handsome Roger Vincent does SEE many things, but handsome Roger Vincent never will never see everything, so Roger Vincent must always go wrong. Because Roger Vincent does not know, really, what I should really do with a life such as my own life. I HAVE it. But then?”
Get it?
It doesn’t matter, because we have the eighty-seven-year-old Foreman back, in a stellar bestowal from Object Collection that never goes wrong.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]