BY TRAV S.D. | “Two are better than one.” So saith Ecclesiastes and so doeth Robert Lyons and Kristin Marting, artistic directors of the New Ohio Theatre and HERE, respectively, as they team up for the latest of their cross-institutional collaborations. Currently in previews, “Idiot” — an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot” — will be presented at HERE through May 21.
“The Idiot” is a novel from what might be called Dostoevsky’s middle period, written in the wake of the success of “Crime and Punishment” and a decade before his culminating work, “The Brothers Karamazov.” It was initially published in serialized form from 1868 to 1869, while the Russian Master was living in Germany. The book is centered around the Christ-like Prince Myshkin, a man who tries to lead a pure life and is treated with scorn and derision by nearly all those around him.
This is the third time Lyons and Marting have collaborated on theatre pieces derived from Dostoevsky texts. In 1991, their take on “The Possessed” was presented at the Ohio Theatre’s original Wooster St. location; a second version was produced at HERE in 2008. And in 2001, they assembled an evening called “The Fever,” which drew from the Dostoevsky short stories “White Nights,” “The Double” and “The Landlady.”
The current production of “Idiot” is being produced through HARP (the HERE Artist Residency Program). It is being called the world premiere, although earlier incarnations have been presented in workshops. It was first developed at the Catskills Mountain Foundation’s Orchard Project in 2014 and “highly designed workshop versions” were shown last year in HERE’s CultureMart festival, North American Cultural Laboratory’s Deep Space in Highland Lake and New Ohio’s Ice Factory festival.
Marting is credited as director and choreographer for the project, Lyon with providing the text. As to how that shakes out in practice, Marting says, “We conceived the project together, and adapted it together, and then Robert does more work on refining the text and putting it into a more contemporary context — and then we work with the designers together to evolve the design concepts, so it’s really intermixed.”
It’s a process that Lyons calls “fluid.”
“I would also include the designers in that process too,” he continues. “At the end of the day the core storytelling decisions are Kristin’s and mine, but through all of that, everybody’s kind of dramaturgically engaged in the storytelling.”
HERE’s mission is to create “new, hybrid performance…a seamless integration of artistic disciplines — theater, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art.” True to form, the current production employs immersive staging, original music, sophisticated live cinematography (i.e. the use of live video), and Marting’s patented employment of stylized gesture and movement. The creative team includes Nick Benacerraf (scenery), Ray Sun (video), Larry Heinemann (music), Kate Fry (costumes), and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew (lighting). Benacerraf is a core member of The Assembly, a collective of performance artists now in residence at the New Ohio, and Fry is also costume designer on The Assembly’s current production.
And yet, though they each have their role to play, Marting adds, “They all weigh in on everything. The costume designer may have ideas about how the video works for one part, the videographer has ideas about a costume moment, and everybody kind of weighs in. Everyone has an investment and people are free to say things about moments, whatever their role is on the project.”
Like any good Russian novel, “The Idiot” contains a cast of thousands. The present adaptation boils all that down to the four principal characters: the titular “Idiot,” (Daniel Kublick), his rival Ganya (Merlin Whitehawk), a spoiled socialite (Purva Bedi), and a notorious woman (Lauren Cipoletti). The performers all have movement and dance backgrounds in addition to acting credits, and great use is made of those skills in the current production. As Prince Myshkin, Kublick may have the biggest brunt to bear, as the key to his character — and the entire production — is the fact that the Prince is subject to repeated epileptic fits, requiring controlled contortionism on his part, and major shifts in tone and reality from the rest of the team, both onstage and off.
The overarching concept is that the audience is at a party. The audience is arrayed on all four sides of the theatre, with the playing space and video screens in the center, and separate spaces for a karaoke stage, a photo booth and a bar. When the audience first arrives, says Marting, the Prince greets each audience member and shows him to his seat, and welcomes him to the party. This is the immersive element.
And yet there is an added factor at the center. After the 2015 workshops, says Lyon, “We had this huge conceptual leap and then we said, ‘Okay, the whole thing is happening at this party inside the Prince’s mind. The earlier iteration was more like objective storytelling…now we’re experiencing it through the Prince’s brain.”
At key moments the Prince experiences what the artists call “recessions,” moments when he’s thinking about characters and imaging realities with them that don’t exist. And driving it all: the Prince’s periodic fits, indicated through stylized movement, flashing colored lights and video effects.
Marting elaborates, “What we discovered from our research is that a fit has different components. There’s an epiphany, and then after the epiphany there’s the black hole where you really fall into convulsions and you lose consciousness. And so, in the show, what we’re doing is we’re building to the place where he has this real epiphany and he hits this ecstatic moment, one time in the show. But all these other times, he’s seeking it. And he doesn’t find it. But he also doesn’t want to go into it. Because when you go into that ecstatic moment, you don’t get to stay there. Then you fall into this horrible convulsion and lose control of yourself, and you’re not able to be who you are in this. So it’s this very barbed question in his mind.”
Adds Lyon: “He’s had access to these epiphanies before, and that’s what fuels his world view. He wants to live in a way that’s transparent and without guile, and because he’s had these visions with the beauty and the harmony and all that. It’s the juxtaposition of those moments and the effect that it had on his personality, with these other three characters — who are all caught up in societal match-making, greed, obsession, self-destruction — that’s the core juxtaposition of the story. It’s all about love and obsession and hatred and self-hatred and the most combustible of human emotions, and here’s this guileless guy who walks into it, and eventually it takes its toll.”
Lyons enthuses about their mutual history: “When the Ohio [Theatre] was on Wooster Street, and then Kristin opened HERE, I always felt like they were like sister theatres or something. [The two theatres] were so close and so many artists went back and forth between them. Then, when we lost the Wooster Street space, it was like a miracle that I ended up in the West Village, which is still within walking distance of HERE.”
Adds Marting, with a laugh, “So we still can meet for drinks at the end of our shows.” But closing night is not until May 21. Til then, the party will be in Prince Myshkin’s mind.
Tues.–Sun., 8:30pm, at HERE (145 Sixth Ave., just below Spring St.). In previews through May 2. Opening May 3, then through May 21. For tickets ($25), visit here.org, call 212-352-3101 or purchase at the HERE Box Office (5pm until curtain on show days).
