Ode to the Man Who Kneels, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, is reviewed by Peter Crawley
The figures in Richard Maxwell's Ode to the Man Who Kneels may not seem particularly well fleshed out, but they do cast long shadows. Illuminated on an almost bare wooden stage by just one hard spotlight (a slide projector in a cardboard box, actually), their silhouettes loom behind them on a white backdrop, as stark and imposing as their names: the Standing Man, the Kneeling Man, the Dashing Man, the Weeping Woman.
Such archetypes, severe and unembellished totems of movie Westerns, are a snug fit for the arid plains of theatricality mapped out by Maxwell's New York City Players, the bare bones of its aesthetic bleaching any conventional understanding of character, drama or empathy from the stage.
Static, isolated, awkwardly funny and mystifyingly involving, here Maxwell's west is anything but wild.
"I'm an actor," says Greg Mehrten as the Kneeling Man; not that the stridently flat delivery encouraged by Maxwell needs such disclaimers.
Rather, in a piece that touches on the alienation and isolation of the American frontier, the process of theatre-making becomes bound up in its anxieties. Even at the hand of his executioner, Jim Fletcher's the Standing Man, Mehrten worries about the lot of the actor: "You're not in the real world. You're recording. You're storing up for a moment when you can use this for later."
The characters, such as they are, are no more secure in themselves: the Standing Man, who next challenges the Dashing Man (Brian Mendes) for the attentions of Anna Kohler's domineering the Waiting Woman and later pursues her young rival, Juny (Emily Cass McDonnell), wonders too if he is "who I say I am".
This spiralling identity crisis is certainly in keeping with the conventions of the Western, a genre hospitable to men with no names. And although Maxwell's dialogue can be hard to follow - switching abruptly from a forced poetry of heartbreak and American mythology to a muddle of terse and incongruous exchanges - he leans mordantly on Western cliches for a supportive structure.
If the style tends to bemuse and sometimes bewilder, Maxwell achieves a more direct engagement through music, performing his own jangling saloon compositions on a piano by the stage, with Scott Sherratt on guitar. It is not for nothing that his lyrics are more unashamedly infused with feeling, the slow hymns and serenades exhorting all characters - both the quick and the dead - to join together in a community of song.
That may be the only antidote to the existential loneliness of the frontier, and for all the distancing techniques of Maxwell's stagecraft, that yearning for togetherness lingers in the air like a reverberating chord. Maxwell's theatre may be carefully stripped of affect, but it can still be slyly affecting.
Runs until tomorrow
