It’s a place that’s neither here nor there. Not real and not unreal. Among the present and the then and the later. That’s the terrain that 1927, the theatrical cabaret company, explores in Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. We saw its opening last night. Devil a thrilling show that plays with conventions of silent film, pantomime, and cabaret. It plays with comic sensibilities and the whole notion of what’s real and what’s not.
Devil is like a dream in which you are dreaming of a movie, but you’ve managed to put yourself in the movie, something that you know isn’t real, but in the unreal reality of a dream, it becomes real. That’s frightening, but it’s not what you expected. You thought you knew what reality was. Until now. And now that reality is turned upside down, what was once funny is sinister and what was once sinister is now funny.
The devil in question (that’s the devil to the right with a helicopter strapped to his back) is a nominal cinematic character not to be taken all that seriously, but is to be taken somewhat seriously. He can materialize from a puff of smoke and turn your head into that of a pig or a rooster. Then he’ll disappear just as quickly in another puff of smoke. But that’s after he casts a spell on a gaggle of geese, whom you are kindly feeding with old crusts of bread, to devour you.
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1927’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea began as a series of experimentation, with Paul Barritt creating films to go along with Suzanne’s Andrade’s poems. Although two performers and much variety has been added since then, at times Devil felt like it was just that - a series of clever film techniques to give the audience something to look at while they listen to the stories. At other times, the text and animation combined to create something truly new - a structure that only exists in the juxtaposition of live performer, spoken word and animated story.
The effect is very different than what happens in Monkey: Journey to the West. In that show, when animation and live performer are combined, it is to envelope the performer in a world bigger than what is offered by the stage. When the animation then gives way to a full-stage scene, the stage looks bigger, like it has grown to encompass the world imagined by the film. In Devil, the animation traps the live performer in a world grown small and two-dimensional, restricting movement and free will. The trapped feeling echoes the stories, where innocent and not-so-innocent people find themselves in dark and gruesome circumstances, and go through it all with a glint in their eyes. It reminded me of a cross between the 1991 Addams Family movie (particularly the love with which Christina Ricci and Anjelica Huston expressed their sadism) and Broadway’s hit Shockheaded Peter, which told macabre tales of what happens to bad little boys and girls with gleeful abandon.
The two-dimensionalness of Devil is deliberate, as it uses the trope of silent movies to structure its tales. My favorites were the ones that truly combined live and film, such as the opening piece “The 9 Deaths of Choo Choo le Chat.” The live “cat” fell from animated buildings, was hit by an animated car, was set on animated fire by an animated devil, was electrocuted by animated lightning, and endured other animated indignities. Similarly clever, and far more poignant, was “Sinking Suburbia”, in which the fight for a better animated house led to animated topiari and a real saw destroying animated scenery. Though it was short, I thought this story gained the most meaning from the production style. The materialist suburban fight is animation in all its two-dimensional limitation.
Although the title of the play suggests that there are difficult choices to be made in life, the devil wins every argument here hands-down (and in fact, slaps an angel down easily in the one moment where temptation is acknowledged in the traditional angel and devil on the shoulder way). This isn’t a play about choices - it’s about how the macabre side of life always has the upper hand. Perhaps that accounts for the two-dimensional, trapped feeling of the piece - there’s not really contemplation of options, just an embrace of the dark side, told with humor and innovation, pulling three-dimensional performers into the two-dimensional, animated world of the twisted.
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[...] cabaret troupe 1927 loves to play with that gray area between what’s real and what’s represented as real. The company is an updated model of the Theater of the Absurd for the 21st century. In an [...]