People in Williamsburg have been known to do novel things with industrial lofts, but what Immediate Medium has done to the Collapsable Hole theater is almost magical. In their Faulkner adaptation (evocatively titled Chuck. Chuck. Chuck.), they morphed Brooklyn real estate into 1930s Mississippi.
The audience enters the space walking past a square heap of dirt. There’s not a patch of grass anywhere, and the tree on one side the stage is gnarled and barren. An unpainted plywood coffin sits ignored center stage. Even the footlights surrounding the space look like tin cans polluting the landscape. The actors portraying the Bundren family go about their daily chores, including wood-chopping and fish-gutting. The sawdust rises like smoke against the stage lights and stench of bass innards wafts across the audience.
With creativity and attention to detail, the theater company thrusts the audience into a world of grinding Southern poverty from before America’s last depression. The Bundren family is preparing for a long journey, carrying their dead mother’s casket to her birthplace to fulfill her dying wish. True to the novel, the theater company tells the story of this journey in a disjointed style, and we learn details about the family in piecemeal through each of the character’s perspectives. In delving into each of the character’s psyches, the actors spend almost as much time in monologues as they spend interacting with each other.
While this fact could have made the story drag, Immediate Medium pulled it off through strong acting, directing and inventive staging. Behind the actors, a band playing a guitar, banjo, ukulele, piano and drum set performs covers of American and Canadian country classics (by Jonny Cash, Otis Redding, Leonard Cohen and others), which are woven into the narrative.
Clearly, the company’s Faulkner adaptation doesn’t follow the book to the letter. Immediate Medium also uses multimedia effects using technology that emerged long after 1930, when the novel was originally published. Video designer Robert Ramirez flashes text to accentuate key lines and floods the stage in red to illustrate a fire; but several of the multimedia effects are more abstract than representative.
The use of this kind of technology is reminiscent of The Wooster Group, the legendary avant-garde company which director JJ Lind once served as an intern. When asked before the show whether that troupe influenced his aesthetic, Lind corrected, “My aesthetic is why I interned at The Wooster Group.”
Theatergoers in Williamsburg should be grateful that a director ambitious enough to make that kind of statement is working in their backyard. In Chuck. Chuck. Chuck., the young director demonstrates that he’s a director to watch, schooled in the techniques of a legendary company but emerging with a voice distinctly his own.
