ARCOS home

︎︎︎

PDF LINK

Central Standard Theatre’s Invasion imports some must-see works July 18, 2016 by Deborah Hirsch and Liz Cook The Invasion — Central Standard Theatre’s annual international festival — is starting to wind down, with Fringe Festival about to open. But there are some winning shows among these collaborations from England, Northern Ireland, Canada, France and the United States. Three of the six are reprises, so audiences have a second chance to see performances that can be inventive, smart, moving, funny or simply diverting. And this year, the event is using two venues: Metropolitan Ensemble Theatre (3614 Main) and MCC-Penn Valley (31st Street and Southwest Trafficway). Details here or by calling 816-569-3226. We saw five of the shows, and they reminded us why we value the Invasion’s return each year. It’s tough to find a sunny side of suicide, but Irish comedian Nuala McKeever comes close. Her one-woman show, In the Window, handles love and loneliness with a light hand. The show opens on a woman named Margaret as she shuffles through her home in fuzzy pink slippers and cocktail attire. She fusses over her appearance, her living room, whether to light a lamp. She’s not planning a party — she’s staging her suicide. Before she can chase a candy dish of shocking-pink pills with her fifth glass of rosé, a young man named Chris — a burglar, she assumes — climbs through her window. Then a loathsome relative barges through the door. Then a handsome policeman knocks. McKeever deftly inhabits each character, heightening the show’s frenetic energy as she flits from subject to subject. She’s so convincing that the small set starts to feel crowded. But her greatest feat as a performer is investing us in Margaret’s bare ambition. Over the course of the 70-minute show, her demeanor gradually shifts from one of brittle disappointment to bright-eyed, heart-sick hope. As the script rolls on, however, plausibility buckles under the weight of one too many plot twists. The show’s climax comes on the heels of an eye-rolling theatrical gimmick, cheapening an otherwise nuanced character sketch. Still, McKeever’s gentle humor and poignant portrayal make In the Window worth the view. Moments before ARCOS Dance’s multimedia The Warriors: A Love Story began, a stranger told me about the terrorist attack in Nice. I entered the theater anxious and afraid. I staggered out hopeful, thanks to ARCOS’s captivating blend of modern dance, historical footage and love-softened memory. With kaleidoscopic shards of narrative, filmmaker Eliot Gray Fisher narrates the (true) story of his grandparents’ meeting and courtship during World War II. Glenn was an American soldier with a doctorate in philosophy; Ursula was a German dancer who survived the firebombing of Dresden. Fisher drives scene changes by plucking objects from his grandmother’s trunk. Along the way, ARCOS’s athletic dancers alternately illustrate and interact with audio recordings of the couple, projected quotes from Glenn’s war journals, period film clips, and original animations with the moody gestures of cave paintings. Lush orchestral compositions — some prerecorded, some performed live by Fisher on a keyboard — unify the fragments into a dazzling, prismatic whole. If the show errs, it does so simply by playing one note too many. A sequence with a hand-cranked air-raid siren stretches on too long, the dancers repeating old themes instead of teasing out new. And the show’s opening image — Plato’s allegory of the cave — never quite returns to weigh on Fisher or his grandparents’ experience. Still, Warriors is an Invasion must-see, simultaneously original, affecting and humane — exactly the kind of show we need right now.