SK’s theatre thoughts

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.

I was puzzled by the section of audience participation. Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appleton play demented young girls periodically, looking for playmates to torture (they have parents buried in the back bedroom and do serious damage to a lodger and an au pair). (They have been likened by others to the twin girls in The Shining, although those demons don’t seem to do anything other than show up in hallways uninvited.) After doing away with their grandmother they want another playmate just as good, so they choose a young man from the audience and dress him up as grandmother. When they take him behind the screen we watch film of “him” running wildly through the woods, pursued by the demonic sisters.

Other film techniques included object manipulation in dollhouses and a full sepia-toned cartoon, mostly sans live performers, of gingerbread men taking over the world. 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.