Robert Kaplowitz
Audio Designer
Philadelphia
When playwright John Belluso passed away in 2006, he had completed five drafts of The Poor Itch, a play about a soldier returning from Iraq as a paraplegic; he left a request that director Lisa Peterson finish the work. Lisa gathered a team of artists who spent weeks in workshops, examining John's notes to himself and looking for a way to integrate the drafts into a traditional script. John had been exploring myriad options toward resolution and revelation at the end of the play. The one constant, in every draft, was the soldier Ian's fracturing—he became more and more adrift in his dream world. We realized that the most truthful way to represent John's work was not to create a singular story, but to present a fractured play. The roots were all there—Ian's dreams of himself on a raft with the Singing Kurdish Translator; the vision of Tom DeLay visiting Ian's hospital room; the water-boarding; the women spinning in burqas. All of these images led us to present not one but all of the branches and forks in Ian's life that John had written. As the play went on, bells were used to signify shifts between drafts—but sometimes the bell was a bell, sometimes it was a sound cue, and sometimes it was an actor saying the word "bell" into a microphone. I wrote music for the translator to sing as he "rowed" the Americans through rivers of light. In our lab presentation at the Public Theater, we embraced the idea of sewing all of these visions together.
While in Prague, I had a chance to see Me Here, You There, created by two set designer/accordionists (Tereza Benešová and Dragan Stojcevski) and a lighting designer (Jan Beneš). I sat overwhelmed and amazed by the integration of music, light and a simple scenic environment used to present the arc of an entire relationship. All communication was either visual or created by the multiplicity of accordions on the stage. Sometimes these accordions were played virtuostically, sometimes atonally. They were disassembled and reassembled, played sideways and upside-down. They were played with "bite-lites" between the bellows—as long open chords were played, the lights were exposed, then extinguished; and as the bellows closed, the lights re-lit and disappeared. In a moment when the relationship between the characters grew tenuous, Dragan changed accordions, blowing a cloud of dust from the new instrument and lifting it from its end in a long, unmusical wail. As the dust rose into the air, Tereza's music moved from self-involved to nostalgic, and the lighting shifted, so the stage was lit entirely via reflections from a row of mirrors. Light scattered through the room, encapsulating tiny segments of space and of the two performers. We learned something new about them, and their relationship moved onward. As astonishing as the performance was, the audience was also remarkable. We were a capacity crowd in an under-cooled venue, watching theatre with no guide—no text, an abstract set, and lighting that was expressive rather than illustrative. And yet, we were rapt, as each of us traveled—possibly along different paths, but all together—with these three artists.