Ordinary People, in the Flesh and on the Screen

<First published online in the New York Times on May 28, 2007>

How on earth to watch Doug Varone’s “Dense Terrain”? Running 75 minutes without a break at the BAM Harvey Theater, this numbingly tedious and relentlessly earnest show (a New York premiere) passed like an ice age. Dense terrain? Deserts are more varied and vivacious.

If you try to watch just its movement images in an against-interpretation way, you can’t, because none of its sequences sustain interest on their own terms. If you try to watch it as dance theater, it no sooner offers you a suggestive moment (a performer sobbing, a middle-aged man laying his head tenderly on the knee of a middle-aged woman) than it switches as if it never really meant that.

You can’t watch it just as “democratic” dance — everyday movement made poetic — because some of its jumpy passages are a bit too fancy, and neither they nor its more pervasive passages of ordinary movement are ever compelling for more than five seconds at a time. And you can’t watch it as a demonstration of skilled dance technique, because several of the performers are out of shape (and almost all of them look terminally woebegone).

When you try to focus on them as thoroughly human human beings — several are middle-aged, and some are on the plump side — Mr. Varone won’t let you, because he makes any prolonged scene for one or two performers look either deranged or boringly miserable.

Dense Terrain” starts with video close-ups of the moving lips and eyes of one bearded man (strikingly like images from Samuel Beckett’s masterpieces “Not I” and “Eh Joe”), and the stage action eventually focuses on this same man, mainly as seen claustrophobically alone in a windowless room. May “Dense Terrain” be read as the psychodrama, the projection, of his solipsistic condition? That doesn’t make it more appealing. These images show that Mr. Varone (who has his ardent admirers, and whose worst work I pray this is) is not without dramatic eloquence. But they don’t last, build or cohere.

A great deal of trouble has gone into “Dense Terrain,” which closes Mr. Varone’s 20th-anniversary season. It’s what some call a gesamtkunstwerk: Its use of video (by Blue Land Media) and its original music (by Nathan Larson) are more elaborate than — and intimately integrated into — its live performance, and you soon realize that the characters onstage are also those projected on screen, and that some of them are doing the singing and speaking.

But there is no point in trying to make sense of any words: the players intone “guman,” “leche,” “weed,” “manos” separately, with gestures, as if giving a lecture-demonstration in gibberish. It’s not just pretentious, it’s also achingly dull.

During most of this nonsense you long for some sustained scene for two people. Then it comes, and you change your mind. The worst was a duet for two men: they grab each other, push each other away, kiss, hoist each other, behave as if at odds with each other, snuggle up like lovers, and these self-contradictions are neither appealingly human nor phrased with lyric or rhythmic interest. Like everything in “Dense Terrain,” they’re just attitudinizing. Not one moment here is fresh.

@New York Times, 2007