Motel Blues

written and directed by Barbara Matteau

at Leverett Old Library

April 14, 15

When two actors share a claustrophobically small set for a full hour with a live band and a couple of painted cacti, there are a frightening number of things that could go wrong. But graduate student Barbara Matteau's Motel Blues, at the Leverett Old Library, offers the rare pleasure of experimental theater that actually succeeds.

Using the music and the cramped theater to maximum advantage, Matteau explores her themes--voyeurism and violation--with startling power, and at several moments creates enough real emotion to justify all the risks she takes.

Motel Blues is a series of episodes in the lives of photographer Jarred (Jay Heath) and his vapid girlfriend Flee (Angelina Zappia), who have travelled to a remote rat-trap hotel in the desert so that Jarred can complete a project. It quickly becomes clear, however, that their relationship is strained and distrustful; the ugly monotony of their surroundings matches the emptiness of their bizarre conversations The strain is increased by Jarred's evident contempt for Flee's favorite activities, reading fashion magazines and eating junk food.

This general anxiety is given a focus when Jarred starts to take pictures of Flee while she sleeps. Once she becomes aware of this activity, Flee grows ever more frantic trying to get a glimpse of the photographs, which Jarred refuses to show her. Only when we see that these photos are of isolated body parts do we fully grasp the nature of this violation: it is a kind of dismemberment that is deeply disturbing.

In creating the atmosphere of alienation and strain, Matteau initially relies on a kind of Beckett-like taciturnity that is only occasionally successful. The way the characters repeat and echo one another's short, cryptic statements--"I'm tapped out," "I can't"--is intended to be disturbing but the rhythm of these sections is off, often falling into a singsong that destroys the intended effect. The style is further undermined by the fact that Flee's valley-girl drawl, while effective for the character, is to mindless and unsympathetic to carry the evocative overtones that this kind of dialogue obviously intends.

Indeed, the most powerful scenes in the play are those in which there is no dialogue at all. Flee's hysterical, No-Doz-induced insomnia, her midnight searches for the secret photos, areintensely claustrophobic, and manage to turn the Old Library's small stage into an asset. (The same cannot be said for the poor sightlines, which often keep one or both of their actor's faces out of view). The scene in which Jarred photographs the sleeping Flee achieves a genuine eroticism and a powerful sense of violation; there is a risk of awkwardness in dealing with these topics, but it is one that succeeds brilliantly here.

These silent scenes are aided by another risky innovation, the use of a blues band (made up of Jeremy Greene, Olgun Guvench, Andy Cowan, and Rabih Shansiry) to provide a continuous accompaniment to the play. The music, composed by Greene, is vital to the modulation of emotion in these scenes, from anxiety to mystery to fury. Amazingly, even in the small space, the band never becomes intrusive and never competes with the actors for attention, a feat rarely achieved even in student productions of musicals and operas.

The starkness of the emotions in these silent scenes, however, is a definite contrast with the generally weak characterizations. Zappia makes Flee as awful as she is intended to be; unfortunately, this robs her of the gravity needed to pull off her more serious lines. What should be the play's biggest emotional shock, Flee's discovery of the photographs, is marred by the seeming banality of her anger.

Jarred's character is more problematic because it is potentially more complex. He is cast as the artist to Flee's pop-culture consumer, but as played by Heath the character vacillates between dignity, ironic detachmet and mere roguishness. If Jarred had more emotional depth throughout, his gradual alienation and his photographic rape of Flee would have been all the more terrifying. This interpretation can be glimpsed only at times, and it is undermined by the decision to give Jarred a visually distracting spiked dog-collar, suggesting a punk persona that is not (and should not be) reflected by the character himself.

The set also raises a few questions: the cacti suggest a Western desert, the Confederate flag suggests the South, and the ragged lawn chairs evoke a tornado-belt trailer park. The characters, perhaps, would be most at home in California, where the exploitative photographer and the body-obsessed model are recognized stereotypes. This melange of bad taste is not actively distracting, but picking the bad taste of a single region could have made the characters more clear-cut.

These flaws, however, are more than compensated by the moments of real emotional engagement that the play provides. In an experiemental, student-written play, it is a great achievement simply to draw in the audeince and allow it to forget the limitations of space and resources. Matteau's play goes further; it is a positive success, and satisfying hour of theater.