BAROCOCO
Happenstance Theatre
at 59E59
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
Interesting word, Barococo. As you might imagine, if your mind makes such associations, it’s a mashup of Baroque and Rococo. Coined by musicologist H.C. Roberts-Landon, it was his way of describing a certain type of “crisp, impersonal” easy listening music of the Baroque and pre-Classical periods.
It’s also the word the five-member Happenstance Theatre company, out of Washington DC, have used to title their collaborative-collective work, which is a portrait, by way of continuous vignettes, of 18th century, late Baroque-era upper-crusters of France, making frivolous merry and revelling in their ignorance and unconcern of the starving citizenry just beyond the walls; though they know something’s up: they can’t quite bring themselves to venture outside.
Performed largely, but not entirely, in silence—including the intentionally languid pauses between scripted lines—its bewigged, showcase of various manners—reserved, spoiled, rude, self-satisfied, oblivious to all but self-indulgence—may seem, if you go in without much foreknowledge (as I did), to be an interesting theatrical—and I don’t mean this word pejoratively—exercise derived from period-rooted improvisation, that goes on for 65 minutes; exactly the right length to stay amusing and not wear out its welcome. But so seeming, may also have you wondering what the point of the exercise is.
Afterwards, what should have been obvious occurred to me: Barococo is a comment on the top tenth of the top one percent of the wealthy…and by association of the Republicans in positions of power who abdicate all ethical responsibility to enable them.
They’re very entertainingly, and with exacting technique, played by: Sabrina Selma Mandell (a dowager resting on faded glories); Mark Linden Jaster (a seasoned and droll courtier); Gwen Grasdorf (a smarter and prettier courtier than she seems, just not to herself); Alex Vernon (the younger, fatuous one); Caleb Jaster (the young harpsichordist who underscores on demand); and Sarah Olmstead Thomas (who struck me as Queen Victoria with another name, here portrayed as the spontaneous airhead to whom all others kowtow, who utters the show’s most memorable line: “Time…to eat!”).
But what exactly is the exercise saying about its targets? When the revelry has ended, five of them form a chorus line of the condemned, sing a dirge-like little ditty whose last line is, “You cannot starve the people and not expect to pay,” and bend forward into guillotine position—whereupon the harpsichordist lifts open the lid of the piano stool and releases it to fall back into closed position: bang, blackout.
Really?
What, in the end, Barococo is actually about…is the inventiveness of a theatre troupe having fun with a classical style. I found it an agreeable introduction to an ensemble with attitude—not dissimilar to making the acquaintance of, say, Monty Python or Second City—and the particular enterprise sillier than profound. Your happenstance may vary.