Alice Walker
Alice WalkerWhen trying to describe the underlying message of TNC Theatre’s newest production, Attempts on Her Life, the odds are stacked against you. Attempts on Her Life, directed by Laura Freitag, is the best-known work by modern British playwright Martin Crimp. Divided into 16 episodic segments, the play is a mosaic of disparate scenes and encounters within which the only unifying thread is a female figure: Anne, or sometimes Annie. In her director’s note, Freitag writes that this figure is “the perfect litmus test for [the play’s] narratives—denying them closure and determinacy while making them individualized and palpable.” In other words, the character gives the audience something to focus on amidst the chaos of the rest of the play.
Attempts on Her Life is “the skeleton of a script,” according to Freitag, written in unbroken prose, without assigning specific lines or roles to the actors. Accordingly, the director is given a great deal of leeway when choosing the number of actors and assigning their roles. Freitag’s cast of six (Arlen Aguayo Stewart, Marko Djurdjic, Max Lanocha, Cory Lipman, Norah Paton, and Joy Ross-Jones) brings an array of characters to life onstage: terrorists and art critics, children and adults, particle physicists and porn stars. The cast’s effectiveness is evident; the actors are able to both maintain distinct voices and mesh well within the ensemble. The play is staged so that each scene begins with its number and title projected onto a cloth screen at the rear of the stage. While hurried costume changes are made, an answering machine message is played to the audience. The 16 events trace out no recognizable narrative structure. There’s a sexy disco dance number, a sing-a-long in which Djurdjic plays the banjo, and a sales pitch for a car called “The New Anny” in both English and, perhaps, Russian. Theres also partial nudity.
The play has all the right ingredients. If it were not for borderline traumatic scenes—a military checkpoint, an interrogation, an account of a rural village torn apart by war—the performance would be almost too much fun. The explicitly political aspect of Crimp’s writing, however, forces you to take it seriously. Under all the frivolity, there’s no doubt that Crimp is trying to convey something important to the audience, albeit in an unconventional fashion.
The overall inability to fully explain the performance demands that we make sense of Attempts on Her Life ourselves. “Western theatre does a very good job of disempowering the spectator because they can’t assert themselves,” Freitag says. “But I think, in a play like this, the spectator is empowered because they become meaning-manufacturing parts of the show.” Seeing this play is an attempt in itself—you can’t watch it without trying to decipher it the whole time.
Attempts On Her Life runs at TNC theatre, Morrice Hall, Feb 9- 12 at 8 p.m. Tickets are $6, email [email protected] for details.
