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Match-Play

  • Theater
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

4 out of 5 stars

Match-Play: Theater review by Helen Shaw

The Rude Mechs visit New York again, and as always, it’s cause for celebration. The Austin company has both a deft touch and a deep interest in experimental antecedents, traits that make its work hugely valuable. If its revival of 2005’s featherlight Match-Play doesn’t quite strike the same sparks as other pieces, it still sheds a welcome glow.

The key—the instigator even—of Match-Play is Judson Church innovator Deborah Hay, whose career-long project includes building mindfulness into performance. After creating her Bessie Award–winning The Match in 2004, she summoned the Rudes and asked them if they’d make a theatrical response. Hay’s The Match does have choreography, but it also exists as a series of instructions, a script that includes scenes like: “Exit and reappear instantly, crawling” and “spontaneously enact a spunky child’s toy.” What would a group so interested in language do?

Match-Play was the collaborative response from the Rudes, an odd, comic collage in which roommates grapple with questions (posed by Hay’s instructions) about imagining expanding cellular consciousness. There’s also an answering machine that has attained consciousness, a papier-mâché cow who pops her head in (“Someone’s gonna have to moooooove!” she murmurs when the roommates get crotchety) and word-association games played for low stakes. Microscenes exist, many of them with language taken from Richard Foreman’s diaries or written by house-playwright Kirk Lynn, and so the roommates chatter diffidently about this and that, with occasional twists into gestures from modern dance.

The result is charming and gossamer-thin, performed by a strong cast that boasts Barney O’Hanlon (of the SITI Company) as a first-among-equals. The others—Rude Mechs's Lana Lesley, Thomas Graves and Heather Hanna—have similarly perfected a kind of serious humor that makes the evening sweet.

Why, then, does the piece also feel so inconsequential? Hay’s interest in the present moment, in coming “awake” as a performer, does contain Zen playfulness, yet the games the Rudes play convert it into the simply goofy. The division between those who will love it and those who don’t will therefore be wafer thin: For some, Match-Play will feel like a sorbet after a rich meal; in my case, I’m afraid, I still wanted some meat.—Helen Shaw

New York Live Arts (Off Broadway). Created by the Rude Mechs from a score by Deborah Hay. Text by Kirk Lynn, Lana Lesley and Richard Foreman. Directed by Shawn Sides. With ensemble cast. Running time: 1hr. No intermission.

Details

Event website:
newyorklivearts.org
Address:
Price:
$15–$40
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