Rafael Jordan as Marlon Brando takes a call, while Laura K. Nicoll as his daughter, Cheyenne, is otherwise occupied in BrandoCapote at the Tank.
The setting of BrandoCapote, the multimedia performance piece currently playing at the Tank, is a room at the Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. It is the location in which Truman Capote interviewed Marlon Brando in 1957, when the star was filming Sayonara. The play hopscotches from 1957 to 2004, the year Brando died, and the hotel also represents, as the program explains, purgatory.
Nicoll is supported by Lynn R. Guerra and Cooper Howell.
This purgatorial in-betweenness is an apt description for BrandoCapote, a co-production of the Tank and Foxy Films that defies neat categorization. Making liberal use of clips from and references to Brando’s movies, the production occupies a space between theater and film. Merging flights of fancy with excerpts from Capote’s writing and the subjects’ biographies, the piece encompasses both fact and fiction. And combining elements of Western avant-garde and traditional Japanese Noh theater, the staging is a stylistic hybrid.
Conceived by Sara Farrington (who is also the writer) and Reid Farrington (who is also the director and video designer), BrandoCapote uses the Kyoto interview as its chief inspiration. Capote wrote an extensive article about the encounter in his New Yorker essay “The Duke in His Domain,” which focuses on Brando’s meteoric rise in show business. The article also touches on the star’s troubled relationship with his alcoholic parents.
In the performances, this becomes a point of connection between Brando (Rafael Jordan) and Capote (Jennifer McClinton). For instance, Capote describes his own mother as a drunk, who would tear up his manuscripts out of spite and announce to all who would hear, “You people don’t know what it’s like to have a faggot son! You don’t know what it’s like!” Brando demurely responds that his own experience was very different: “My mother wasn’t a drunk. She was an actress.”
BrandoCapote also weaves in scandalous episodes from the actor’s later life. His son Christian (Cooper Howell) murdered the husband of Brando’s daughter Cheyenne (Laura K. Nicoll, who also choreographed the piece), and the incident spawned tabloid headlines. The dialogue and scenes juxtapose this with Capote’s own connection to a murderer in his nonfiction 1966 novel In Cold Blood.
In staging and visual style, BrandoCapote resembles Richard Foreman’s experimental work for his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, which he produced at St. Mark’s Church for more than 30 years. Both approaches make use of striking images and boldly colored props and costumes, and both use disembodied voices for alienation effects. (Laura Mroczkowski and Andre Joyner designed the lighting and costumes, and Marcelo Añez designed the unsettling sound effects for this piece.) The works also reflect the limits of performance and language.
In BrandoCapote, a ringing phone (a bit inspired by Capote’s New Yorker profile) keeps interrupting the proceedings, and conversations often uncontrollably slip into recognizable film scenes from, to name a few, On the Waterfront, Julius Caesar, Last Tango in Paris, and The Godfather. When personal life merges into his movie parts, Brando pleads, “Can we do that again? I’m going to get this right.”
Guerra (left) plays Brando’s mother Dodie, and Jennifer McClinton is Truman Capote in BrandoCapote. Photographs by Miguel Aviles.
Whereas Foreman’s pieces tend to evoke a lunatic funhouse world, the mood of the Farringtons’ piece is much darker. The staging makes intriguing use of Noh theater elements (with Mayo Miwa serving as the Noh consultant), including fans (which are also strikingly used as screens for film projections), colorful silk robes called shozoku, and stylized choreography involving strips of cloth. Yet underneath the vibrant imagery, there is an underlying sense of foreboding. There are also periodic violent eruptions from Brando’s son and brutal fights between Brando’s mother (Lynn R. Guerra) and her husband. Additionally, Jordan’s Brando is easily triggered, and he frequently enacts Stanley Kowalski’s famous table-clearing scene in A Streetcar Named Desire.
The performers are compelling to watch throughout, and they work effectively as an ensemble. Eschewing conventional narrative techniques, BrandoCapote is both a hypnotic and enervating experience in its repetitive attempts to “get this right.” Disentangling the lives of the two souls merged in purgatory is fruitless and frustrating. Of course, that is exactly the point.
BrandoCapote plays through Nov. 24 at the Tank (312 West 36th St., between Eighth and Ninth avenues). Evening shows are at 7:30 p.m.; matinees are at 3 p.m. For the performance calendar and to purchase tickets, call (212) 563-6269 or visit thetanknyc.org.
