Choreographer Yvonne Rainer (Colleen Werthmann, left) discusses her work with an interviewer (Jennifer Morris) in Radio Downtown: Radical ’70s Artists Live on Air.
Creative teams that turn popular movies into musicals are becoming commonplace on Broadway, but as Radio Downtown: Radical ’70s Artists Live on Air demonstrates, it takes a rare breed of creator to unearth a collection of decades-old public radio interviews and transform them into a viable piece of Off-Broadway theater. Fortunately, Steve Cosson is just such a visionary.
As artistic director of the boundary-pushing troupe the Civilians, Cosson is known for inventive stagings and the reshaping of realities. As director and co-writer (along with Jocelyn Clarke) of this new, multimedia experience, he again toys with the audience’s perception of what constitutes a stage performance. The fast-paced 75-minute piece is a sliced-and-diced discussion of an era’s experimental film, dance, visual arts and poetry that explodes the narrow confines of radio and broadens the definition of “play.”
Morris (standing) and Maya Sharpe play at harnessing their psychic energy. Photographs by Hunter Canning.
The source material for the work is straightforward enough, consisting primarily of taped interviews from WNYC radio shows of the 1960s and ’70’s, including Arts Forum, Artists in the City, and Poetry of the Avant-Garde. Five actors portray a variety of real-life interviewers and interviewees, such as film historian P. Adams Sitney, experimental choreographer Yvonne Rainer, underground filmmakers George Kuchar, Kenneth Anger and Harry Smith, and the poet Leroi Jones (before he became known as Amiri Baraka). Even Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman show up in a remembrance of their infamous 1967 attempt to harness psychic energy to levitate the Pentagon.
The primary challenge for the performers, as bluntly explained at the top of the show, is that they do not know their lines. Instead, they all wear earpieces which feed them the actual radio recordings. They then deliver the words aloud as they hear them. This is a variation of a technique that the Civilians employed, with stunning results, in their 2019 hit by Lucas Hnath, Dana H. In that one-woman drama, the earbud-wearing actor lip-syncs the lines from a kidnap victim’s recorded interview, thus inventing a striking metaphor about captivity and what it means to be in control of your own voice.
“ The fast-paced 75-minute piece ... explodes the narrow confines of radio and broadens the definition of ‘play.’”
Here the strategy results in a very different outcome, one which emphasizes the distance between the material and the audience. The actors interpret the voices that only they hear and then speak the artists’ thoughts. But, in doing so, the reality behind those thoughts becomes altered, twisted in translation, turning the proceedings into a kind of performance art. Or, to borrow Kimako Baraka’s words from early in the evening, “Without the people being directly and actively involved in whatever it is that's happening that's considered to be culture or cultured, it's not valid. It's just not real.”
Bouts of absurdity and visual humor further drive home the distancing effect. Musical chairs come to mind in the way one scene speeds into another, while the interviews are intercut in a manner that suggests a radio being changed from one station to the next, to the next, then back again. One quite funny moment finds Harry Smith discussing his work while a baby, portrayed by the fully grown Joshua David Robinson, crawls around the stage, cooing. By scene’s end, Smith is making as little sense as the babbling infant.
Werthmann and Robert M. Johanson channel their characters with the help of discreet earpieces.
Also in the mix are brief spasms of dance and plenty of film clips from works like Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising, featuring Manson family murderer Bobby Beausoleil. A projection of Beausoleil covered in blood fills an upstage screen as Anger (Robert M. Johanson) bemoans, “We ran into the slight problem that Bobby was, um, living the part of Lucifer off-screen as well as on.”
The subset of the audience who are actually familiar with the characters being portrayed here will likely have a different experience than the uninitiated, but the cast’s quirky interpretations should satisfy most everyone. Colleen Werthmann excels in physical humor and sharp mannerisms while Johanson finds the comic angst in Anger. Robinson, once done crawling, brings dignity and joyfulness to his poetic characters, as do Jennifer Morris and Maya Sharpe in their multiple roles.
The radicalism being preached in Radio Downtown, often focusing on the arts’ relationship to race and society, feels nearly gentle by today’s standards. Some of the artists predict that the passage of time will cause their art and their message to vanish, and indeed their words are fleeting. At one point, even the chairs the actors are perched upon disappear beneath them. The audience is left to ponder just how many creative endeavors have been lost to the ages, and how best to preserve the ones worth keeping.
The Civilians staging of Radio Downtown: Radical ’70s Artists Live on Air plays through Feb. 9 at 59e59 Theaters (59 East 59th St.). Evening performances are at 7:15 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2:15 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, visit 59e59.org.
Playwright: Steve Cosson and Jocelyn Clarke
Direction: Steve Cosson
Sets: Andrew Boyce
Costumes: Emily Rebholz
Lighting: Amith Chandrashaker
Sound: Ryan Gamblin
Projections: Attilio Rigotti
