Savage Love @ Hip Pocket Theatre
Photo Credit: Shannon Atkinson Cahoon
—Jill Sweeney
"'Savage/Love' was written around 1980, but you'd swear it came straight from the fervent avant-garde laboratory of earlier years, when Shepard and Chaikin discovered their artistic selves. Character and plot, among other theatrical conventions, are out the window; "Savage/Love" is a sequence of 19 poems - some lyrical but most of them anxious - on love.”—Nelson Pressley, Washington Post
Guys, it’s no fun to be the party pooper, to feel like a bourgeois 1950s housewife, gazing uncomprehendingly at an experimental art piece and leaning over to whisper to her husband, “But what does it mean?” But I feel a dim obligation to be honest in my reviews, even if running the risk of being accused of a sort of blinkered square-dom—of being guilty of the cardinal sin of just not getting it.
Local mainstay Hip Pocket Theatre’s production of Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin’s Savage Love, although produced with care and thought, is simply not my cup of tea. That said, it’s a mood piece above all else, a dreamy mix of dance, movement, music, and poetry, all centered on the theme of love—the giddiness of falling in love, the insecurities in relationships, the hard fall when it all ends. It did not tickle my fancy, but your fancy may well be more ticklish than mine.
There’s a whiff of freshman acting exercise to the production—a group of actors, instructed to respond to the same emotion, to mime a morning on the subway together, or to echo one speaker, acting almost as a hive mind at the play’s opening. The cast then scatters, with one or two actors frequently rushing onstage to recite a few lines, twist and writhe to music, then rush off again. Repeat, and conclude. It was interesting to note while researching the piece that a 2011 production by Dallas’ Sundown Collaborative Theatre used only two actors for the piece, which might go a long way in threading the play’s narrative (such as it is) together and giving the audience a concrete relationship to invest in. But, conversely, the cast was nicely diverse, and director Lorca Simons clearly meant for the sprawling collection of actors to convey love running the gamut of age, gender, sexuality, etc., which may even be more in line with the playwrights’ original intent.
Chaikin worked first at The Living Theatre (founded by visionaries Judith Malina and Julian Beck) before opening his own experimental venue, The Open Theatre, in 1963 (and later collaborating with Shepard), championing a fluid, organic acting style, liberally mixed with music and dance. HPT’s production is certainly channeling the 1960’s sensibility that animated the Living Theatre movement and the “happenings” of the time. What one feels is missing is anything of real substance, though this may be more the fault of the playwrights than this production.
Dana Schultes, moonlighting from her role as Artistic Director of Stage West, gave the show’s most fully realized performance; the highlight of the night was her monologue as a woman at once desperately vulnerable, then performatively confident in the face of a potential lover: ““Could you give me a small part of yourself, I’m only asking for the tiniest part, just enough to get me from here to there.” Sarah Sampson was also a powerhouse, first in a wordless, raging scene of a woman dragging her boyfriend’s belongings out of their presumably shared space and, with much effort, heaving them over a fence. Then in a later scene, she is penned in by mirrors and at once furious and plaintive, raging at how she’d molded herself to fit a lover before she’d even known him. Her raw physicality—whipping her thick, dark hair back as she strained to lift suitcases, wrenching her dress up in a frenzy of pain and anger, was magnetic. And Aja Jones, last enjoyed by this critic in HPT’s “The Diary of Adam and Eve”, was at turns playful and incandescent with rage in her brief scenes. But even these performances were at times undercut by the show’s intrusive sound design, which was sometimes overwhelmingly loud street noise (at times obscuring dialogue), or music that felt wildly out of sync with the emotions being expressed.
I’m a fan of Hip Pocket’s laid-back style and dreamy vibes, and Lord knows there are few finer feelings than clutching a cold Shiner and listening to soft guitar music under a big ol’ Texas sky in their twinkly courtyard. While this production may not have been up my alley—I was in savage “like” at best, I’m afraid—there’s no reason to think it might not be up yours. And I have every intention of making it out for the theater’s next production, the always spooky Legend of Sleepy Hollow, coming in October.
WHEN: Through September 11
WHERE: 1950 Silver Creek Road, Fort Worth, TX 76108
WEB: hippocket.org
