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Architects get skewered at WHAT
BY CAROLYN CLAY
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Private Jokes, Public Places
By Oren Safdie. Directed by Brendan Hughes. Set by Dan Joy. Lighting by Christopher Ostrom. Costumes by Mary Jo Horner. With Stephen Russell, Dafydd Rees, Marc Carver, and Ann Hu. At Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater through October 24.
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Paradigms are as cheap as a pair o’ dimes in the tortured parlance of modern architecture, where too often big egos wrap big commissions in big ideas at the expense of producing pleasing, functional spaces for human beings. Well, playwright and architect manqué Oren Safdie, son of famed Israeli-born architect Moshe Safdie, is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it any more. His Private Jokes, Public Places was welcomed last year in New York (where it transferred from La MaMa ETC to the Theater at the Center for Architecture); now it’s making its area debut at Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. Safdie takes a matte knife to abstract architectural bloviation, scoring some points and not a few laughs in a short jab of a satire based on his own experience presenting a thesis project to a jury of professional prima donnas. The play also points a finger, à la Oleanna, at sex and power abuses in academe. But where Mamet imitates Pinter or even Kafka, Safdie exaggerates along more cartoonish lines. At WHAT, director Brendan Hughes has altered the architectural design of Safdie’s play, adding a sort of environmental prologue in which the audience is ushered through the backstage space, which is festooned with oddball models (courtesy of WHAT set designer Dan Joy) and rough sketches such as might turn up in the interstices of a school of architecture. As we pass along, the play’s two visiting architectural pooh-bahs, Colin and Erhardt, are seen critiquing a student’s work. Their final few remarks, taken from Safdie’s opening, set the heady, nonsensical tone these competitive intellectual pretenders will take, with Erhardt speaking of "dialectical utopianism" and Colin responding with talk of "expanding the paradigm." Eventually, we pass into the small auditorium, where an attractive but nervous Korean-American grad student named Margaret is preparing to defend her thesis. Coming along to prod her project, an enclosure containing a public swimming pool, are snobbish Modernist Colin in his pert bow tie, black-clad avant-gardist Erhardt, and the school’s youngish dean, William, who spends the play leapfrogging between referee and therapist as the two visitors divide their time between attacking Margaret and attacking each other. It isn’t pretty, but it is funny. And according to my architect husband, it’s not that much of an exaggeration. Director Hughes, who founded the Theater Cooperative before going off to his own grad-school crucible at the Yale School of Drama, was doubtless attracted to the play’s display of preening, prejudice, and power-tripping in academe. But Safdie’s portrayal is not entirely one-sided. The strong-willed Margaret, whom the playwright created for his Korean-Canadian actress wife, M.J. Kang, represents the talented student out of step with a philosophy that favors gimmicky concept over feasibility. In her case, having grown up in public housing, she wants her pool complex to answer what she feels are natural human requirements, among them privacy in a public space, rather than conform to some intellectually conjured idea. She moves, however, from anxiety to an outspokenness that borders on rudeness. Poor William can only hope to keep a lid on things so that Margaret will graduate and be able to march on to her promised job at Skidmore, Owens, and Merrill. It’s clear that Safdie is invested in Margaret’s point of view; her childhood tale of irregularly stacking her Legos to create more human urban boxes suggests a kiddie approximation of Safdie père’s famed Habitat ‘67. But the playwright doesn’t make her his unburnished heroine; like Sophocles’s Antigone, she’s not all right. The members of the play’s male jury are more thoroughly lampooned, and that includes sensitive but sexually exploitive academic William, who in the enthusiastic person of Marc Carver gambols about the WHAT stage in a veritable ballet of amelioration that has him invoking anyone from Freud to I.M. Pei to keep the peace. (The latter proves an amusing backfire, as Margaret takes umbrage at the broad stroke of the pan-Asian paint brush.) Dafydd Rees is a prissy, condescending, possibly unstable Colin, and WHAT stalwart Stephen Russell, almost unrecognizable in shaved head and shades, is intensely in thrall of his own dynamic utterances as Erhardt. As Margaret, Ann Hu (who understudied Kang in NYC) plays her character’s predicament as effectively with her eyes as she does with her arguments. In the end, the badgered student, goaded into an admission she had not meant to make, finds a forceful if mute way to have the last word in the argument over public exposure. Yet her statement seems unlikely to lead us back to some innocent Eden of architecture. The snake is out of the bag.
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