IT’S A CULTURAL FANFARE, and it certainly swells with capital-C ‘Culture’ – both highbrow and pop. New York City’s brand-new development, Hudson Yards, reportedly the most expensive private real estate development in American history (and “a billionaires’ fantasy city” according to critics) contains within it an ‘arts space’ with the disingenuous, plainspoken name: ‘The Shed’.
To launch its first season, the attention-getting fanfare that now emanates from The Shed is a staged prose-poem – “Norma Jeane Baker of Troy,” commissioned from the renowned classicist and poet-novelist Anne Carson. You could scarcely ask for a more obvious blending of high and lowbrow than this effort at identity-mingling between Marilyn Monroe (formerly Norma Jeane Baker) and Helen of Troy – the ‘face that launched a thousand ships’ and who legendarily, as Carson says, destroyed two civilizations.
Using Euripides’ play Helen as a guide (rather more than Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, it seems) Carson makes the sorrows of these two so-called ‘sex-objects’ echo each other across the centuries. “It’s a disaster to be a girl,” is a hard-to-dispute refrain spoken and sung (to music by Paul Clark) throughout the 90-minute performance. This plaintive verse and other examples – some quite melodious, others less so – are delivered mainly by that wholly indisputable star Renée Fleming, once a grand opera fixture, now wonderfully extending her talent more widely.
The production is altogether powered by high star-wattage, and many ‘Culture’ boxes are checked. Fleming’s onstage companion is Olivier Award-nominee Ben Wishaw, an actor of extraordinary versatility, and sinuous androgyny, too – which comes in handy as his character morphs from an obsessive fan of Marilyn into a cross-dressed version of Marilyn herself. The director is Katie Mitchell, resident artist at London’s Royal Court Theatre, perhaps still that city’s most cherished temple of the avant garde. Clark the composer is valued for his prolific work performed from Sadlers Wells to Dublin’s Abbey Theater and our own Lincoln Center.
BUT THE TROUBLE WITH FANFARES is that they can on occasion be blaringly noisy. That is the case here; this challenging piece, hard to follow at many points, is too often rendered well-nigh incomprehensible by some confusing and cacophonous sound design – the work of Mitchell’s frequent collaborator Donato Wharton. Recorded voice mixed in with the live spoken voices, plus atmospheric sound-effects, plus vocally tonal and atonal music often totally obtrude on the action instead of supporting it. This is most evident when one repeated trope, the playing-out of pre-recorded academic teaching notes, ‘History of War’: Lesson 1 through Lesson 9 (taking us from the Trojan War of Helen’s time to the ‘optics’ of modern-day Russian stratagems involving cleverly-faked, actually inflatable, MiG-31 fighter-planes) becomes ultimately indecipherable … totally losing its own war with an over-elaborate sound-balancing console.
The pleasures of the production (and there are many pleasures, mercifully not destroyed by the wayward soundscape) consist in magical moments of actorly skill. These two masters Wishaw and Fleming revel in imbuing their demanding dialogue – as respectively the spiky boss with a message to dictate, and the hired stenographer turning it into the written word – with humanizing jokes and winks, ironic but arresting double-takes and, most of all, a growing complicity in telling their, yes, highly inscrutable tale.
