Rosa and Blanca by Rebekka Kricheldorf
translated by Neil Blackadder / Cherry Arts Collective / Cherry Artspace through Sun Nov 17 (thecherry.org)
“The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral…”
This speech of Polonius in Hamlet comes to mind: the issue of genres and expectations. Oversaturated with the realistic play, not to mention the usual plot-driven narratives of television and film, it can be a bit unsettling to change gears as an audience. But over and over, that is what the Cherry at its best urges us to do.
What’s delightful about this requirement is just how easy that gear shift can be. Let expectations go and experience the flow. Stop making sense.
Rosa and Blanca has text, it has characters, and relationships. One thing even leads to the next (the rudiments of plot!) But it meanders and repeats, spiraling outwards, in this contemporary adult reworking of Snow White and Rose Red.
In an imaginary forest (director Samuel Buggeln has transformed the space to grassy paths, hillocks, with a suggestion of forest climbing to the ceiling), creatures—human and not –drift in and out.
Mother, urgent, distracted, citified, bourgeois, and overdressed. (When she returns later with a gun in a purse, I felt she might have just exited a Sam Shepard play.) Susannah Berryman alternately falls into reveries of her past and nagging rebukes with aplomb.
A Dwarf, hobble-footed, swearing a Scottish blue streak and guzzling whiskey. A gloriously foul and funny debut by the dexterous Robin Guiver.
A fluffy, inquisitive Lamb (Sylvie Yntema), an airy Hare (Mike Chen), a haughty Dove (G-Quan Booker), and a resolute yet wary Deer (Meg Elliott) might have come straight from the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh, especially when they sit for tea each Sunday with their human friends, Rosa and Blanca.
The sisters have abandoned a stifling city (civilization) for this pastoral utopia. Rosa (Erica Steinhagen) is more the type A, an extrovert, designing a grass-based fashion collection. Blanca (Darcy Rose) pulls inward, the budding scientist. Their sisterhood is tight and loving. At first.
The core of Kricheldorf’s script is the impossibility of innocence, the inevitability of growing up, the dangers of being a girl in any existing world. The sisters’ scenes are a telescope of childhood to adolescence.
Into this semi-paradise stumbles a Bear (it seems he was once imprisoned by the Dwarf). A joyful, goofy Bear (Dean Robinson) that wants to be with everyone, but especially these girls. He’s a bit clumsy, he’s a bit of a puppy,, he is above all, persistent.
And he’s the inescapable male persona that drives the sisters into a jealous competition. But not like a hammer. More like a deep mystery. And the gaze is from the young Beauties to this Beast.
The ride is joyful and melancholic, frothy and edgy, sweetly tender and bitterly harsh. Buggeln and the actors keep the presentation light, letting individual moments play out like instrumental solos, allowing each segment to stand by itself, a lovely sense of breath. Air. Space.
In addition, there’s a not-to-be-missed shift into the psychedelic (very Beatles/Doors/Jefferson Airplane) when some hallucinogenic berries get shared.
The acting is physically and emotionally adroit, slightly heightened and floating, but still sharply interactive.
Robinson almost steals the show with the sheer energy of his lumbering, antic Bear.
At the show’s core Steinhagen and Rose display bouts of playfulness and rivalry, shifting moods suddenly, but subtly. When the knives come out, they play a great game of one-upping. Steinhagen’s Rosa is a bit cocksure, jumping feet-first. In Rose’s hands, Blanca is a trifle cautious and secretive.
Design supports the cartoonish, fabulistic milieu with inventive costumes, offbeat sound and scene-setting lighting.
Immerse yourself in the experience of this long strange trip.
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