Deus dial-up

Snappy Dance telephones the Renaissance

by Marcia B. Siegel

The hero of Snappy Dance Theater's Deus ex Machina, which was given last weekend at Suffolk University's C. Walsh Theater, is a spiritless depressive and possible art-history major named James (Phil Mitchell). After coming home and finding no messages on his answering machine once too often, he falls asleep and dreams the Italian Renaissance in living color, as the incarnation of his suppressed desires. He glimpses angels from time to time, but mostly he fantasizes the unspeakable: spouse murders, S&M, cannibalism, and insulting friends.

As an effusive nun on an overhead screen talks about art, the living paintings become confused with television pictures. James walks into the Slaughter of the Innocents, the Inferno, a wrestling match, and an operating-room drama. He keeps trying to call God for help and getting routed through an endless menu of choices. ("Press the first three letters of your religion now. You have dialed Buddhism. All our consultants are busy. Approximate waiting time will be 15 years.") The voice-mail robotry is just one more authority figure in a life filled with rejection and psychic hold buttons.

James finally gets fed up and throws his answering machine away. But as he's leaving, presumably to become a more assertive person, he invites the whole troupe of angels, wrestlers, rollerbladers, and decapitated Florentine aristocrats to come along with him.

This hallucinatory scenario, conceived by Snappy Dance Theater's director, Martha Mason, with telephonic one-liners by Paul Wagner, reads better than it plays. I don't know what kind of space Mason had in mind for it, but it seemed better suited to a vast arena or a movie screen than to the Walsh's small stage. What with the overhead video projections, the lifesize picture frame, and the pink lucite armchair and tilted table of James's living room, the 12 dancer-actors seemed to be faking or just wrangling around when they were supposed to be fighting or flying or practicing to be devils.

In one scene James was partnered by two angels with one skate and one bare foot each. James could barely stand up on two skates, the poor guy, just another example of his inability to cope. But even if he'd been a skating whiz, he wouldn't have been able to cut loose on that stage. Perhaps Mason's intention here was a reversal of Charlie Chaplin's great triumph in The Rink, where, with virtuosic agility, the Tramp upends his oversized, blustering rival and sweeps out with the girl. James has no such grace on wheels, or anything else, it turns out, but the performance didn't contrast any superior models to his haplessness.

The whole performance had a kind of easygoing incompetence about it. The acting was often exaggerated, but somehow it wasn't really funny. Paul Wagner played all the controlling characters on TV, including a bloodthirsty sports announcer when the characters in a leather bar trick James into a fight, and a Mafioso devil who's prepping unsuccessful candidates for Hell. ("No, no! Think evil, schmucks! The whole class, they're hopeless. Send 'em up to Purg.") Mason and Jeff Morrison played the murderous, headless mom-and-dad surrogates. And, to one of the waltzes from Les Sylphides, Morrison and Robyn Conroy were the gourmet doctors who sampled whatever they were removing from the patient, Crissy Liu. She found the same stuff pretty tasty when she revived.

Although it was framed as a series of skits, the show lacked the manic timing of most stand-up comedy. On opening night, the company stopped 20 minutes in to fix a malfunctioning video, then started again from the top. The video did appear, but it was often streaked with horizontal lines and other picture-defacing effects. I didn't know whether this was intentional, given the wayward eclecticism of the rest of the performance.

Some of the performers were listed as dancers, but the only number with anything that looked like choreography came early in the piece and featured too many women in wafting draperies and hair swooping and spiraling around the tight space. After James's harrowing adventures, he dreamed two angels cloned together doing slow acrobatics. With Cathy Bosch lying on the floor, Mason balanced on her partner's upraised feet and arms to take a prolonged series of floating poses. They somersaulted slowly one over the other and left. This seemed to be the signal for James's positive awakening.

In a final left turn, all the performers came back in dance clothes for their bows and did a small choreographed ensemble dance with individual solo bits while the audience clapped them on.