Sowelu Theater
Portland, OR
503.730.9066
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| Jenni Green |
Reviews: Some Explicit Polaroids by Mark Ravenhill, 2002
Willamette Weeks says: "Sowelu snaps some strong shots from Mark Ravenhill's tough play.
We fight and we fail or flail, we live to die, we screw and we get screwed. So what? What's the use of living? Nothing means anything anymore.
This slacker school of thought is tired. It's no longer shocking or interesting, and it doesn't make for the kind of dynamic characters and relationships that make going to the theater worthwhile. But when the empty frame of that philosophy is filled in with the energy and sweat of sex, the blood of disease, the dirt of the past, when it is ripped apart at the corners and examined, a complex and interesting picture emerges, and we cannot turn away.
Director Barry Hunt and Sowelu Theater transport the six characters of Mark Ravenhill's sexual-political drama Some Explicit Polaroids from the playwright's native Britain to America in the late 1990s. The play opens with Nick (Ted Schultz), released after a 15-year prison sentence for attempted murder, arriving at the door of Helen (Lorraine Bahr), a former lover who has tossed aside her revolutionary spirit in favor of inane public-service tasks and a run for Congress.
Nick's '80s-era fight-the-man rants, which boiled over while he was on the inside, are old news to Helen, who nevertheless finds some allure in the man and his ideas. Nick falls in with young Nadia (Jenni Green), a bruised and battered stripper who is his intellectual opposite. She and her friends, the HIV-positive Tim (Chris Harder) and his Russian sex slave, Victor (Sean Skvarka), are young, empty souls in overstimulated bodies, with no interest in Nick's--or anyone's--politics.
Hunt and his cast have embraced the play's title and have made each scene into a collection of beautiful, gritty snapshots worth more than Ravenhill's quick-witted words. It feels much like flipping through a stack of private photographs, but the ideas (and it is essentially a play of ideas) are not lost.
The characters and relationships that develop are an advertisement for Sowelu's ensemble approach. Skvarka especially, as Victor, is sexual vigor incarnate. He is a veritable animal who stands on the furniture one moment and humps the floor the next. As Tim, Harder lets his perfect body function as a shield for his character's failing immune system. His struggle to balance the knowledge of his looming death with the fact that a new AIDS medicine makes its timing unpredictable is earnest and believable.
Green's Nadia, who lives behind a Polaroid camera and communicates in undeveloped bits of New Age philosophy and therapyspeak, uses her photographs as a replacement for memory and as a way to organize her life. When Tim dies, all she is left with are images, devoid of any emotional recall. Green captures this completely.
At its heart, Polaroids asks difficult questions about whether we sell out as we grow older and are doomed to become passive observers to all the terror and injustice that happens inside and outside all of us. The question cannot be answered, of course, but this production gives us plenty of ways to look at it.
—Eric Larson
Read audience response to this production.