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BY ALEX HO

In print | Published March 27, 2008

What is “The Other Shore” about? After spending an afternoon with the cast and crew of this spring’s Theater Department Production Ensemble, I can’t say I’m entirely sure. The play first struck me as inscrutably about everything and about nothing at once. But that might just be because of the play’s convoluted origins.

To begin, “The Other Shore” is one of the works of Gao Xingjian, a Chinese expatriate living in France who gained worldwide recognition when he received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Literature. His play “The Other Shore” was written in 1986 during the rising tensions over free press and free speech that would eventually bre-ak out at the Tiananmen Square protests. Gao’s plays were soon blacklisted, the Beijing production of his play was abandoned and he fled for France. Gao’s works are still banned in China.

But “The Other Shore” is not the brash indictment of communism that one might imagine. One of the cast members, Miriam Rich ’11, said, “I think a lot of the play is the tension between the collectivism of the crowd and the individual.”

She added, however, “It’s not a black and white thing, where it’s like the crowd is bad or the individual is bad.” Gao has described his works as decidedly apolitical, stating in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech “The Case For Literature” that “if ideology unites with power and is transformed into a real force then both literature and the individual will be destroyed.”

Cast member Chris Klanieki ‘10 described Gao’s approach to drama as “different from Stanislovsky … different from Brecht,” which, in a way, flies against both Beijing opera traditions and the socialist realism that pervaded Mao-era theater. Instead, the play’s most obvious influence is perhaps French absurdism. Judging from my vain attempts to get a summary of the play from any of the cast and crew, “The Other Shore” eludes anything that remotely resembles a plot. Its endless procession of disjointed episodes seems, at times, to be straight out of a David Lynch movie.

The production’s director, visiting professor Kym Moore, proposed one interpretation of the play. “It’s literally a meditation, and the events that occur are events that are thoughts,” she said.

In “The Case for Literature,” Gao says, “Literature transcends national boundaries,” and Gao himself is certainly an international figure. It’s fitting, then, that this week’s production of “The Other Shore” is so culturally non-specific and disorienting. The play’s nine actors performing in natural, non-inflected English are nonetheless dressed in earthy 1960s era Chinese socialist garb as created by costume designer Marsha Ginsberg.

Also added into the mix are even more nonsensicalities on the production’s sound design by Nick Kourtides. When a wayward woman, played by Sasha Shahidi ‘09 ,is hauled away by the play’s frighteningly stupid mob, we inexplicably hear the Talking Heads’ 80s New Wave song “Once in a Lifetime.” Old Ritz Crackers commercials precede the entrance of a charismatic businessman marketing dog skin plaster medicine to the fickle crowd members.

Moore explained that these juxtapositions were incorporated to recontexualize the play’s themes for American culture.

“What we’ve done with the sound a lot is to layer in how commercialism in the United States … is akin to a totalitarian entity,” Moore said. “In the same way that China may be a communist society and [have] a totalitarian government, what is totalitarian [in the United States] is consumer culture.”

“The Other Shore” was originally intended by Gao to be an exercise tool for actors, and for the cast it posed a lot of challenges that they had yet to encounter in their theater careers. Isa St. Clair ‘11 said, “A lot of what we have done has sort of challenged the way that I think a lot of us have learned about theater and really asked us to come up with a completely new way of being in a show and of actuating a character.” Gao’s unique approach to acting, which forced actors to be conscious of their performance as they were on the stage, placed the cast in roles they would never have imagined playing.

Each actor took on a number of roles, including, for Rich, “Young Man,” and, for Klanieki, “Old Woman.” Rich said, “It’s very different from what you think of as usual Western theater, where you’re trying to be a realistic representation of the character, whereas here it’s like a very stylized, demonstrative character.”

Just as the play wrestles with collectivism, the actors similarly had to work heavily on working as an ensemble. To prepare, the cast engaged in many group exercise that Nell Bang-Jensen ’11 said, “has just made us incredibly aware of each other and how we all move.”

“It’s been an interesting challenge because of the collaborative effort,” Shahidi said. “There are times where our director is telling us what to do, and there are times where it’s just like, ‘Create this scene using your bodies in ten minutes. Go.’ It’s been a really good way for us to become an ensemble.”

The sparse set — a sole giant disk with several trapdoors — shifts the theatricality of the play onto the actor’s shoulders. Assistant director Lauren Dubowski ‘08 said, "There’s lots of lights and lots of sound, but the set itself is kind of like a playground for the actors." The play’s performance so heavily employs movement that Moore enlisted Joanna Wright ’08, a theater and dance major, to choreograph the play.

Ultimately, for Moore, “The Other Shore” is heavily rooted in the Buddhist philosophy of coming to terms with yourself and your predicament. “We can’t escape commercials and dictators … all of that is mixed in with what the world is … but we can learn to live with it and to get to a place of peace within ourselves about it,” Moore said. “Basically, there is no other shore.”

“The Other Shore” opens tonight in the LPAC Frear Ensemble Theater from 8 p.m. – 10:30 p.m. It will also run Friday, 4:30 – 7 p.m. and Saturday, 8 p.m. – 10:30 p.m.

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