Tasha Lewis | Phoenix Staff

Nathalie Gumpertz (Jessie Bear) carries a weighty secret in “Preparations.”

BY ALEX HO

In print | Published September 10, 2009

The Philly Fringe Festival is always an exciting grab bag of experimental theater.
One particular show, “Preparations for Departure,” may be an especially gratifying experience for Swatties, past and present, who have seen its players’ work develop over the years.

The play was created and performed by the six members of Matchbox Theater Company, a collective of Swarthmore theater majors: Emma Ferguson ’10 and Class of 2009 graduates Colin Aarons, Jessie Bear, Daniel Perelstein, Sasha Shahidi and Jackie Vitale. “Departure” was shown from Sept. 4 to Sept. 8 in a curious venue – an abandoned building standing beside a towering, rusting Ben Franklin bridge. The audience was asked to descend into the basement and, before the start of the play, observe something reminiscent of a museum exhibition of turn-of-the-20th-century memorabilia, from a book on hand puppets to a world map charting the various, perhaps even imaginary, expeditions of family members. The moody textures of these environs all cued the audience into the play’s focus on a Prussian family’s immigrant experience.

I’m hesitant to say anything concrete about the play: what is real and imaginary to the story seems perpetually in flux and ultimately irrelevant to distinguish between. The play itself feels like a schizophrenic fever dream oscillating between the idyllic joys and inescapable tragedies of the Gumpertz family.

The play opens with and continually returns to characters in the act of gazing upon something that the audience can’t see and is forced to imagine. The characters themselves often seem to be living in a dream state, especially the Gumpertzes’ three children – Olga, Danny and Rosa – who have the incongruous appearance of three young adults, as played by Ferguson, Perelstein and Shahidi respectively. Danny in particular is a rambunctious boy who concocts elaborate military fantasies yet tells himself at one point that he’s too old to play pretend. The children’s stagnantly naïve presences grow progressively disturbing as developments about the harsh realities of the family’s life begin to surface. They evoke the feeling of time deferred and uncertainty about the family’s future.

Aarons plays Julius, the father, a factory worker who loves to entertain his children, but Nathalie Gumpertz is the heart of the story as a mother who seems to largely exist in the hectic kitchen, fluctuating between fawning over her children and giving a thousand-yard stare that hints at a deeply buried secret. Bear’s portrayal of Nathalie elicits great sympathy from the audience.

Although living on sparse means, the Gumpertzes’ family life seems practically paradisiacal. It is all the more unexpected when discontent begins to seep into the actors’ performances. In one instance, we witness a cheery family dinner only to have that same dinner conversation eerily repeated two times fast and intermittently interrupted by a distraught monologue by Bear.

At times, the story feels a little too barebones, contributing little novelty to the well-worn territory of stories about Eastern European immigrants struggling in New York City. This may verbe because the Gumpertz family is based on a real family whose story serves as the nondescript proxy for an entire generation of immigrants in various archives and museums.

Fortunately, the play has no intention of being a realist portrayal of immigrant life and is more focused on its characters’ negotiations of their reality and their imagination. This makes for a consistently engaging, challenging theater experience. It’s fun to see that the cast also doubles as the crew; they transparently manipulate the lighting of the set (all from lamps diegetic to the story) even as they are performing. Vitale, who is billed as “The Magician” in the playbill, morphs into various characters from the Gumpertzes’ grandfather to Rosa’s friend Louise to Miss Smith, a snotty client of the Gumpertzes’ small clothing business.

For Swarthmore students, the experience may be an extra treat in recalling the players’ prior theater work at Swarthmore. There is the seamless integration of music that seems to be Perelstein, Vitale and Aarons’ bread-and-butter technique, the lived-in drapery reminiscent of the Ferguson’s set design in “The Wild Party” and the thematic fixations of balancing work and relationships in Bear’s “Pop Out.” As with any good theater collaboration, it’s hard to tell where one member’s input ends and another one’s begins.

Like “Merma” and last semester’s “Macbeth,” both directed by Vitale, “Departure” has no stage or seating arrangement for the audience who must instead navigate through the space. But more so than “Macbeth,” the technique here does not loudly call attention to itself but is more naturally subsumed into the narrative structure and the orientation of the set. The audience members are encouraged to become the directors of their own experience. One finds oneself framing certain characters through a kitchen window that is suspended in the air or choosing between looking at one of two simultaneous scenes. The play leaves one excited to see where the Matchbox Theater Company will go next.

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