Culture is cosmetic . . . Cries and Whispers at BAM

The song from 'Passing Strange', 'What's Inside is Just a Lie' has a refrain from which I copped the heading of this entry: Culture is cosmetic. One thing I take this to mean is that we use culture: theater, music, literature, as a salve to distract us from the unpleasant realities of being alive in the world . . . we will at some point die.

'Cries and Whispers' does not fit into the 'culture is cosmetic' mode. There is nothing salve-like about it. The film is a beautiful piece that stares life in the face without flinching. It's a film about death, painful and brutal and about the ones circling the dying and how they live on; it is beautiful, rich and evocative. According to the playbill, Bergman saw the film as a 'comfort film'.

After seeing the production at BAM of the Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the line from 'Passing Strange' has been resonating a lot in the last couple of days. A lot of theater is cosmetic; and there is nothing inherently wrong with that, people want to be entertained and distracted for a couple of hours so they don't have to think about things like aging parents or paying bills; which makes a production like 'Cries and Whispers' even more stunning. It was a pretty wild ride. The director made very interesting use of video (in fact making the main character, the dying Agnes, a filmmaker and painter); some of the images from this production I will never forget, though describing them would not do them justice.

The performances were brave and for the most part right on target. These actors were not afraid to strip themselves bare, in some cases literally. Was it a perfect production? No. Some of the music choices were out of left field and the director (Ivo van Howe)let some of his performance art inclinations get in the way once or twice. I left thinking I'd seen something interesting if not 'great'; but it has been in my head for a couple of days now and the more I think about it . . . the more I think about it. And that is a sign of greatness I think: that a piece gets under your skin and lives there, and the more you consider it the more it reveals itself.

This is the second of four pieces we are seeing as part of the Next Wave festival at BAM (first was Berliner Ensemble's Threepenny Opera). Next up is John Malcovich as a serial killer . . . wonder how cosmetic that will be!