A collage of scenes from “45 Plays for America’s First Ladies.”
As you’re settling into the Neo-Futurists’ digital mainstage show, you can only imagine how raucous and powerful the early Abigail Adams rock anthem “Remember The Ladies” would be in person: a wild and wonderful song to bring us into the world of the piece as a whole. But as with many of the plays in this latest political anthology from the Neo-Futurists, watching it in a recorded version streamed on Twitch—as undeniably fun as it is—just doesn’t have the same kick as you know it would live.This is nothing against the concept of digital theater, mind you. As the worldwide pandemic—further exacerbated in the United States by a cruel, uncaring and incompetent federal government—has relegated most theater-making to the digital realm, artists have found exceedingly creative means of artistic expression to grapple with the lack of in-person gatherings for a prolonged period of time. The Neo-Futurists themselves leapt into the realm of digital theater-making headfirst with an enviably successful online version of their weekly “Infinite Wrench” shows. Their pivot to digital content has been seamless, as well as a shining beacon for how to stay creatively engaged during a moment of deep social and economic crisis.
The “Infinite Wrench” shows consist of thirty plays in sixty minutes with the only connective tissue being the ensemble that has written and performed them. “45 Plays…” is a similar beast, but only slightly: forty-five short plays, each thematically linked by the chronological history of this country’s First Ladies, moving from Martha Washington all the way to Melania Trump, with each play chronicling how the highest office in the land has betrayed our most marginalized citizens in an attempt to uphold the white supremacist patriarchy that is the American experiment.
The plays are quick to note how nebulous the title of First Lady even is, one of the more appropriate quotations about the role of First Lady was “an afterthought and an impossible expectation.” If there is any thesis to be gathered from the plays as a whole, it’s that the role of First Lady has played a deadly role in defining how misogyny is systemically woven into our country’s history and culture, while the women who have actually been First Ladies have, for the most part, been more than happy to play that role. Thematically, the tightrope walk of “These women were treated horribly in their time and history has not been kind to them” and “Actually, a lot of these women were slaveowners and were complicit in their husband’s violent policies” is handled deftly, and is perhaps the greatest success of the evening.
The individual plays are as varied as the women they purport to be based upon. From puppetry to musical numbers to riffs on French avant-garde cinema, afterschool specials and game shows, the plays—under the fanciful direction of Denise Yvette Serna—are rapid and eclectic enough to distract from the one-hour-forty-five-minute runtime (already a big ask to stay engaged watching a computer screen). The ensemble (Brenda Arellano, Hilary Asare, Ida Cuttler, Andie Patterson, Robin Virginie and Vic Wynter) performs with the inspiring level of absurdist truth one hopes to see from any Neo-Futurist show. But the disconnect is hard to shake, especially when only a small smattering of the pieces take full advantage of their filmed nature, with the majority of the plays screaming out to be performed in a live room with people. There are a handful of plays that incorporate live audience members via Zoom, but these are few and can only approximate the illusion of liveness so much.
Perhaps trying to make theater right now is a lot like holding the title of First Lady: a complete afterthought and an impossible expectation. This is uncharted territory for a lot of artists right now, and we’re all messily navigating how to pivot an entire art form onto a new medium. So yes, anyone who is able to wholeheartedly and creatively make art right now, especially art that can find links to our current moment of political unease, should be applauded, and so I do for the Neos and for “45 Plays…” Even if this particular effort didn’t pull me in as much as I had hoped, I still recommend checking out what the Neos have to offer. They’re meeting our moment as deftly as one can.
Playing digitally with the Neo-Futurists, neofuturists.org, (773) 878-4557, $15. Through November 2.
