Review: Ambitious, Controversial REFUGIA at Guthrie Theater

"Refugia" is a Latin term meaning "an area where special circumstances have enabled survival after extinction in surrounding areas." The adventurous theater explorers of The Moving Company (themselves displaced from the renowned Theatre de la Jeune Lune, which closed in 2006) have devised multiple riffs on this idea and related themes, pushing the boundaries of narrative and perhaps, too, of the mainstage Guthrie audiences.

Structured in 9 chapters, each in a different theatrical style, each set in a specific time and place, and featuring a wide range of music (opera, folk melodies including a Kurdish lullaby and an Andalusian song, contemporary composer Arvo Part's holy minimalism, show tunes, pop songs, etc.), this show is eclectic and ambitious, both thematically and stylistically.

We meet a wordless unaccompanied child at the Arizona border, undergoing processing by neglectful, racist, and buffoonish American guards. There's a family of Muslim women fleeing to Germany via Lesbos by boat, who stop off in a NATO refugee camp. There's an Algerian couple, long-time residents of France, whose son has fled gang involvement in Marseille to join jihadists in Syria. There's a flashback to the 1950's, and a Polish couple, both musicians, attempting to leave the USSR for a new life in Israel; the border guards in this scene are efficient and repressive. There's even a wordless duet between a dying polar bear and a strong and graceful African dancer, observed by a scientist in a hazmat suit, set in Indonesia in the future.

All this is framed by opening and closing chapters centered on an aging American white man played by Stephen Epps, one of the show's writers. The show begins with house lights up. A conversational monologue in direct address, touched by humor, devolves into a movingly performed onstage transformation: the character shrinks into an elderly dementia patient in a nursing home. Post performance, Epps said that this was a deliberate effort to draw in the mostly white, mostly older mainstream Guthrie audience to a contemplation of the way all of us face displacement, disability, and the final border crossing of death, so as to build empathy for the stories that then ensue.

The final chapter is a wild roller coaster ride through time and geography that careens zanily into both genealogical and evolutionary realms. Rife with physical comedy and loony twists, it eventually resolves into final images of journey (with the whole ensemble) and a tree of life that buds before our eyes.

REFUGIA began in a residency at the University of Texas at Austin in January of 2015. This is how the Moving Company generates new material, through a non-hierarchical, non-linear, often non-verbal process of improvisation and experimentation based around a central idea and attendant research, working with students. Then core company members refine and develop that material.

The attack on the staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo happened in Paris while the team was in Austin. In December of that same year was the attack at the Bataclan, as the piece was still evolving. In a post-show discussion at the Guthrie, company members voiced that there are stories in the news nearly daily that connect in their minds to what they are attempting to address, and could make additional chapters. (With a current running time that nears 3 hours, including intermission, that might require some swapping out of chapters.)

Some of the most exciting and cutting Edge Theater I have ever seen has grown out of a devising process like this, but it is a messy business. Knowing what to keep and what to cut is crucial. Often that requires leaving brilliant bits of performance behind because they impede momentum or blur the central intent. Doing so usually requires an overall directorial or authorial eye, which has to be somewhat ruthless.

Here, that role has been shared, in keeping with the collaborative ethic of the group. Steven Epp, Dominique Serrand, and Nathan Keepers share writing credit; Serrand then served as director, while the other two artists are on stage in multiple roles. These three are joined by Christina Baldwin, the fourth founding member of The Moving Company, whose gorgeous singing gilds a number of scenes. Five other actors play a variety of featured roles, and a supporting ensemble of eight more performers play orderlies, rescue workers, Kurdish women, and so forth. The curtain call also features all the backstage personnel, honoring as many of those who labored to create the performance as possible.

In keeping with the LeCoq training that gave rise to the Theatre de la Jeune Lune where some of these artists first met, the performers work in a highly physicalized style and are gifted shape-shifters. Serrand can work magic in mise en scene; here, the chapter featuring the musical couple attempting to leave the USSR is achingly beautiful as staged. It's one of the places that Baldwin's singing is central, but also woven into the staging: this is not 'stop the action and let me tell you a story through song' musical theater. Epps has an Everyman quality that he deploys to benefit audience connection, while showing us an actor's transformational skill in full light and real time; Brecht would be pleased. Keepers plays an astonishing array of characters, including the polar bear (in a full sized full body suit) and the Polish composer, who uses gesture to evoke music in a way that is odd, astonishing, and very lovely.

What do I make of all this?

First: the thematic intent is sprawling and ambitious and runs counter to conventional storytelling. That's fine: one of theater's most underutilized potentials is to generate questions and perhaps even insight through juxtaposition, gesture, and imagery rather than linear narrative. Therefore it's a mistake, I think, to have some of the characters appear in more than one chapter in the second half, since that suggests a kind of 'neatening up' of reality that is common in conventional theater but out of place here.

Second: The robust French tradition of satire and the European acceptance of very barbed political clowning are a hard fit for the era of political correctness here in the US and the local culture of Midwestern niceness. Seen one way, the centrality of Epps' old white man in the first and final chapters is an attempt to build an empathic bridge for the mainstream regional theater audience (read: older, white) so as to reduce the tendency to see the central figures in the other chapters as 'other.' But seen another way, it replicates the privilege accorded to white male voices at the cost of those at the margin. This is true despite several strong female characters of color, particularly the French/Algerian mother, the Kurdish matriarch, and the (silent) African dancer.

Additionally, the choice to costume several female characters in extreme padding reads as fat-shaming to theatergoers who are sensitive to comedy that exploits gender norms. And a key figure in the wacko final chapter, the librarian, is played by a male actor dressed in women's clothing-thus giving away a role that might have been carried by a female actor to a male one, and raising questions around non-gender normative and trans identities. Again, the intent may be to ask the audience to wake up to another border crossing, but this is done without framing and so can read as thoughtless stereotyping.

The Guthrie responded to the controversy in the very active local theater blogger community by setting up a conversation at the theater that was 'tense,' according to the local coverage (http://strib.mn/2redAl0). I was not able to attend. Guthrie Artistic Director Joseph Haj was there, mostly to listen, it seems.

Whether The Moving Company will find another academic setting in which to continue their investigations of the themes in REFUGIA, and perhaps to refine this first fully produced outing of the piece, remains to be seen. The production at the Guthrie did not sell out and is now closed. What I hope is that the Guthrie will continue to provide a venue for experimental work done by artists of this caliber, and that The Moving Company will forge onward, pushing artistic boundaries and asking more of audiences than complacency, while interrogating their own intentions and evolving ethical positions, as all of us must. None of this is simple!

Photo credit: Dan Norman

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