WILLIAM THOMAS CAINE
Catharine K. Slusar and Ross Beschler star in "Cabinet of Wonders," Gas & Electric Art's first commissioned work. It's staged in a huge warehouse basement filled with stuff, and a fake rat.
Detritus of dysfunction
A family's secrets stowed amid a messy collection of stuff.
A play in props. Bigger than the junk shop in Mamet's American Buffalo, messier than the abandoned apartment in Miller's The Price, weirder than the Collier Brothers' New York hermitage, Gas & Electric Arts' set for Cabinet of Wonders is the Miss Havisham of 'em all. The venue, a huge warehouse basement filled with stuff actually for sale - clothes, lamps, pictures, jewelry, teacups - is wildly atmospheric. (Don't miss the plaster rat on the windowsill in the alley before you enter.)
The point is that it's not just a play in props, but also a life in props and a family in props - this is about how stuff defines us, how the relics of the past, the detritus and the souvenirs and the memorabilia, create a history that shapes our ideas of who we are. The misshapen characters here are a woman (Catharine K. Slusar, whose performance deepens impressively) and a man (Ross Beschler). They are about to be evicted, and rummage around in the accumulation of the years, trying to hide from the secrets of the past. This is physical theater, so the ideas are performed rather than discussed.
There is an absent daughter, Theodora, who has written a book about her family as if they were dead. The clock chimes, "Mealtime"; they sing, "Beans and toast," and eat from a pot. There are lemons. There are wishbones. There is a spider made from bent forks. There is an inheritance of death and grief and self-aggrandizement. This makes most dysfunctional-family drama look like Father Knows Best.
Written by Kira Obolensky, Cabinet is Gas & Electric's first commissioned work, and, like many new plays, it's too long. Lisa Jo Epstein directs, and Irve Dell provided the stuff and created the cabinets, which are quite wondrous - one can be played like a squeezebox, one is a cage, one is filled with sand - and which create remarkable stage images. And although the highly stylized Dadaist, surrealist manner is annoying at first, the cumulative effect - like the acquisition of a lifetime of bits and pieces - is powerful and poignant. My impulse was to go home and throw everything out.
