By Nancy G. Heller
FOR THE INQUIRER
It’s 60 minutes of sheer delight — jam-packed with slapstick humor, astonishing acrobatic feats, witty visual effects, romance, heartbreak, and music ranging from jazz to Tuvan throat singing. Oyster, inspired by a book of poems by filmmaker Tim Burton, is a signature work of Israel’s award-winning Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollak Dance Company. The troupe’s three-day run at the Annenberg Center, which began Thursday, marks the end of its latest U.S. tour.
While each of the vignettes that make up Oyster evokes its own mood, the overall sense of eeriness and androgyny — and especially the dancers’ stark white makeup, fright wigs, and outrageous costumes — are certainly Burtonesque. (Think: Johnny Depp in Edward Scissorhands, Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice, Helena Bonham Carter in practically anything.) But Oyster also owes a lot to the circus, Federico Fellini, and the cracked sensibility of Edward Gorey.
There’s no linear, identifiable “plot” here, but there are distinctive recurring characters, notably a woman in a bright orange wig, dark tutu, pointe shoes, and a black turtleneck that obscures the lower half of her face. We don’t know who she is or why she has a tiny step stool attached to her rear end. But, because of the performers’ skill and the endless inventiveness of co-artistic directors Pinto, a dancer, and Pollak, a classically trained actor, who create the choreography and design soundscapes, sets, and costumes for all their works, we do wonder about this. We also care about Oyster’s other creatures as they crawl, stagger, shimmy, scuttle, strut, and fly about the stage.
But Oyster isn’t simply a parade of “acts.” There’s regular dancing, too, including a quirky and demanding sequence, performed by six people in tattered black frock coats, that would fit right into the repertoire of any contemporary company. The 12-member cast (which seems much larger) has the astounding physical control, and the comedic chops, to pull it all off.
Much of this piece’s power comes from its wild, complex, and fast-paced sequences. But one of the most affecting moments occurs at the very end, when two women slowly walk upstage, accompanied by sweet, slightly melancholy violin-and-piano music, and appear to dissolve into the back wall of the theater. It is a moment of genuine pathos and unexpected beauty.
***
Additional performances: 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 3680 Walnut St. Tickets: $20-$50. Information: 215-898-3900 or AnnenbergCenter.org.
Howard Shapiro reviews and writes about theater for The Inquirer, and has been on staff since 1970. He's had many posts at the newspaper, including cultural arts editor and editor of the Weekend section. He's twice been the editor of the Travel section, for which he writes frequently. He began writing theater criticism a decade ago, and has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, an Internews fellow in Greece, and a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts' Journalism Institutue in Theater and Musical Theater, where Robert Brustein was among his mentors. He teaches arts criticism and travel writing at Temple University, and is Broadway critic for the NPR-affliated stations of the Classical Network.
Toby Zinman's night job since 2006 is theater critic for the Inquirer. She also is a contributing writer for Variety and American Theatre magazine. Her day job: Prize-winning prof at UArts, author of four books about four playwrights (Rabe, McNally, Miller, Albee), and doer of scholarly deeds (winner of five NEH grants, Fulbright lecturer at Tel Aviv University, visiting professor in China). Her 'weekend' job as a travel writer provides adventure: dogsledding in the Yukon, ziplining in Belize, walking coast-to-coast across England, and cowboying in the Australian Outback.
Wendy Rosenfield has been writing freelance features and theater reviews for The Inquirer since 2006. She was theater critic for the Philadelphia Weekly from 1995 to 2001, after which she enjoyed a five-year baby-raising sabbatical. She also writes the ArtsJournal blog Drama Queen. She was 2009 and 2010 Guest Critic for the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival's Region II National Critics Institute, a 2008 NEA Fellow in Theater and Musical Theater, and a participant in the Bennington Writer's Workshop. A graduate of Bennington College, she is inching toward a Master's degree in Liberal Arts at the University of Pennsylvania. She also is a fiction writer, was proofreader to a swami, publications editor for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and a Brownie Girl Scout troop leader.
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