Charlie Kaufman cornered the market in self-referentiality with Adaptation, a movie about a blocked screenwriter called "Charlie Kaufman". Now Kaufman is creating fictionalised versions of his audience members in Hope Leaves the Theater. This play features Meryl Streep, Peter Dinklage and the eponymous Hope Davis, who in the role of an unintentionally disruptive audience member is picked on by "Meryl Streep" and obliged to leave.
The concept of Theater of the New Ear - featuring this play and another called Sawbones - is ingenious. Actors sit on stools, reading from manuscripts. Eight-piece band Parabola play Carter Burwell's score. Foley artist Marko Costanzo runs through his repertoire of sound effects, footsteps, rain, locks, doors, PC keyboards and canned laughter. With party balloons and women's shoes (for female footsteps), he adds theatrical flair to the event. For Sawbones, the supercharged opening play by Joel and Ethan Coen, Costanzo vacuums, squishes leeks and drops bullets in a bowl to bring the multi-layered story to audio life. (This also has an amazing cast, including John Goodman and Steve Buscemi.)
It's all in real time. When Burwell needs jaws' harps for a lame western theme tune, a few of the guys switch instruments and start twangling. When he needs muffled elevator music, the flugel-player inserts a mute and turns his back on the audience. The underscore moves rapidly from dynamic punctuation, to urban paranoia, to tinny TV stings.
By playfully re-ordering its priorities, Theater of the New Ear is as fiercely contemporary as the Bays, or Dave Eggers, or that guy who photographs the backs of billboards. It's the sort of thing you'd expect "John L Walters" to write about (he was there in the audience). The event was awash with creativity. But it was also a bit half-baked, neither one thing nor the other, and in awe of its own celebrity.
