Indecently Immersive
Indecently Immersive: An Analysis of Cohesive Directing Techniques in Broadway’s Indecent, Directed by Rebecca Taichmann
“How do we as artists question our sins in front of a greater audience?” Who are we to judge or be judged? As we are all flawed and complex human beings floating through dust on the edge of abyss, how do we show meaning out of chance and anarchy? Rebecca Taichmann gives a masterclass in staging and intent, and exhibits a breathtaking cohesiveness through her interpretation of Paula Vogel’s Indecent. Taichmann’s directing techniques illustrate the complexity of the human spirit in response to the fires of a vengeful and indifferent God.
In reading the play’s forward, we learn that their collaboration was more than cohesive, it was more like a coloring book- where Vogel gave all of the linework and Taichmann gave the illustration color and hue and shading. “She staged my intention with more life than I could ever dictate through stage directions alone.” Something I particularly thought interesting was the idea of the shaking of the dust at the start of the play, with the rain washing all of the dust away at the end. It’s mentioned in the forward that it was Taichmann’s idea to use dust as a staging technique to demonstrate a dead troupe rising from the ashes, and I particularly loved the broadway staging’s dancing in the dust. We are made from dust and ashes (brilliantly said in Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1912). Dust is no one thing- it’s constantly shifting, it’s never the same, and it’s made up of so many different elements and particulates. And growing up Catholic I was always told that ‘to dust we shall return’. As a Jewish person, I’m sure that this particular usage of dust carries even more meaning, especially when we get to the play and find the troupe in an attic, with the text declaring that the troupe has returned to ashes (Ashes to Ashes: The Troupe Returns to Dust), and an older Asch declaring solemnly that “six million have left the theater.” There’s no rhyme or reason to dust. We can’t predict which way the wind will blow. But it’s beautiful and poetic in the way that Taichmann has imagined rising from the dust as a dance of joyous defiance and will to live, a demonstration of the human spirit to carry on and dance despite being made up of the ashes of six million people.
Every single one of the six actors (excluding Lemml, because he is more of a stage manager than anything- he is the through line that holds the entire play together like glue) knew EXACTLY their part in this extended dance throughout the play, and their slight variations were made even more seamless because everyone’s parts were so clear. I think that it was ingenious to use only six actors- two ingenues, two ‘middles’, and two elders. We know where each actor is at in their stage of life and how that relates to the character they are playing in each scene, which is a practice that I believe traces all the way back to commedia and stock characters. The troupe makes sense in every scene because Taichmann takes the extra steps in the coloring book to help the audience understand what it already knows- the stereotypes of the young writers, the young lovers, the grumpy old men, matronly old women, and stuck middle men.
Watching this play roughly three times made me wish that I knew more about Jewish tradition, dance, and music, so that I could gain a deeper understanding of the haunting beauty that is inherently laid in the minor chords most Jewish music is made up of, or the joyous rage in Jewish dance. That translation as a non-Jewish person was often lost upon me, and I wish that I knew more, even though it would be a crime to stop and explain the meaning of every note and line and lyric. A lot of this play relies heavily on the theme of translation- translation of theme/meaning, losing translation of self, translation of the horrors of humankind to those who will never be able to fully comprehend the enormity of death, etc. Taichmann’s emotional translations, however, are seamless. Although it is indicated in the text of the play that any time a character speaks in their native tongue, they speak in perfect English, and that when they speak anything but, they speak with an accent, Taichmann’s direction of the actors speaking abilities is so flawless that there isn’t a missed beat or moment of language in the entire play. Nothing is lost in translation to the audience. I compared it in class to watching/reading/comprehending Shakespeare’s works, and how reading his plays are almost like reading another language, making them disliked and hard to understand to those who fail to fully comprehend them. It takes a good actor and an even better director to make an audience understand every word and intention of Shakespeare, and if Taichmann ever directs a Shakespeare production you can bet I’ll want to be in that audience. Her work in Indecent sang to the horror and beauty we as humans face in the eyes of god and ourselves. I understood every note. I cried all three times I watched the rain scene at the close of the play.
Therefore, the color that Rebecca Taichmann brings to the linework of Paula Vogel’s Indecent conjures beauty and intense emotion using dance, music, translation, and staging. Her ‘color’ as a director shows the clarity of reality translated from a raw block of human existence in the face of its maker, and breathtakingly illustrates its complexity.
Oh, What a Lovely 1917
1917, directed by Sam Mendez, starring Dean Charles-Chapman and George McKay, is in my list of my favorite films of all time. And for good reason! I remember when I saw it for the first time in 2019. It was my sophomore year of college, and it was back when I lived in New York City. It was cool and rainy that evening, but I made a habit of going to the AMC to take advantage of their $5 ticket deal every Tuesday so that I could experience the cinema. I loved going to the theater by myself. I was especially excited that evening simply because I could not wait to see 1917. I knew going in that it was a World War I film, and earlier that year I had performed in a mainstage show at Marymount called Oh, What a Lovely War!- if it weren’t for what I learned about the first world war in that show I don’t think I would have the understanding and appreciation for the detail and care that went into the making of 1917 as the horrific historical masterpiece that it is.
1917’s story is relatively simple. Two brave companions, Lance Corporals Blake (Charles-Chapman) and Schofield (Mckay) partake on an almost impossible quest, with 1,600+ souls doomed to a horrible grisly fate if they fail. One of those souls is the brother of Blake, which is why Blake’s been selected in the first place. Oh, and did I mention it’s World War 1- one of the most brutal and unforgiving wars that this world has ever seen? Trench warfare, modern gunnery, literal hell on Earth?
I decided to do this re-watching of 1917 paired with a watch of the 1960’s film of Oh, What a Lovely War! to get a bird’s eye view of the horrors of World War One from varying perspectives. 1917 has a very literal take- the film is shot in an almost continuous manner, grounded in the reality of the situation. Lovely War is exactly the opposite- its take on the war is more conceptual than anything, that the ‘war game’ is for clowns. Both are two sides of the same coin- World War I was a war fought by children, and resulted in the endless destruction of millions upon millions of lives for, well, nothing. It was a war wrought with blunders, and the massacres resulting from those blunders left scars on the landscape of Europe that are still visible today.
“Brother Bertie went away
To do his bit the other day
With a smile on his lips
and his Lieutenant's pips
upon his shoulder bright and gay
As the train moved out he said,
'Remember me to all the birds.'
And he wagg'd his paw
and went away to war
Shouting out these pathetic words:
Goodbye-ee, goodbye-ee,
Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee,
Tho' it's hard to part I know,
I'll be tickled to death to go.
Don't cry-ee, dont sigh-ee,
there's a silver lining in the sky-ee,
Bonsoir, old thing, cheer-i-o, chin, chin,
Nap-poo, toodle-oo, Goodbye-ee.”
Schofield and Blake make their way down the trenches to meet General Erinmore (Colin Firth) and receive the orders to call off the next morning’s attack at the front, led by Colonel Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch). They are to cross No Man’s Land. The significance of the fear in their eyes as they cross out of the trenches is very well placed. No Man’s Land was hell- bodies decaying everywhere, unable to be given proper burial. Half decayed men and horses. Flies. barbed wire that if you fell into, you’d get tangled, strangled, or pierced to death. You’d find men hanging on it, having gotten stuck and died. Mendez and his team don’t shy away from putting these grisly practical effects in, and it really illustrates to an unknowing audience- “Oh. This isn’t some war film where the heroes survive and we win the war and there aren’t any bodies or ptsd or myopic fantasies about battles. This is real, this is serious.” Slip into the wrong puddle and you’d lose your entire leg to trench foot and decay. (Sometimes the puttees that the soldiers wore literally held the decaying flesh of their legs together. Isn’t that awful?)
“If you want the old battalion, we know where they are,
They're hanging on the old barbed wire,
We've seen them, we've seen them,
Hanging on the old barbed wire,
We've seen them, we've seen them,
Hanging on the old barbed wire.”
And, what makes the expanse of bodies worse, is that most of them were indeed children. You had to be 18 to sign up, but that didn’t stop a lot of 14/15 year olds from lying to have a crack at defending their country. It was not a kind war. No armor, no glory, or bulletproof vests. We see the reality of machine warfare on the unprepared- after crossing through booby-trapped German trenches (which were a lot better constructed than the British ones tbh) all it takes is one stray bullet to catch and kill Blake. “Write to my mum for me.”
Schofield’s response was incredibly accurate as well. He had a job to do, and needed to see that job done. He states, “It doesn’t do to dwell on it.” which is how most men responded to the horrors they’d seen. What else could he do but keep moving forward? When the war ended, most men refused to talk about it. It simply wasn’t discussed.
“And when they ask us, how dangerous it was,
Oh, we'll never tell them, no, we'll never tell them:
We spent our pay in some cafe,
And fought wild women night and day,
'Twas the cushiest job we ever had.”
The war did sneak itself into a few major literary works that you may recognize. If you’ve ever read J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings you’d know that he himself fought at the Somme. Frodo Baggins perfectly exemplifies the way the soldiers came back from that war- not a soul back in Hobbiton knew what Frodo had done. Not a single one cared that he carried the root of a great evil across the world and cast it into the fire. No one thought any more of him even after everything he suffered and went through. No one paid him any kind words about the friends he had lost along the way. Frodo never completely healed from his journey to Mordor, and neither did the soldiers. Frodo would forever carry the pain of the Morgul blade that he took at Weathertop till the day he would die. No one leaves a war whole and well.
“I want to go home, I want to go home,
I don't want to go in the trenches no more,
Where whizzbangs and shrapnel they whistle and roar.
Take me over the sea, where the alleyman can't get at me;
Oh my, I don't want to die, I want to go home.”
Schofield is knocked unconscious, and when he awakes he makes a run for it through enemy territory, with only flames and flares to light his way. The cinematography in that scene is INSANE. Schofield jumps into the river and nearly drowns, but is able to hang onto some bloated bodies floating in the water. Bodies all wearing different uniforms, but dead nonetheless. No time to clean up the dead! No time to mourn or cry! It’s the morning of the attack, and now the audience is counting down the minutes to Mackenzie’s attack on the front. The tension builds during the ballad “I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger”- the camera focuses on each child’s face, and the audience is filled with the grim prospect that these boys will all soon be dead. If not in this pointless battle, then the next.
Schofield narrowly gets the message to Colonel Mackenzie after the first wave is sent over, and tells Blake’s brother (Richard Madden) the news of Blake’s passing. Blake passes out at the foot of a tree. “Hope is a dangerous thing.” I feel like the true tragedy of the film is leaving with the knowledge that this was just 48 hours. The war lasted for four years. Every single day was just like this one. It’s hard to imagine death on that scale, and I think that Sam Mendez does a stellar job at showing the horrors behind the history of 1917.
“One McDonald’s Fairy Meal Please” -The Pale Man
Pan’s Labyrinth
To be very incredibly honest, I was very excited to experience this movie for the first time. I genuinely enjoy fantasy films in any format I can and knew that I was going to be in for an experience unlike any other with this one. I knew beforehand that Doug Jones was in it, and that it was directed by Guillermo del Toro- so it HAD to be good. I’m also a big fan of the Jim Henson movie Labyrinth and the iterations of the labyrinth myth in the Percy Jackson books and in Greek mythology.
What I was NOT expecting about Pan’s Labyrinth was, well, any of it. Legend tells of a princess who lived in the underground, dreaming of the world above. She escaped, and forgot who she was, and eventually died. Her father grieved and vowed to wait until her soul returned to the Underground. The REAL story begins with a little girl named Ofelia (played by actress Ivana Baquero), wandering into the unknown after fixing a mysterious statue in the forest. She learns of a labyrinth next to the camp/mill that her and her pregnant mother travel to- a pile of rocks old as it gets, “there even before the mill”. A mysterious walking stick bug follows Ofelia, observing. I wasn’t expecting for Pan’s Labyrinth to be a World War II film, either. Or the brutally gory tone set when the Captain (Sergi Lopez) beats an innocent boy and father to death, shooting them to put them out of their misery. It was reminiscent of the hammer scene in Midsommar- I almost threw up my McDonald’s chicken nuggets right there.
From there, the mysterious walking stick bug transforms into a literal fairy, leading the young Ofelia into the labyrinth- down a set of stairs, where she crosses into the unknown. She is greeted by a satyr, a faun (Doug Jones), who names her as the lost princess. She must complete a quest before she is to return to the world she is from. She accepts. Her first task? Retrieve a key from a giant toad poisoning the roots of an ancient fig tree. Jesus christ almighty, the toad scene freaked me out. This movie has an understanding of practical effects that most CGI-bastardized films fail to grasp nowadays. You can’t really animate slime with CGI, so that mud and that goop and everything in that scene had to really be… well, slimy. I almost threw up my McDonald’s… again. Holy cabooses. But SO GOOD.
We learn that Mercedes, the housemaid (Maribel Verdu), is the rebels’ spy on the inside, and that she has been supplying them with information about the Captain’s plans. Ofelia returns to the labyrinth, having completed her task and retrieved the key from the stomach of the frog. The faun… seems untrustworthy. The next day, the book predicts blood, and blood does come- in the form of her mother. Her mother is bleeding all over the floor, from complications with the pregnancy. Did I mention Ofelia’s mother is deathly ill with the Captain’s baby? The faun visits Ofelia personally to give her a remedy to her mother’s sickness and make sure that she completes the second task. Mercedes visits the rebel base to bring news, medicine, and hope.
I’d like to take a moment to write a lot about the second task and the sheer production value that practical effects have that CGI simply can’t replicate. CGI produces a sort of ‘uncanny valley’ effect that makes the audience feel that something is off, a sense of unease, and that reality is not ‘real’. CGI can’t replicate the minor muscle movements that humans and animals have, due to their complexity. It struggles to capture the flow of hair and fabric- there’s a reason that the Muppets always have one moving flowing part to their design, so that they seem more alive! In fact, I think why puppets work so well over machines is that at their core, they are human operated and connected to a living breathing thing in a way that computers will never be able to. CGI, until now with Avatar: The Way of Water, has consistently struggled to animate anything with water- it’s why when you see real slime in The Thing (1982), it feels real, and gross, and icky; and when you see CGI slime in The Thing (2011), it just feels dry, rubbery and wrong. The second task has Doug Jones again, not as the faun but as as the Pale Man, a child-eating monster that lives within the labyrinth. And Ofelia isn’t in some green screen room, either- that’s a FULL SET, which is something we don’t see often nowadays. Because it’s all tangible, and real, and not uncanny, it’s TERRIFYING when Ofelia eats the grape and the Pale Man wakes up. Beyond scary. He ripped into those fairies like they were tasty little chicken nuggets… I think I threw up my McDonald’s for real that time. Doug Jones’ performance deserved every award it didn’t get. But you have to take that with a grain of salt, because I think Doug Jones is a fantastic actor.
As far as the rest of the plot goes, the rebels are discovered, Ofelia’s mandrake root and labyrinth are discovered, she is shot and refuses to spill the blood of an innocent for the third task, and plot twist! She's the ‘innocent’- it was a test. Ofelia rejoins her father and mother and takes her place as a ruler of the underworld.
Pan’s Labyrinth was an unexpected but wonderfully made movie, and I really enjoyed getting to experience it for the first time (even though my stomach did not). The design and practical effects were stunning and made the film a masterpiece. I think that this film was my favorite out of all of the movies that I watched this semester.
Chance and Anarchy: ‘No Country for Old Men’
If there was any lesson that No Country for Old Men taught me, it’s that patience is the key to suspense. This 2007 film, directed by the Coen brothers, runs roughly two hours long- which is on the longer side of the average of most film run times (statista.com). Most films tend to run somewhere between 90 and 120 minutes, with the longer movies I’ve seen running at 240 minutes. For the average film viewer used to solid 90-minute long Marvel superhero films, 240 or even 120 minutes can seem like a lifetime. However, with longer movies, patience is key, because the buildup and payoff of scenes and the overall arc of the plot are able to hit with an elegance that simply can’t be crammed into a 90-minute film. Which No Country does, and does well. No Country for Old Men is a masterclass in storytelling through environment, and proof that time is a key element in creating a good film.
The movie centers around Lleweyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a mostly ordinary man, who stumbles upon a drug deal gone very, very bad in the desert while hunting. In a bizarre stroke of fate, Moss finds $2 million at the massacre, and knows that if he can successfully hold onto that money he can have an entirely new life for him and his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald). However, the story doesn’t just belong to Moss- it also belongs to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) and the deadly hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) hired to find and kill Moss to recover the $2 million. When you throw in the wild card of Woody Harrelson’s Carlson Wells, and all the chess pieces are set on the board. From there it’s a game of cat and mouse- you roll your dice, move your mice, and hopefully nobody gets hurt… in a coin toss and/or killed by an air powered captive bolt pistol. (Speaking of which, how terrifying IS that! It’s like being killed via icicle or something that can’t be traced, and in rural Texas in the 1980’s? A NIGHTMARE. If I was killed by one of Chigurh’s air shots? With one pthwip nobody would ever hear from me ever again. Or find my killer. Tragic!)
I think that the opening line, from Sheriff Bell, quite well summises and sets up the film-
“I always knew you had to be willing
to die to even do this job -- not to
be glorious. But I don't want to
push my chips forward and go out and
meet something I don't understand.
You can say it's my job to fight it
but I don't know what it is anymore.
...More than that, I don't want to
know. A man would have to put his
soul at hazard.
...He would have to say, okay, I'll
be part of this world.”
I want to take a minute to deconstruct just how perfectly this opening line sets up the entirety of the film. One of the major themes of the film is that with the development of technology and as time passes humanity finds more and more ways to be, to put it bluntly, despicably cruel to itself. There’s only so much that someone can take of the horrors that man pits against his fellow man before someone says “this world isn’t for me anymore. I quit.” When it’s man versus the world, how much of the world can you take up on your shoulders? How do you come to meet something you know you will never understand? How do you survive in the wilds of the world when the world is so wild? That theme is brought up often, as the cops frequently demonstrate that they simply do not know how to handle or stop the violence created by hitman Anton Chigurh as he blows down everyone standing in the way of that $2 million.
It’s very interesting that in examining the script, most of the story is told WITHOUT dialogue. Time is on Moss’ side right up until he runs out and Chigurh catches him.
I found the script online using this link: https://imsdb.com/scripts/No-Country-for-Old-Men.html and it’s written as if time is the language of the film, and the characters all speak with their moments. Take, for example, the scene where Chigurh and Moss are in the same motel- both within inches of their goals, and tensions running about as high as they can get.
“CHIGURH
He walks over to the bathroom.
He turns on its light, looks.
He leaves the door open. He goes to a closet, opens it, looks.
He goes to the door of the room but doesn't open it. He stands
with his back against it and looks at the room.
The bathroom door.
The closet door.
Chigurh goes to the bed and sits to take off his boots.
MOSS
Moss snips the last of the wire hangers' hooks off with the
sidecutter. He wraps the three hooks with duct tape to make
a sturdier one.
He wraps more tape to attach this hook to the end of the
three-link pole.”
Additionally, I think it’s quite interesting and important that in the end, Chigurh should be the one that the audience knows survives. The world is prone to chance and anarchy, and Chigurh embodies that sentiment. We never know what horrors the world will throw at us next, and it’s almost poetic that he is so heavily injured by a random car crash after everything that has just happened.
However, Bell’s final line sums up again the themes of time, chance, and anarchy, and the struggle to understand the future:
“And in the dream I knew that he was goin'
on ahead and that he was fixin' to
make a fire somewhere out there in
all that dark and all that cold, and
I knew that whenever I got there he
would be there. Out there up ahead.”
The dark and cold represent death, but the knowledge that his father was out there somewhere, preparing a fire, is comforting. We never know what’s ahead, so all we have is who we are and where we’re from. No Country for Old Men is a masterclass in storytelling through environment, and proof that time is a key element in creating a good film.
Somewhere in the Sunken Place
Somewhere in the Sunken Place
Jordan Peele’s 2017 psychological horror film Get Out simply fucks with me more and more with each time I re-watch it. I’m not normally one to watch horror movies. At all. The only horror film I’ve ever seen in theaters was A24’s Midsommar, because I mistakenly thought that a horror movie in the daytime wouldn’t nearly be as bad as a regular horror movie (and my mistake was manifested in the entire bowl of popcorn I ate during the previews seeking to escape me during the entire duration of the film). There’s something about horror films that just makes me feel itchy and uncomfortable. However, Get Out is a film in which the uncomfortable is necessary, as discomfort is a point of departure into a conversation on post-racial America.
The plot follows Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a Black photographer, and his White girlfriend, Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), who travel upstate to meet Rose’s family for the first time. However, upon arrival, the Armitages are not quite what they seem. One could chalk their behavior up to White ignorance, resulting in their ineffectual and odd mannerisms while speaking to and acting around Chris, but everything in the Armitage’s house and grounds suggests an intent that is much more sinister. The Armitages make tactless and passively racist comments about Chris, and the household staff (all Black, and all on the Missing Persons list…) have an odd manner and tell Chris to “Get out”.
This rewatch, there were a few scenes that stood out to me in particular. One of those scenes that personally spoke to me was ‘the Sunken Place’. From the very moment that Missy (Catherine Keener), the matriarch of the Armitages, pulls Chris out of the darkened hallway into the lit room that she uses for hypnosis, everything in the world was slightly off. Not that the world wasn’t already wonky, but everything in the scene suggests to the audience that something terrible is about to happen. Toby Oliver’s incredible cinematography illustrates perfectly how to make everything seem slightly out of place- the stark contrasts of dark elements with light elements made me feel as if I was a child sneaking around, avoiding the light, and that the light itself was what was off. Or at least, everything felt off to me, but that’s because hypnosis kind of freaks me out.
I feel like Chris’s full spiral into his own head is something we can all relate to, in a sense; traumatic memories that aren’t remembered in the first person, in an almost dreamlike, dissociative manner feel reminiscent of a post traumatic stress disorder induced panic attack. I used to get dreams like that, and have a few memories in my head that I fully can’t remember in the first person, which is why I think that the Sunken Place stood out and resonated with me so much on this rewatch.
Another scene that stood out to me was when Chris discovered Rose’s- and by proxy, the Armitage family’s- intentions and pieced together that something was truly wrong upon finding Rose’s secret little room with photographs of every Black person the Armitages had ever killed. Chris realizes all too late that he is next in line, but it’s Rose’s unfeeling reaction that stuck with me. The minute she dropped all pretenses was when I truly felt scared. That’s probably all credit to Jordan Peele’s masterful direction. Her lack of empathy and remorse felt, to me, almost like the ‘uncanny valley’ effect, and was a terrifying reversion of humanity.
Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a masterclass in discomfort in a post-racial America, and through cinematography and masterful direction he commands the audience to see through the eyes of Black Americans (in more ways than one). This discomfort makes Get Out a film that inspires change in modern society and is necessary to understanding post-racial America isn’t at all a good place, but a sunken one. With one clink of a spoon on a teacup, on this rewatch, I woke up.