After Phyllida Lloyd was done with Julius Caesar down the street and Fiona Shaw had gotten Eugene Onegin in shape across the river, they got together at BAM for their one-woman + dancer staging of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. As we saw in Julius Caesar, Lloyd likes to mess with audience perceptions.
So as the audience was entering the Harvey and getting settled, I was up in the wayback reading in the program book a profile of the late Richard B. Fisher, major arts donor whose name adorns two buildings – I’d met him once at a wedding reception at the Elks Lodge in Hoboken (no, really), but that’s another story – when a familiar voice next to me asked a bunch of college-age kids across the aisle if they wanted to come and sit down front. You wouldn't refuse a direct invitation from Fiona Shaw herself, so off they went.
But there was a price, they had to go up on stage and try on hats.
There were two hats, a tall, elegant, beaver one, for the Wedding Guest, and a beat-up felt one, for the Ancient Mariner, and that one came with a staff. Shaw would choose someone, put the Wedding Guest hat on them, then the Mariner hat, and she’d hand them the staff and position them in a stoop. She’d assess. After a few rounds with different audience members, she chose another, a lanky young man, to go through the same drill, indicated to the still-settling audience that this one had the right stuff, there was a ripple of applause, and suddenly the narrative began.
“It is an Ancient Mariner…”
He was a plant, of course, the dancer.
The stage was bare except for some crates stage right, a toy ship downstage, and a canvas sheet hanging at the back that looked like it had seen some heavy weather in its day. The state of the sail – raised, lowered, billowing or slack – along with shifts in lighting and Mel Mercier’s soundscaping (his was the indelible, Wozzeck-like noise crescendo in Medea a few years back), underscored the subtle changes and key events in the narrative.
The hats traded off between Shaw and the dancer, Daniel Hay-Gordon, as the narrative shifted between the Mariner’s tale and the Wedding Guest’s reactions. So Hay-Gordon got to dance both Mariner and Wedding Guest, albatross in flight or hanging, the crew dropping dead by ones or the dead reanimated, slimy things and undersea spirits, and pin-stepping, skeletal Death of the rictus grin. Kim Brandstrup’s choreography was an epic in itself, and held the stage well against Fiona Shaw’s fierce way with the language.
That language is 3D and tactile, so Shaw’s approach wasn’t a reading but an embodiment, lyrical and abrasive, dry-throated and terrorized. Beyond sailing the lines with their shifting tone and meter, she had her own amount of rope-hauling, zombie-fighting and self-crucifixion to do, and she had Wotan’s own skill with a staff – she slammed it on the stage and the bay split and the ship went down like lead, as indicated.
The denouement, if you recall, is the Mariner’s description of his compulsion to tell the story over, not just to anyone but to one he knows on sight to be the right one. The actor has the Mariner’s hat, the dancer the Wedding Guest’s, and he sits slumped on a crate, still listening. The sounds of the ending wedding encroach, and the Wedding Guest rises to go in but the Mariner turns him “from the bridegroom’s door”, so, sadder and wiser, he goes back to his seat in the audience. He picks up the coat he left there and leaves, slope-shouldered and slow, through the exit at the back, while the actor chooses another from the front row to try the hat and staff.
Between the actor and the dancer, the Mariner and the Wedding Guest, it was a full evening’s performance packed into a swift three quarters of an hour.
