An extremely ambitious new drama heightened by live jazz performances, (A)loft Modulation is a fictional story drawn from fascinating real life circumstances.
According to press materials and program notes for the play that premiered on Thursday at the A.R.T./New York Theatres, (A)loft Modulation intertwines the lives of three men.
One of them—named Myth Williams in the play—was a celebrated photojournalist who moved into a seedy loft apartment located near the corner of 28th Street and Sixth Avenue in New York City during the late 1950s. He soon grew friendly with a neighbor—named Way Tonniver here—a teacher of composition and theory at the Juilliard School of Music.
Eventually their adjoining apartments became a late night lair for musical greats such as Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk as well as artists such as Salvador Dali. The Myth Williams character documented these jam sessions in some 40,000 images and also surreptitiously wired the building to record 4,500 hours of audio tape during the years 1957-1964.
At some point after the award-winning photojournalist’s death, a writer—named Steve Samuels in the play—discovered the photos and tapes and preserved them for posterity in a book, a radio series, and a traveling exhibit known as The Jazz Loft Project.
Such is the essential history that has inspired Jaymes Jorsling to write his fictional (A)loft Modulation.
Let’s hope spectators will read the program notes before the show begins, because the story’s chronology is not linear. As the Steve Samuels character plays the reel-to-reel tapes in 2019, various episodes from the 1957-1964 period irregularly unfold.
In the now-and-then frame that the playwright presents, Samuels is depicted as an obsessive soul who somehow has holed himself up in the loft—miraculously untouched for decades although the building is said to be on the verge of demolition—where he has stumbled upon the audio tapes. He is feverishly listening to them with the vague ambition of making a book or something out of them. His long-suffering wife is not at all pleased.
And so the yesteryears sporadically unspool along with the tapes. Jorsling conjures up for his drama a louche world involving hookers, junkies, and musicians hanging around the ratty premises even as Way Tonniver and his jazzy cohorts throw midnight jam sessions and Myth Williams incessantly takes photos and rants about creating art within a miserable world. There also are plenty of extended conversations among everybody regarding music, sex, drugs, posterity, and other profound topics.
An extremely talky and diffuse two-act play that goes on for well over two hours and 30 minutes, (A)loft Modulation is more or less an elaborate study in compulsive behavior. The playwright shows some gift for colorful gab, but the arbitrary nature of his situations and characters becomes hard to swallow even as the inconclusive drama slowly chokes on its own gassy verbosity.
Christopher McElroen, the artistic director of the american vicarious (which styles itself in lower case letters), the company that produces (A)loft Modulation, stages the play with an uneven nine-actor ensemble. Several among them bring a semblance of verisimilitude to the action and its people. Charles Hudson III and Elisha Lawson are vivid as garrulous jazz men while Eric T. Miller lends Way Tonniver a certain low-keyed elegance. The central role of Myth Williams is challenging to enact—this scruffy photojournalist is alternately eloquent or loony—but PJ Sosko depicts him at all times with a convincing intensity.
Making strategic use of designer Troy Hourie’s artfully squalid tri-level setting and Becky Heisler McCarthy’s bluesy lighting, McElroen supports the story considerably by cultivating a raffish late night party atmosphere. Meanwhile, musicians Jonathan Beshay (saxophone), Kayvon Gordon (drums), and Adam Olszewski (bass) join Miller (piano) to storm up all sorts of pleasing jazz.
