With playgoing on hiatus, the contributors to New York Stage Review have decided to provide our readers with alternate discussions of theater: think pieces, book/music/video reviews, and the like. We would much rather be reviewing live theater, and we look forward to the day when the curtain rises once again.
The livestreamed performance of Michael Urie’s tour de force in Jonathan Tolins’s Buyer & Cellar—presented on April 19, 2020, as a fundraiser for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS—opens with an expression of regret that due to today’s de rigeur social distancing “we” cannot be together in person, and one day soon we’ll again be able to enjoy the communal experience, and so forth.
Understandable. Yet no qualification or apologies were necessary, for not only was the medium absolutely ideal for this particular dramatic event, it made for much the most enjoyable and effective of the four times I’ve watched Urie play Alex More, part-time custodian of the faux mall in Barbra Streisand’s Malibu basement. In fact, Sunday night’s experience points to interesting ways in which online viewing and live performance can coexist creatively.
I don’t know whether the portion of Urie’s apartment chosen for the staging is something he hasn’t gotten around to decorating yet, or it was just ingeniously white-paneled for the occasion. Either way, it successfully suggests both the pristine environment a Streisand would feel comfortable in, and the bare necessities of a struggling actor in Los Feliz. Most interestingly, the main camera faces two walls coming to a vanishing point, where hangs the little bell announcing the arrival of Mr. or Mrs. Brolin. Urie’s upstage crosses to ring that chime give a continual sense of depth working against the usual sheerly horizontal, and when at one point he sinks to the floor way back there, it’s a beautifully expressive picture of personal and professional dejection.
Not that Urie/Alex spends much time up there. Much more common is his leaning forward into camera to share confidences or make sly jokes. As it happens, the treatment of the camera as confederate works in complete sync with Tolins’s material. After all, young More is telling us tales out of school, directly contrary to the terms of the nondisclosure agreement he signs with the megadiva when taking on this peculiar assignment. (He’s hired to be the costumed attendant of shops only one customer ever enters, if she enters.) He’s right to be careful whom he confides in; in fact, I would argue that it’s more appropriate—no pun intended—for Alex to confide his story to a single sympathetic yet silent listener, than to offer it to a large group. It takes nothing away from the communal experience of Buyer & Cellar to report that I have never felt so close to, friendly to, involved with Alex’s extraordinary yarn as on Sunday, when I felt it was being told to me, and only to me.
And you see, this is what Urie gets, down to the bone. A performance sent to a computer is an intimate act that’s qualitatively and quantitatively different from work framed for a theater screen or broadcast TV, where a certain expansive size is called for. The fact of the matter is that a laptop typically faces one user—just one—which means that the person facing the camera has to foster intimacy with that user. And does Urie ever. Relying on his “library voice,” toning down the flamboyant gestures without seeming limited, he effortlessly forges that 1:1 bond with the individual viewer. It’s a display of exemplary technique that begets waves of empathy, from which Tolins’s charming fable, about the ways in which we try to create our perfect world, wholly benefits.
Many factors contribute to this successful transposition, notably Nic Croy’s deft adaptation of Stephen Brackett’s original Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre staging, and Paul Wontorek’s livestreaming leadership—direct from his upstate New York home—in cutting dynamically between videographer Ryan Spahn’s two cameras. In the end, though, it’s the affinity between the tale being told, and the skill of the performer, that make it all sparkle.
It doesn’t hurt that Alex More’s world is one of technology—cellphone calls and WiFi and texting—making his interaction with a videocam a logical next step. (I can’t think that Julie Harris’s Emily Dickinson would find performing The Belle of Amherst to a Logitech device quite as congenial.) And to be sure, there are values to the live group audience experience of a play like this, values that are absent online and of which we are all desperately in need at this moment.
Still, I can’t help but think that an Anna Deavere Smith or Daniel Beaty or Eve Ensler or Mike Birbiglia—contemporary artists whose stories and personalities are at one with computers—should be able to build the sort of conscious, direct bond with the home user that Urie does. They have it in their power to bring about a new kind of performance experience, one that meets us more than halfway in seeking to transform us personally and intimately, one audience member at a time.
Buyer & Cellar was livestreamed on April 19, 2020, on broadway.com. The complete event is viewable through April 22 at 11:50 PM on broadway.com
