Sunday, 27 September 1998. Review after a night @ the theater:


    Secret History of the Lower East Side

    Presented by En Garde Arts


    The Seward Park High School takes up what looks like an entire
    city block, like Macy's. We enter the building and come into a
    kind of open lobby area which leads into the auditorium, the
    entrance of which is flanked by proud wall-mounted plaques
    boasting of such famous graduates as Walter Matthau and Sammy
    Cahn. We buy our tickets and are given laminated badges in a
    specifc color (there are several groups, like color war in camp)
    that are attached to necklaces of matching gift-wrap ribbon and
    we sling them over our heads. I wonder where we will be sent,
    thinking of the immigrants to Ellis Island who had identifying
    numerals drawn on them in much the same vein as we wear these
    blue rectangles of plastic.


    We have some time to kill so we wander the hallways, which
    have lots of visual encouragement for the students in the form of
    head-shot quality portraits of recent graduates, their particular
    academic strengths written below. The interior architecture is
    undifferentiated. We could be almost anywhere in America.
    Wooden doors have large square panes of glass; we peek through
    and see a familiar picture--generic office chairs, institutional
    green on the walls. The only difference is that now there is a
    gigantic computer monitor monopolizing one of the desks, sitting
    on top of it like Plymouth Rock or The Blob. The doors all have
    stenciled words: The Assistant Principal's Office; a small
    confessional-booth size payphone closet-- For Teachers Only.


    At the end of the hallway is an elevator (!) which we ride up to the
    5th floor and are led into an open area and deposited to sit
    with other members of our color group. During the day this is
    where the cafeteria is set up. There are a few dispenser machines
    turned with their backs toward us like out-of-work voting booths.
    Are there usually lunchroom ladies wearing hairnets and white
    uniforms or does all the food now come out of machines? The
    tables and chairs are all pushed and piled at the other side of the
    room.


    Each color war group has a female guide, in black trousers and a
    cherry-red shirt and before we are taken up the stairs to the roof
    we are given a little background information about her personal
    life, and the specific twists of fate that led to involvement with
    En Garde Arts, the producer of tonight's spectacle. The tale of the
    guide of the blue group, a strikingly dimpled and curlylocked
    Lower-East-Side born Jewish NYU theatre arts student, was one
    of serendipitous anaphylactic shock, fortunately attended to by
    the director of En Garde Arts, Anne Hamburger. Details of a
    mostly motherless childhood, part of which was spent in an
    orphanage, were listened to attentively by the group of
    blue-badged people. For the skeptics among them it was the
    evening's first inkling that the veracity of the autobiographical
    presentation was to be taken with a large grain of kosher salt.


    Finally we are summoned to join all the other color groups and
    form one large herd that is led up another flight to the roof. The
    audience is mostly grown-ups, including a large white-haired
    contingent and I pondered the fate of those for whom climbing
    the up-the-down-staircase is not an easy task. Anyway, everyone
    makes it to the top.


    It is hard to identify exactly what kind of space we are in. During
    the day it is used as a gymnasium; there is a trio of netless
    basketball hoops in one section. It is vast. The floor plan is
    basically rectangular with offshoots at each end, forming a letter
    c, more or less. Open yet enclosed, with yellow brick walls going
    up to the ceiling and massive windows along one entire side
    through which are glittering and wondrous views of the entire east
    side of the city. But there IS no ceiling! Looking up through
    girders and metal netting, a nod to prison architecture, hamster
    cages and chicken coops world-wide, I realize that the sky is the
    roof and although it is dark I can still make out lots of small
    elonganted clouds slowly shifting by in Morse Code pattern over
    the deep blue. There is a grandness to this space and its powerful
    ready-made theatricality is tough competition for a piece of theater.


    The evening, and the space, is broken up into segments. There
    are three long monologues separated by several shorter vignettes,
    all inspired by the history of the Lower East Side. The color war
    groups are led around, according to color, to view the pieces; by
    the end of the evening each piece will have been seen once by
    each color group and will have been performed by each actor
    three times. The main works present a psychotic gravedigger, an
    immigrant Chinese woman and a speakeasy-era Jewish gangster.


    Our dimpled guide pushes aside an immense wooden scrim,
    revealing the gravedigger. The audience sits on wooden
    bleachers. There is a large puddle with old suitcases and junk
    strewn about; scrappy shoes and bits of clothing are tied to the
    metal grid that covers the enormous windows. There is a lot of
    screaming, a lot of scrambling up the wall, Gene Kelly style, to
    hang by the window bars. It is hard to tell if this is suspension of
    belief or of disbelief but whatever it is it goes on for much too
    long. Things seem to point to a welcome end but it is only a
    tease, rolling on again with the gravedigger darting about like a
    West Side Story Jet. I busied myself for a while with looking at
    the black caps covering his teeth, a theatrical effort to appear
    toothless.


    At last it's over and we are led to a small stage, a square platform
    upon which part of a brick wall, complete with arches, has been
    built to delineate the corner of a building. We watch a short
    episode from an early 20th century bar room, complete with
    brawl, and its mix of denizens. The costumes are perfect;
    newsboy caps and knickerbockers, laced-up boots. The actors are
    young and highly spirited. The problem, and this held true for
    almost the entire evening, lay not so much in the acting--although
    there was a lot of over-the-top emoting going on--but in the
    writing. I found myself doing a good deal of mental wandering.
    Luckily it was the perfect environment in which to do so.


    The second long monologue presented a Chinese immigrant
    woman. A facsimile of a school room was set up, with those high
    school all-one units comprising chair, apostrophe shaped
    arm-resting table flap and a slanted wire bin where books will
    reside until the next bell rings. (In fact, buzzers do go off to
    signal the end of each piece causing the audience to scurry on to
    their next stop; part high-school, part Pavlov dog.) Yellow,
    orange and red paper lanterns lie in a string along the floor like
    floating swimming pool lane dividers. The stage is surrounded on
    three sides by basketball hoops. A photocopied flyer is plastered
    in rows filling up an entire wall; the smiling face of a little
    Chinese girl and the sober composite police sketch of a generic
    Bad Man are paired improbably in a repeated pattern making
    disturbing wallpaper. The two faces are also on the other walls
    singularly, as enlargements, almost campaign-poster style. This
    was the only monologue not written by the En Garde Arts team,
    but rather by the performer herself, Alice Tuan, a woman of
    enormous and awesome talent. She gave a not quite narrative
    cut-and-paste collage-like performance where she seemed to be
    possessed by a variety of different characters all woven together
    to convey a layered amalgam of personal and collective
    immigrant history. She switched rapidly between characters using
    distinct and impeccably performed accents. Many associations
    were made: English lessons, patriotism, citizenship, Mao, the
    subjugation of women, chicken feet, Emma Goldman (although
    this may just have been MY imagination). A canopied
    food-vendor cart was a moving prop. The desks were used as
    stepping stones. A naked basketball hoop was magically
    transformed into a stage. Beautifully written and poetically
    performed with admirable physical stamina, this half hour was a
    flawless example of transcendent theater. The entire production
    could have been limited to Alice Twan's monologue alone. She
    does, in fact, present solo performances.


    At this time, an hour and change into the evening, the
    temperature began to drop; from this moment until the end of the
    production remaining on the roof became a personal challenge.
    The next short vignette was more or less about media sensation in
    the form of a young Chinese woman combined with confessional
    TV talking heads.


    The last vignette was a blur. Our guide had made an earlier
    promise of something called 'Yiddish theater' but what we saw
    was a bunch of actors all talking at the same time in a Babel of
    fake language. Our guide took to the stage, literally getting into
    the act, wailing and prostrating in a catharsis of her personal
    history. I put another sweatshirt on over the first one.


    The third long monologue portrayed the Jewish gangster. There
    was talk of Lansky's Lounge, tenement life and the bittersweet
    love of an Irish girl with red pubic hair and rosary beads. We
    were sitting on upturned white plastic buckets. They had warning
    labels showing a waving baby tipping precariously, a 'no' line
    superimposed over the figure. By this time I was shivering. The
    grown-up people with white hair had their hoods on. It was as if
    we were all waiting for the M2 bus in November. I looked up at
    the black sky and watched helicopters making their evening
    rounds, going from point A to point B, blinking like fireflies. I
    watched a light which turned out to be a star. I turned to the
    windows, with their regal picture of buildings lit in primary
    colors. I thought of all the people in all those buildings, and the
    lives I imagined them to be living. I thought of all the people who
    have ever lived in this city, and the tumult of the sum of them as
    if combined and I thought about the archeology of history and the
    ruthless forward motion of time.


    There seemed to be some stalling after the end of his
    performance. Our guide had a kind of 'serious talk' with a
    member of the crew. Fake? Real? Buying time to coordinate the
    entire group in order to bring them all together for the big finale?
    Who knows? At this moment we were promised 'a Gershwin
    song' and guided back into the main space, all the groups
    together. There was a brief moment of suspense as the entire cast,
    en masse, walked quickly towards the meekly standing audience.
    It seemed like the whole cast of characters was gathering for one
    tremendous curtain call or for that final musical number where
    everyone comes together singing happily. Then the crowd seemed
    more an angry mob daring the audience members to jump out of
    the way or be knocked down. They nimbly and innocently passed
    right through us and clambered onto the bleachers and we were
    treated not to the much-awaited Gershwin tune but to the
    dramatic spiritual bellowing of a little black girl with overalls and
    major lung power who moved slowly along the edge of the puddle
    while singing a Gospel dirge with simple and moving sincerity.


    The evening had come to a close. It was past 10:30. We took off
    our necklace badges and handed them in, received programs and
    rode the elevator down to the Lower East Side, each one of us
    back to our own life.