Particularly in the Heartland
Lyn GardnerThursday August 10, 2006Guardian Unlimited
Dorothy has fallen from the sky; Bobby Kennedy has risen from the grave and is wandering around the garden and the kids are home alone on the Springer family homestead celebrating the fourth of July after mom and dad's disappearance, abducted by aliens or maybe Jesus.
In a festival which seems to be increasingly obsessed with the fragile state of the American psyche, the latest work from Theatre of the Emerging American Moment (The Team) is pure theatrical apple pie. "Are we good people?" is the question being asked as the Wizard of Oz collides with A Christmas Carol, bombs fall, eggs get smashed and there is the sound of distant explosions.
There's plenty going on here - perhaps even a little too much for British audiences who are unlikely to easily pick up all the references to American political history of the last 50 years. And the company certainly have no aversion to repeating themselves.
But for all its confusions this is an engaging and ambitious piece of work which belongs in the tradition of the American avant garde and companies such as the Wooster Group - the piece combines playfulness with a questing intellectual fervour as it melds the mythological and the fictional with the harsh realities of American neo-conservatism and finally, rather touchingly, puts its faith in the people.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,1841467,00.html
Dorothy has fallen from the sky; Bobby Kennedy has risen from the grave and is wandering around the garden and the kids are home alone on the Springer family homestead celebrating the fourth of July after mom and dad's disappearance, abducted by aliens or maybe Jesus.
In a festival which seems to be increasingly obsessed with the fragile state of the American psyche, the latest work from Theatre of the Emerging American Moment (The Team) is pure theatrical apple pie. "Are we good people?" is the question being asked as the Wizard of Oz collides with A Christmas Carol, bombs fall, eggs get smashed and there is the sound of distant explosions.
There's plenty going on here - perhaps even a little too much for British audiences who are unlikely to easily pick up all the references to American political history of the last 50 years. And the company certainly have no aversion to repeating themselves.
But for all its confusions this is an engaging and ambitious piece of work which belongs in the tradition of the American avant garde and companies such as the Wooster Group - the piece combines playfulness with a questing intellectual fervour as it melds the mythological and the fictional with the harsh realities of American neo-conservatism and finally, rather touchingly, puts its faith in the people.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,1841467,00.html
