Reviews

THE BIG WINDOW
John Peter in The Sunday Times:

[I]f festivals are about celebration, my prize goes to The Big Window (Theatre Workshop) by two Americans, Kate Browne and Linda Dowdell. This is an 80-minute musical that I would risk calling a mini-opera: astringent, elegant, bitter to bitter-sweet. Subject: love, fears, doubts, cautious optimism. Main influence: probably Sondheim, which is meant as a compliment. Style: elegant, free-wheeling, economical. Tone: acerbic, wistful, generous. As I say, festivals should be celebrations.

—September 4, 1994            

Alastair Macaulay in the Financial Times

Another fringe highlight is The Big Window, a 100-minute musical at Theatre Workshop performed by an Anglo-American cast of 10 and band of three. This is a delicate, sophisticated piece which deals with heartbreak and sexual confusion in an urban milieu.

The music, composed by Linda Dowdell, is an eclectic vein of high jazz. The words, by Kate Browne, have a fine talent for light irony. "You and I have known each other for a long, long time. We are, if I remember correctly, even married." And she and Dowdell have so collaborated that the words move into haunting Gertrude-Stein-type circles: "Perhaps she said perhaps." There is a wide panoply of rhythm, some deft choreography by Kraig Patterson, but the most exciting thing of all is that Dowdell show a very rare instinct for word-setting. In ensembles, in solos, in high-jumping vocal lines, she plants words with exceptional clarity and to great effect. While you applaud, you hope this is the embryo of some larger project.

—September 2, 1994            

The plays of Kate Browne have impressed me mightily. I suppose they could be called absurdist tragicomedy or something like that. But their sharply original tone—very darkly humorous, with dancing glints of lighter wit—seems to me sui generis.

Kate makes extroverted theatrical spectacles of dramatic ideas seemingly more fit for psychologically introverted chamber plays. The effect takes getting used to at first, then becomes steadily more exciting. It is an effect of explosive wildness whose elements—of language, especially—are actually jewel-like and lyrically precise. It makes for a stirring time in the theater that leaves a strange, sonorous resonance in memory.

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Kate Browne is one of the most original, inventive and fearless voices of her generation. Her work's high energy and limit-defying logic take theater to a higher level than most of her contemporaries can even glimpse. A female vision that is both comic and daring is rare indeed.

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I have no idea what Needles is trying to say. I am entertained, uncomfortable, confused. I seek motifs to follow deeper. I struggle to understand the sense of urgency, despair, disillusion. Needles, chalk drawings, money, and a memory. I want to know how it adds up. The shows does not grant me my wish. It doesn't want to.

The two Evils, played by Sarah Moore and Molly Powell, immediately set the stage as the audience enters the house: starring us in the eye, sneering and snarling, moving about in deliberate, distorted, sexually charged steps. They supply needles to Wilhelm. Five characters move in and out of the box-like set aggravating, irritating, grating each other in short bursts of interaction, erasing each other's creations, contradicting one another's thoughts. The action is set to the unpleasant beeps and bells and strings of composer Linda Dowdell. The scrupulous presentation of all these oddities makes for us a successful displacement of convention. We don't know what to assume.

Maybe the formless chaos and turmoil is an expression of heroin addiction. Needles agonizes over trying to remain outside the rules, while trapped within them. But in saying this, the play says nothing. I am doing the saying. And every conclusion I draw is an explication that may be totally wrong. Abstract work does not serve conclusions on platters with toothpicks, which is what is so uncomfortable about it. It forces me to find my own answers.

Form is inherent in a work of art, not imposed. As an artist, if I break away my own layers of insecurity, discussion, indecision, confusion, I approach a perfectly formed piece of art in my work. Or, I can being with an already-formed piece of art, and add layers to it, to affect confusion, or ambiguity. Form is inherently part of each of us, influenced by the society in which we live. The denial of form is an attempt to strip from ourselves pieces of the institutions and ideas which have created us. Likewise, heroin consumption may be an attempt to forget the distasteful presence of those institutions and ideas.

An iconoclastic piece like Needles attacks itself, its own form, in an attempt to destroy settled beliefs and institutions. The tearing down is exciting and chaotic, but little art thrives from it. The art of Needles is that it forces me to build from its wreckage something new-an idea, an article, a conversation. It forces me to insert myself in the piece; otherwise, I take away nothing. It echoes my place in the world. Of course, Needles risks saying nothing at all because most audiences are not willing to spend so much energy on a show. Needles doesn't care. For it, destruction is enough.

March 1999
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