Water, Great Connector

by Rob Weinert-Kendt

Photo: Simon Kane

Theater is found not only in words and action but also in space—in the way humans move through it and occupy it, the way our physical environment brings us together and keeps us apart. As our contemporary lives have become more isolated and modular—awash in cheap, disposable conveniences and screens everywhere, delivering bits of information, connecting us less to each other than to the means of communication themselves—theater artists attuned to these changes have plenty of fresh material.

Britain’s Filter Theatre seems particularly alert to the way we live now. In shows like Faster and Silence, as well as in freewheeling adaptations of classics, the company has employed a pared-down, seam-showing aesthetic. As co-artistic director Ferdy Roberts describes it, “The idea is that the rehearsal room ends up onstage.”

That’s certainly true of the look and feel of Filter’s intimate but wide-ranging work Water, which debuted at London’s Lyric Hammersmith in 2007, was revived in 2011 at the Tricycle Theatre, and comes to the BAM Harvey from November 13 to 17. A transatlantic mystery with climate change as a thematic backdrop, Water has characters staring into laptops, moving hurriedly through desolate airports, speaking through disembodied microphones, or, if they’re feeling particularly forward, addressing us directly with a slide presentation on the molecular structure of H2O. The world around may be warming, but the world of Water feels distinctly chilly.

Ionesco's Rhinoceros—Ungulates in the House

Photo: Jean-Louis Fernandez

by Rob Weinert-Kendt

In 1938, the 29-year-old Romanian writer Eugène Ionesco had his last conversation with his father, a government lawyer with whom relations were already strained. As is often the case, their personal differences only sharpened their political disagreements. And given the cataclysmic conflict toward which Europe was headed by the late 1930s, disagreements about politics had real consequences.

“He believed in the State, no matter what it represented,” Ionesco later recalled of his father. “I did not like authority. I detested the State. In short, at the end of our meals together, we were at sword’s point with each other. At one time in the past he had called me a Bolshevik; this time he called me someone who sided with the Jews. I remember the last sentence I ever said to him: ‘It is better to be on the side of the Jews than to be a stupid idiot!’”