#dumbshow

It’s about a girl that moves in with all guys and wHaDdYa KnOw, OnE oF ThEm FaLlS fOr HeR and UH OH! They’re both awkward! So neither of them are going to make a first move so she puts him in the friendzone and he tries to get out of it but she continues to push him away

Miscellaneous short videos today.  1/3

2017 – Dumbshow (partial) – Pyrate Invasion – Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire

Recap of the day's events during Pyrate Invasion.  Please note that this Dumbshow is only partial, as it was shot on a cellphone with very little memory left.  It also skips twice, where the phone gave up.  Full versions below. Recorded by yours truly on Pyrate Invasion weekend (Sunday September 17th.)

Dumbshow’s beautiful staging of The Pearl, John Steinbeck’s version of the Mexican folk tale is presented as one of many stories that washes up on English beaches, alongside the other spoils that the beachcombing cast have collected: boxes, lamps, bottles with messages, rope, toys and – specifically – right-footed wellington boots. (The left boots end up in Norway, if you were wondering.)

Sam Gayton’s adaptation moves seamlessly in and out of prose and rhymed verse, English idiom and fragments of Steinbeck’s original text. Alongside a production which is peppered with original sound and music alongside cues from Merill and Styne (“Don’t Rain on My Parade” and Disney (“Under the Sea”), it feels as if not only the props, but the entire play has supposedly washed ashore – a hodge-podge of presentational storytelling techniques. The ‘diving’ section where protagonist Kino first finds the pearl is one of the most resourceful, fun and compelling uses of the beg-steal-and-borrow (or make-do-and-mend?) storytelling aesthetic that I have come across.

The adaptation is slightly held back by the structure of Steinbeck’s novella. He expanded from his 1945 short story around the same time as he co-adapted the screenplay for the Mexican film, which was released in 1947. The final act of the story is correspondingly filmic taking Kino, his common-law wife Juana, and their baby on a dangerous journey across the cliffs and into the caves high above the sea, chased by shadowy hunters, toward a brutal climax.

It’s deeply affecting, but it simultaneously takes the narrative pressure off the structural causes of Kino and the other pearl-divers’ subsistence – at the hands of colluding pearl-buyers, a conservative church and the mercenary evils of the local doctor – which are all so drily and compellingly related in the novella, and mockingly and grotesquely rendered in Dumbshow’s production.

For all this, the defiantly anti-capitalist presentation of a story about value, currency, beauty and greed does the work that the story somewhat gives up on – while the gritty shiny thing clasped in Kino’s grubby hands may be the ‘pearl of the world’ to any of the characters in the tale, to the storytellers and to the audience it is only a smooth pebble, like any on the beach, and all values, judgments and hopes heaped upon its surface are equally laughable and tragic.

Until 20th November 2014.