November 1, 2007
Now Playing by Leonard Jacobs (ljacobs@backstage.com)
The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side
A theatre company called the Amoralists... Something tells you the work will provoke. Derek Ahonen, an actor, playwright, and co-founder of the group, doesn't dissappoint. Inquire about the genesis of the company, formed in November 2006, and he launches a pointed fusillade against aesthetic laziness in contemporary New York Theatre: "We wanted a company using narrative again-really kind of raw characters and good dialogue. We've been disgusted by a lot of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway: souless, gutless work without heart; work overwrought with heavy-handed, pretentious symbolism."
Dive into the Amoralists' website (www.theamoralists.com) and you can sniff out the roots of Ahonen's stridency. It's the same rabble-rousing theatricality that fueled the Living Theatre, that made Sam Shepard's plays, especially the early ones, a theatre of brutality that electrified audiences. Ahonen serves as an executive producer; his partners-all colleagues from their training days at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts- are James Kautz (Artistic Director) and Matthew Pilieci (Executive Producer). The Amoralists' newest effort is Ahonen's The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side.
"It's a play about four people, like an extended sexual family, attempting to live some sort of happy utopian lifestyle together but really are holding onto life by threads--together," Ahonen explains. "What you're going to see are characters that have a kaleidoscope of colors. I find a lot of things Off- and Off-Off-Broadway representing an author's symbolism-cogs in some great intellectual and metaphorical bullshit experience that isn't very satisfying for an audience. I grew up on 1970's film, and the thing about it is you have characters that are good and bad, ugly and beautiful, and on a journey."
Acting with the company, he says, requires an affinity for a distinct (some might say risky) aesthetic. A note on the group's website states its actors are "physically and emotionally fearlesss" and "volatile." For what purpose? "If a beer bottle is thrown at an actor during an onstage moment," the text continues, "the actor will bust out a sewing kit and stitch up their wounds while continuing to attack the other actor with the dialogue," implying the desire to awaken actors and audience to gut reactions, to impulses, in the name of emotional and physical truth. "It's not that we're alone in wanting this," Ahonen says. "If you stroll anywhere downtown, I have a difficult time trying to find [theatre] that catches my interest as a person trying to learn something about myself, learning why wars are corrupt or why shit in the world doesn't work."
Ahonen says his first play, Venus, Sensation and the Pope, was "a gritty little love story with five characters, including a drug dealer trying to become a children's writer." Pied Pipers serves up an equal number of characters but approaches love as a collective undertaking, "a family that exists in a commune, running a fast food restaurant--the Pied Piper-- that allows them to live and eat for free. They're working on a barter system like many people are starting to do; they're walking away from the capitalistic system. They're hanging together not because it's utopia but because they believe everyone should love each other. It's all the flaws, all the logic of the hippie movement-- these people who have each other's back, who can't function without each other but collectively can get through their addictions and pursue their search for God." Telling, Ahonen says the Amoralists' founders live together-- the typical Gotham roomate story with an added dimension.
Because the group believes "it isn't important to know the actors; it's important to know the characters," Ahonen says there are no actor bios, but rather character bios. As for the increasingly accepted pre-show request that the audience silence their cell phones, Ahonen is predictably contrarian. "I'm so sick of plays where stage managers take me from the enviornment by reminding me to turn my cell phone off," he says. "What we mean by 'physically and emotionally fearless artists' are people that would welcome a cell phone going off, so you could yell at them. I don't want to push the boundaries of what's real and not real in a symbolic way but in a real way. The idea is to set up an environment and play with it."
And what if Actors' Equity has a problem with this theatre of brutality, this theatre of the in-the-moment yell? Do away with the union, Ahonen says: "They're a couch-and-doughnut operation. I think artists--whether actors, writers, or directors--have unique and individual talents that need not be grouped together with everyone else's unique and individual talent to be represented fairly. If someone wants to use me because they think it'll sell them a lot of tickets, the contract I draw up will make my demands. If they breach that contract, I will get a lawyer and sue them. If they don't want to use me for whatever reason, that's their constitutional right. In jobs that are similar--laying sod, delivering fish-- unions are useful. But for this work, I can manage it myself. I don't need union leaders telling me what I need to be happy." Perhaps put your cell phone on vibrate, however, just in case.
The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side runs Nov. 2-25 at the Gene Frankel Theatre, 24 Bond St., NYC.