Theatre in Review: See What I Wanna See (Out of the Box Theatricals)

	Ann Sanders. Photo: Thomas Brunot

See What I Wanna See lives so thoroughly in its head that it never lets the audience in. This ultra-high-concept musical by Michael John LaChiusa offers a pair of one-acts (each with a distinctly odd prologue) designed to function as a complex mediation on intelligence and perception, faith and unbelief. An intensively worked-out arrangement of mirroring ideas and connecting themes, it might be easier to diagram than review. A starry 2005 debut production at the Public Theater made a case for it as a bold, original, yet not entirely satisfying work. Ironically, Emilio Ramos' elegant, well-cast, and intimate staging casts a revealing light on the material's principal weakness: its fondness for provocative ideas that have little connection to lived reality.

LaChiusa is an original with an unmistakable style and his score for See What I Wanna See is marked by sinuous rhythms and melodies that move with the stealth of serpents. But each act rests on a shaky foundation, coming off as forbidding or false. The first, "R Shomon," updates the action of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon to Manhattan in the 1950s. A murder has been committed in Central Park; the deceased, known as Husband, is a tough guy, possibly mobbed up. What follows are the conflicting testimonies of those involved, including a thief, who may have acted out of lust for the victim's wife, and the wife, who may have been seeking vengeance after being raped. Or was the death a suicide, as per an intrusive medium, who seemingly channels the victim's voice from beyond the grave? (In a too-cute twist, the backdrop for these sordid doings is the premiere screening of a certain Japanese film that, I feel, I need not name.)

Seen at the Public, the volatile personalities of Marc Kudisch, Idina Menzel, and Mary Testa gave "R Shomon" a gripping, anything-can-happen quality. Here, one notices how uneasily the original narrative, set in the medieval era, rests when transposed to 1951 Manhattan. The characters are too one-note to be of much interest -- they're a collection of self-serving small-timers -- and their problems are hard to credit; surely each would try to wriggle out of an indictment rather than invent tortured reasons for their supposed guilt. This conflicting points-of-view device can be made to work dramatically -- Brien Friel did it brilliantly in Faith Healer -- but LaChiusa's songs yield few insights into his characters, making it easy to lose interest in the tricky, unresolvable plot.

Even dicier is the second act, "Gloryday," which wades into heavy theological waters and nearly drowns. The central character is a young priest who, overwhelmed by the sufferings of his flock following the events of 9/11, abandons his vocation. Embittered by the suffering surrounding him, he schemes to expose religion as a con job by staging a massive hoax, spreading the word that Christ will appear out of Central Park Lake. Soon, a parade of journalists, celebrities, and everyday folk are hanging around, waiting -- some furtively, others desperately -- for a miracle to appear.

Like "R Shomon," "Gloryday" is based on a short story by the noted Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, and he may very well treat this situation with more sophistication; LaChiusa's version is almost entirely unpersuasive. That a devout cleric might lose his faith is certainly possible, especially when faced with so much suffering; that he might transform into a mad monk bent on hoodwinking and breaking the hearts of millions is another thing altogether. The piece suffers from other contrivances, for example, the priest's beloved aunt, a staunch atheist who earned her anti-clerical ideas in Mussolini's Itay and who, dying of cancer, undergoes a dramatically convenient last-minute change of heart. "Gloryday," wants to grapple with some of the most troubling questions of belief but its characters are little more than two-dimensional attitudes, entirely subject to authorial whim. LaChiusa's lyrics are highly literate and well-rhymed, yet they do little to reveal any complexity of feeling. And are we really supposed to believe that hard-bitten New Yorkers, seeing a handful of notices posted on tree, would fall for this false Fatima, carrying on like extras in a Hollywood Bible epic?

Still, LaChiusa's music often haunts, and one's objections to the book are frequently ameliorated by the gifted cast. Kelvin Moon Loh has a nice edge of menace as the first act's murderee; in the second act, he does all that can be done with the cliched role of a mental case ex-businessman who roams the park dressed in rags, carrying a briefcase. (You can't have a religious drama without a holy fool, I guess.) Zachary Noah Piser nearly steals the first act as a cagey janitor with an ever-shifting story; he also very nearly makes sense of the priest in "Gloryday," a role that defeated the great Henry Stram the first time out. Ann Sanders is striking as a medium with an eye for publicity and as the aunt who wants nothing to do with God. Sam Simahk is effectively creepy as the thief and touching as a cynical news reporter with secret hopes for a divine event. Marina Kondo creates sharply differing characterizations as the designing wife in Act I and a strung-out starlet in Act II, but too much of her singing is unintelligible.

Indeed, German Martinez's otherwise clear sound design could get ticked down a level or two; the tiny space doesn't require so much amplification. Otherwise, the design news is mostly good, although Emmie Finckel's elegant set, depicting the underside of a Central Park bridge, is compromised by adding a tacky half-circle of color-changing LED tape. (This is an impulse many designers should resist.) Siena Zoe Allen's costumes are appropriate both in terms of characters and time frames. Kat C. Zhou's lighting subtly shifts moods and points of focus with invisible skill. Tom Lee designed the bunraku puppets used in the two prologues and shadow puppet effects for "Gloryday;" all are effective contributions to a show that is sort of Japanese and sort of not.

Those prologues, by the way, more than ever seem disconnected from the rest of the show, but that isn't the fault of anyone on this creative team. The more I see productions at Out of the Box Theatrics, the more I appreciate the company's knack for engaging fine actors and directors. But LaChiusa remains one of our most frustrating musical theatre makers, a writer/composer of obvious intelligence whose works often don't live up to their premises. See What I Wanna See is no exception: It never puts any flesh on its ideas. --David Barbour