When I walked into Alice's after hours, one side of the room had been lined with chairs where a long table normally sat, and the other side had been shifted so that it was as though the audience were peering into the window of a cafe, almost like Alice's. Upon arrival, the actors were already in place at their tables, checking phone messages, listening to music, sipping iced coffees and picking at scones and croissants. Some of them were practically in our laps!
Then the action began for the first installment of what is to be a series of environmental theatre pieces by David Alex Andrejko called Scherzo. It started, appropriately enough, with music which set the tone for a tightly choreographed evening of glances into the lives of seemingly unrelated people in a cafe.
At first the server, named Capacity (Melissa McNerney), seemed to be the only link between the customers, though her main interest seemed to be in a scruffy blue collar worker named Man (Adrien Saunders) who appears, at least inwardly, to reciprocate her interest. At the opposite table sat a young woman named Our (Jillian Mason) a compulsive eater waiting to hear back from a man she'd been seeing. And in the middle sat two friends, Maid (Molly Groome) and Create (Zac Walker), discussing rifts between friends, co-workers and lovers, without ever really listening to each other.
At many points during the action Andrejko has the characters talking simultaneously, as would happen in a real cafe, forcing the audience to catch glimpses of all the conversations, focus in on one, or else let the symphonic cacophony speak for itself.
Ellen Orenstein's direction, alongside Anna DeMers' choreography, help to guide the audience's eye where it needs to go, and also let us know when it's okay to just soak everything in. The connection of movement to dialogue to character to sound is impeccable. At moments the entire cafe will go into slow motion, focus on one or two character for just a moment, before rushing back into the noisy hustle and bustle of daily life. We get just enough to glimpse those moments of true human interaction before a cell phone buzzes or a car horn honks.
Groome and Walker, as the friends in the middle, seem completely in tune with each other, their rhythms both balancing and battling each other as they talk, but don't hear. Mason's ferocity is kept in check by extreme discipline, which shines through in her quieter moments. McNerney's honesty, through all the stylized choreography and staging, makes the absurdity of her character's actions come across as always sincere. In fact, all the actors live in a world of stylized motion and absurdity, which is tempered by emotional truth. The most down to earth of the bunch, without losing the style completely, is Saunders as the hard working Man.
The soundtrack to this ballet comes from Alex Winston's recently released EP album Choice Notes, with additional music by Kevin Becker. The score, designed meticulously by Chip Rodgers, is central to the piece. The term "scherzo" comes from music, a jaunty comical refrain to be played as a part of a more serious whole. Indeed, the term "scherzo" is directly translated as "joke."
Throughout the piece, each character has a chance to talk to each other character in the piece, and yet, through the text interruptions, the phone calls, the bathroom runs, the cigarette breaks, we get the impression that no one has actually communicated with another person onstage. The last few moments of the show left the audience watching the characters solitary, disconnected from each other, focused only on their own issues, plugged into their electronic devices. So, who's the joke on?
