Review: "Cetology" Travels the Waves of One Woman's Psyche

Cetology

Written and performed by Nelia Miller

Directed by Michele Stine

Presented at UNDER St. Marks

94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC

Saturday, Feb. 22 at 5:30pm; Monday, Feb. 24 at 5:30pm; Thursday, Feb. 27 at 7:10pm; Monday, Mar. 2 at 5:30pm; Thursday, Mar. 5 at 8:50pm; Saturday, Mar. 7 at 10:30pm

Tickets available here

Nelia Miller. Image courtesy of Nelia Miller
When the audience enters the theater for Cetology, a solo show written and performed by Nelia Miller, drifts of discarded pages, many crumpled, already adorn the stage space. When Miller's unnamed protagonist enters barefoot in a paneled dress to the strains of gentle music, she is tranquilly paging through a journal or notebook, which, it transpires, contains the letters that she has written that day. She reads us each one, tears it out, and buries—or, in one case, seems to plant—it. As the reasons for this habit and the import of the epistolary burial site at the seashore come into focus, Miller explores the woman's loves, loss, desires, and frustrations through dialogue, movement, animation, and song.

The woman is both a wife whose husband is often absent and a mother whose son drifts without direction until he decides that he wants to follow his father. The seashore for her figures as a place both of departure and return, farewell and reunion. The title of the play, which refers to the study of whales, comes from a chapter of Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick, and both the famous white whale and a female opposite figure heavily in the symbology of the piece, as well as in the beguiling 2-D animation, projected onto a screen at the rear of the stage, that complements Miller's performance. At one point, having earlier live-looped some wordless singing, Miller adds a second set of loops to the first set of loops, layering hissing, angry sibilants over ethereal tones and making them one, as the two whales suggest the separate but singular sides of the woman, or any woman, and her relationship(s). The woman tells us that she loves the sea and she loves her husband, and she asserts that waiting is an active state and its own adventure. But what would it mean for her to act not as a new Penelope, to acknowledge her frustrations or to have them break through her placid, patient surface, to question what she thought that she wants or is waiting for?

Miller is a magnetic presence, powerfully and poetically evoking her protagonist's tenderness, her ardor, her sensuality, her melancholy, her fury. The show itself moves with the logic and rhythm of a poem, or perhaps the pulsations of seas internal and external. Catch the passionate and penetrating Cetology at the 2020 FRIGID Festival before it weighs anchor.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards  

 FRIGID 2020 Reviews on Thinking Theater NYC
Blockbuster Guy
Laser Comedy Show
Mother Leeds
And the Rope Still Tugging Her Feet
A Southern Fairytale

Other FRIGID 2020 listings on Thinking Theater NYC
The 500 List
Artaud Marat
Artisanal Intelligence
Beneath the Bikini
Cemetery Golf
Closed Circuit
Delirium
Finding Fellini
Jaxx & Lolo: A Friendship Story
Magnetic Dragons
Nancy Drewinsky and the Search for the Missing Letter
A Southern Fairytale
The Stands
Story Time with Joey Rinaldi
This Feeling

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Immersive "American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams" Takes Audiences on a Marvelously Crafted Journey

Image
American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Jim Niesen Presented by the Irondale Ensemble Project at The Space at Irondale 85 South Oxford St., Brooklyn, NYC October 27-November 26, 2023 Shadenia Savid in Moony's Kids Don't Cry . Photo by Natasha Rotondaro In 1948, Tennessee Williams published American Blues , a collection of five one-act plays, and a remarkable new production of this collection by Brooklyn's Irondale shows that these works have lost none of their power to both entertain and challenge audiences in the intervening three-quarters of a century. Comprising plays written in the decade between 1936 and 1946 - Moony's Kids Don't Cry (1936); The Dark Room (1939); The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941); The Long Stay Cut Short, or, the Unsatisfactory Supper (1946); and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1946) - American Blues represents the second part of Irondale's American Century, the first install
Read more

Review: From Child Pose to Stand(ing) Up: "Yoga with Jillian" and "Penguin in Your Ear" at the Women in Theatre Festival

Image
Yoga with Jillian Written by Lia Romeo Directed by Andrew W. Smith Presented by Project Y Theatre and Richard Jordan Productions in association with The Pleasance June 2-17, 2023 Penguin in Your Ear Written and performed by Eliza Bent Directed by Jess Barbagallo June 10, 2023 Part of the Women in Theatre Festival , presented by Project Y Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres Michole Biancosino. Photo courtesy of Project Y Theatre This June, Project Y Theatre Company presents the eighth annual installment of its Women in Theatre Festival (WIT), which showcases new work by women and maintains "more than 50% female representation of all artists involved." This year, the festival includes a lobby installation project, titled In the Betweens , from scenic designer Chen-Wei Liao, through which audience members pass on their way into the theater proper. One first chooses first between "light" and "dark" rooms and then moves into "the gardens" before re
Read more

Review: Nancy Redman’s "A Séance with Mom" Conjures Mother-Daughter Hilarity and Love

Image
A Séance with Mom Written by Nancy Redman Directed by Austin Pendleton Presented at Chain Studio Theatre 312 W. 36th St., Manhattan, NYC April 20-23, 2023 [Update 5/1/23: shows added May 24-June 4, 2023 (no performance May 29)] Nancy Redman Nancy Redman appears onstage, a simple table in front of her, a walker off to the side. Within seconds, we are immersed in a séance involving two then three then four characters—all emerging from only Redman. Redman plays Nadine, a woman who has something urgent to address with her dead mother, Gussy. Redman manages multi-faceted character work, each character in conversation with the other, complete with different gestures, accents, and mannerisms. The effect is riveting and, ultimately, deeply cathartic. The heart of the show comprises Nadine’s mission to reach her mother through a séance in order to talk. An unwitting rabbi plays the bumbling gatekeeper to the spirits in the séance, while Nadine’s something—actually several somethings—to tell her
Read more