City Pages: The Year in Theater -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 12/5/2001
Last Visited: 12/5/2001
Director Andrew Kim seems to be pursuing a muse that nobody has every heard of before: It's not Calliope, nor Terpsichore, nor Thalia, but some previously unheard-of sister that inspires puppetry, European corporal mime, and a diverse variety of Asian stagecraft.Theater Mu's production of Passage, directed by Kim from a script by Edward Bok Lee, told the story of a pregnant girl who returns to the city of her childhood, only to find it filled with people who have lost their memories.Within this fairy-tale structure (which the company billed as an "absurdly dark, quasi-Asian ritual"), Kim wove all his obsessions, and the resulting play contained the most unusual and compelling images seen in Twin Cities theater this year.The stage writhed with grotesque creatures--padded and distorted versions of humans.And the actors beneath all the padding similarly brought a gnarled sensibility to their roles.They screamed at one another, created little games onstage for their amusement, and died with great elegance, tearing through longs strips of white cloth with their bodies.
10. SMALL BARBIE!SMALL BARBIE!