Nature Theater of Oklahoma: a murder mystery

(© Anna Stocher/Burgtheater Wien)

If you like being wrong-footed for a whole three and a half hours, then be sure not to miss Episodes 3 & 4 this week of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s ten-part theatrical biography Life and Times. The lead character’s adolescent years are tackled via the conventions of the murder mystery genre.

The story so far: for its exuberant Life and Times formal experiment, the New York-based Nature Theater of Oklahoma (NTO) based itself on a literal transcription of over 16 hours of telephone conversations with Kristin Worrall, one of the group’s leaders. In that series of phone conversations Worrall recounted her own dead-ordinary life from A to Z. For each episode, NTO has dealt with that huge body of spoken words in a completely different way. They calculatedly play with genres and conventions in order to see what the clash will yield. If you haven’t seen parts 1 and 2 you will still have no problem picking up the story with Episodes 3 & 4. We rang Pavol Liska in Belgrade, where Episode 1 had just been staged. Pavol Liska: “It was good to go back to the beginning once again, as each episode feeds into the next. Episode 1 was pretty static, so for 2 the challenge became movement and dance. And because we were moving and singing so much in Episode 2, the challenge for Episodes 3 & 4 became stillness and speaking. We see what happens if we don’t move and sing at all and deal with theatre again.”

(© Anna Stocher/Burgtheater Wien)

Of course this choice is also in line with the content, the period in the main character’s life we have arrived at.
Pavol Liska: Definitely. We start dealing with individuality, with a person separating from the group and the small world she was a part of.
How does the reference to murder mysteries fit in?
Liska: We like to work with clichés and the expectations they raise. We take or even copy different recognisable elements from different genres, in order to allow the audience a door into a room that is not really there. You walk into a world that has nothing to do with the visual world that we show. There were already allusions to Alfred Hitchcock, Agatha Christie, and the staging of murders in the previous episodes. It is a leitmotiv that we now exploit further. A murder mystery is a quest: the world is broken and the characters try to put it together.
The text was originally a monologue, but it is now played by different characters representing different aspects of this one person.
Liska: We split up the monologue to make it look like a real play, but the dialogues are really dialogues in one’s head. In fact that is how a playwright writes a play in the first place: he divides the monologue in his head between different characters.
Does that result in anything you expected?
Liska: Hopefully not, because we try to work against expectations and keep open the option to lose colossally. The text is not exactly written by Shakespeare or Chekhov. It is a stupid phone call and there is no actual murder. The only thing that can make things work is the performers’ ability to create suspense out of non-suspenseful material. That makes suspense the most important element we try to borrow from the murder mystery-genre.

Life and Times - Episodes 3 & 4
28 & 29/9, 19.00; 30/9, 15.00, €12/16, EN, kaaitheater, square Sainctelettesquare 20, Brussel/Bruxelles, 02-201.59.59,
tickets@kaaitheater.be, www.kaaitheater.be