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Vincenzia's Talking Machine

by Erica Blue
SF Examiner review by Joe Mader

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'Talking Machine' comes
close to speaking volumes

By Joe Mader
Special to The Examiner

Erica Blue's new one-woman show, "Vincenzia's Talking
Machine, or: The ClichÈ of Suffering" is the second production of
the Exit Theatre's new DISCOVER series, which artistic director
Christina Augello describes as "somewhere for plays to go in
between a staged reading and a major production." The series will
provide short-run opportunities for local playwrights to get their
work mounted.

"Vincenzia" attempts to be a mini-compendium of Italian
culture in its examination of the after-effects of an obsessive love
affair.

Using references to Boccaccio, Italo Calvino and Fellini, and
hardly any text, Blue and her director, Eponine Cuervo-Moll,
display immense ambition, and it's no slight to say their greatest
accomplishment is that the show never descends to camp.

Despite such using slightly stylized movements, anguished
cries and melodramatic gestures such as burning her lover's
letters and smearing the ashes over her face, you never titter at
Blue's Vincenzia. There are moments where the show lags, and
Blue can't quite bring the audience along during Vincenzia's howls
of despair, but what she does achieve is often remarkable.

Aided by the show's amazing technical design (Greogory
Lincoln Kloehn designed the set, Bart Grady the lighting, and
Andrew Voigt and Matthew Sperry the sound), you often get the
feel of the Italian movie classics. At its best, the show appears to
pay homage not to Fellini, but to Roberto Rossellini's great short
film of Anna Magnani in Cocteau's "The Human Voice," another
tale of a woman's despair as a love affair falls apart.

Blue is no Magnani or Cocteau, and she's not always
successful trying to portray the fractured states of grief, but there
are striking images and sequences throughout this one-hour
piece.

The show begins with a monologue. Vincenza appeals to her
lover who has come to end the relationship.

"Love and lust can be confused," she says in her Italian
accent, "but what a delicious confusion."

She's left a wreck. Having disgraced her family, her father
brusquely and brutally imprisons her in her bedroom, where she
alternately goes mad and then recovers from her grief.

She holds a wall clock in front of her face and attempts to turn
back time by moving the dial, and an echoey voice counts in
Italian over a repetitive refrain of clarinet, trombone and tuba. She
plays operatic recordings on scratchy 78s using a crank-handled
suitcase turntable. She extends her arm through the label hole in
an empty record sleeve, and it looks like the mysterious limbs
holding candles in Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast."
Hallucinatory voices whisper "Vincenzia" from the record player.

When she burns her lover's letters, she's a witch casting a
hopeless spell over her makeshift cauldron.

By the relation of a fable whereby a woman's severed hands
are restored to her, we're meant to understand that Vincenzia has
gone through her grief and is beginning to have the strength to
hold and contain her emotions. She bathes herself and cleans up
the room.

"The next time I fall in love," she announces, "I'll fall in love with
the sky." Her bedroom door opens, and the room is flooded with
light.

The stage features a rustic bookcase of crates at center, a
dirty, naked baby doll displayed on it. On the back wall are the
clock and a print of the crucifix. both hung askew. At stage left is
a spindly writing desk, and at stage right, a worn, concave
mattress covered by a homespun blanket. A tin wash basin with
two buckets is close by.

Grady's illuminations employ a footlight that throws distorting
shadows, and the whole set is bathed in a warm sepia glow.

Blue's story of healing after the crushing end of a love affair is
told almost entirely through movement and theatrical images. The
lyricism falters occasionally, and to make the play entirely
successful, she would need to find a moment to make her sorrow
completely naked, to bare her soul.

This may be asking the impossible. But that they've even got
us thinking of the unattainable is something of which Blue and
Cuervo-Moll can be proud.

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