Scattered Thoughts on The Scene You Need

Last week, there was a well-written show by a local playwright that opened in the basement of the Brumder Mansion. This week there’s a well-written show by a local playwright that opens with the Alchemist Theatre. If all theatre in Milwaukee was like this, I’d be very, very happy. Honestly there's no reason why every show that opens in this town shouldn't be written by someone from this town. 

Charlie Sommers’ The Scene You Need rounds-out the Alchemist Theatre’s New York Stories trilogy with a show set in the 1970s in Manhattan. We see characters filter through subways from the CBGB to Studio 54. There’s also a VA office and Vietnam. There’s an alley way. The show jumps around a lot. There's a jagged dizziness about it that's not at all unpleasant. 

David Sapiro reprises his role as Eddie--a writer drifting around various fringes of Manhattan artist culture. Shannon Nettesheim returns as Rose. She’s a prostitute who we also find working at the VA. She’s got a history with Eddie that we saw in the first part of the trilogy. Nettesheim shows considerable strength in a return to Rose--a character caught in slow-motion somewhere between moments not entirely unlike Eddie. Sapiro has some strikingly vivid moments of his own--particularly in interacting with April Paul, who returns to play Izzy. She’s a punk girl in transition. Paul is kind of intoxicating here. She’s got a lively and intricate sense of humor with a firm grasp of subtlety that never loses track of her character’s underlying humanity. She’s a lot of fun. There should have been more of her here. Like anything that is as pleasantly varied and patchwork as The Scene You Need, it feels like there should have been a lot more of a lot of things. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. 

The play is a weird tapestry that plays out like a party for a gritty fringe on the edge of the ’70s. Like any party, we’re drifting around and never seem to have enough time with the people we really enjoy hanging out with. By the time we really take a liking to someone, they’re gone and we’re on to the next scene. I had that experience with Clarence Aumend’s character  Marco in the second act. He’s a club boy at Studio 54.The character is bombed out of his skull, but playing at some kind of Shakespearian brilliant fool kind of thing. At first it feels annoying and nauseating, but by the end of his scene I felt like I could have happily watched another hour with the character. It’s one of the best performances by Aumend I can ever remember. And there’s glitter. 

Niko King picks-up some memorable moments as an aging theatrical producer. Her characters is trying to reach straight into the heart of everything to pull out some kind of truth just like the rest of everyone here. There’s an endearingly worn and weary humanity about the performance that feel fairly fearless. 

Andres Garuz is a relatively new face. Here he’s playing a the stereotypical bearded Vietnam vet who is lost at home near the falling edge of the 20th century. It’s tragic that this archetype has become so common to the drama of the period that it’s difficult for any actor to make a genuine impression. Garuz has charisma and clarity that make a tragic stock character from history and bring it home once more. 

Individually, everything in this show works on some level. My big issue with The Scene You Need is the rhythm of the piece. It’s a scattered series of events that seem to be looking for the same kind of direction that the characters are seeking. There’s little to no momentum from one scene to the next. Emotions echo through moments that feel kind of cavernous. We’re watching the 20th century beginning to die here, but we’re not feeling the restlessness that connected the idealistic revolution of the ’60s to the dazzlingly slick lifelessness of the ’80s. Of course, trying to make a blanket statement like that is a gross oversimplification of pop cultural dynamics, but it would have been nice to have a stronger unifying voice between all the scenes. The overall narrative wouldn’t necessarily have to have made any specific statement about the decade, but it would have been nice to feel some kind of firmament to all those isolated scenes. 

Of course, imposing an overarching direction probably would have posed its own problems. There's no questioning that it would have compromised the crazy energy of the piece as we drift from one interaction to the next. In a way, it’s almost fun to just evaporate into the isolated moments with the rest of the characters as idle intellectual conversation resonates through the intimacy of the Alchemist Theatre. There’s some real poetry to Sommers’ script, particularly in the final monologue delivered by Eddie. Sapiro does a really good job of bringing it all together at the end in a remarkably sharp bit of text that Sommers should be proud of. It provides some of that focus that felt missing in places over the course of the show. It's a really smart distillation of what it means to be a part of any subculture community that's trying to reach into the heart of reality and unearth something real.

Alchemist Theatre’s The Scene You Need runs through Jul. 11. For more information, visit the Alchemist online.