Multimedia Resuscitation: The Builders Association's "Sontag:Reborn"

Writer/actress Moe Angelos has compared acting with The Builders Association to “performing next to a big electronic drag queen, all sparkly and fabulous, [where] you have to learn how to stand your ground.” In the latest production from the multi-media theater company, Sontag: Reborn, playing at the New York Theatre Workshopuntil June 30, the “electronic drag queen” happens to be Angelos herself.

Sontag: Reborn is a one-woman show with two featured characters, reconfigured from Sontag’s published personal journals by Angelos herself. Though both characters happen to be Susan Sontag, time’s divisive impact on personality here splits Sontag into two separate entities: one a projection of Angelos impersonating an older Sontag, the other of the middle-aged actress in the flesh, portraying an adolescent Sontag, her true age blurred by a scrim. The wizened, ripened Sontag hovers above her younger self in a filmed recording like a chain-smoking, skunk-haired deity, commenting both on the hopefulness and foolishness of her past self. As the play is taken verbatim from young Sontag’s journal entries, the words of the older iteration of the thinker represent the notes real-life Sontag would scribble in the margins of her old journals, treating her former self as a work of literature up for critique.

All of the play’s live action occurs behind a scrim, on which a frenetic, diaphanous landscape of memories is projected, like a poetic thought bubble hovering over the academic as she meticulously calculates her personality, her consumption of intellectual capital, and the people with whom she interacts in a painstaking portrait of self-invention.

The Builders Association has been unflinching about their aesthetic—a “seamless” and constant “incorporation of sound and media…in the landscape”—for the last 20 years. They consistently use a labyrinth of scrims and projectors to create a seemingly textured, constantly moving set with the use of film. Few other theater companies embrace film—theater’s century-long adversary—to such a heightened extent. And, unlike companies that typically implement “tech” elements in the final weeks of production, projection designer Austin Switser attended even the initial rehearsals of Sontag: Reborn. There, he captured footage of Angelos as the older Sontag so that she could portray the younger Sontag with her televised counterpart right next to her, as though in the presence of a living, breathing scene-partner.

Despite The Builders Association’s unflinching history of media-ornamented staging, the significance of their video content is reinvented with each production:

With Sontag: Reborn, the projections provide a litany of images racing by, acknowledging the excess of signifiers consumed by a mind that would go on to internalize them, process them, and regurgitate them as iconic writing. In On Photography, Sontag famously stated that “essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”  With this production, artistic director Marianne Weems expresses this claim by exhibiting Sontag as a phantasmal projection puzzling over the “reality” of her past as though it were so very foreign:

Angelos as both young and old Sontag in Sontag: Reborn

With House/Divided, a recontextualization of The Grapes of Wrath applying John Steinbeck’s tome to the recent housing crisis, The Builders Association gained the rights to transport a foreclosed house from Ohio to the BAM Harvey Theater and projected an amalgam of contemporary and depression-era emblems of economic strife onto it:

House/Divided

House/Divided

Their previous play, JET LAG, concerned the true story of a woman who, alongside her grandson, took 167 flights (never leaving airports) to escape her grandson’s pursuing father, and eventually died of jet lag.  For this piece, The Builders Association collaborated with the enigmatic architecture/design/performance firm Diller Scofodio + Renfro to build a set that would evoke the liminality of an airplane-and-airport-confined existence, creating a paradoxical sense of claustrophobia within our notion of the world’s openness through travel.

Moe Angelos (left) and Jess Barbagallo (right) in Jet Lag

In Continuous City, a “meditation on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation stretch us to the maximum as our ‘networked selves’ occupy multiple locations,” the company used rotating, mobile screens that could fit together like pieces of a Rubik’s Cube, then come undone, shattering the projected images.  One actor in the production, Rizwan Mirza, engaged in unrehearsed video chats with family members across the world in every performance.  Moe Angelos, also featured in this production, was sent to each of the touring production’s destinations a few days before the rest of the company: she would travel the city, and then blog about her experience in that specific location from onstage.  The series of blog posts written mid-performance is still available here.

Continuous City

Continuous City