‘Wallflower’, A Reflection

posted by Anthony

Art forms involving live performers upon stage are presented with a layer of intimacy less readily perceivable elsewhere. Each performance, regardless of how well practiced or how long the show is billed to run, is the product of unique circumstance. Personal situations, mood transience, time of day, day of week indubitably hold sway over the actor, singer or dancer, no matter the polish. There is a sort of privilege in envisaging such a performance, one that although may be repeated, will never manifest itself in quite the same way again – a snapshot, as it were, of a subtle, shifting portrait. Weave into this interplay a narrative, and each moment on stage becomes freighted with certain significance. But there is enjoyment too. We engage as spectators not only because of art’s meaning but because of its power to entertain. It was mainly for this latter reason that I ventured with our Editor-in-Chief to screen a university theater production.

It may seem foreign to mash up the burgeoning spirit of 1950s American high school dance with the fantastic Shakespearean vision of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but San Francisco State University’s Wallflower does just that. The stage production, which portrays a colorful evening in the lives of estranged youth, is a collaborative project of the cast, designers and director Mark Jackson.

The production design is expertly executed. Simple – the side of a school building and a school yard exterior – but as it should be. The building face is textured and seamed with divots as to suggest the inlay of bricks, fitted with crossed windows and a gym door which gives way to the basketball court doubling as the dance floor. The stage is framed by grass while white streamers run atop the theater scaffolding. Clusters of lonely chairs are tucked up against the brick-face and a bowl of punch sits up-stage left upon a table.  As the performance opens, members of the cast approach a microphone at stage right to, in true wallflower fashion, nervously utter their welcome and point out the theater exits. Their costumes and make-up are wonderfully vintage. What begins as slow, awkwardly charming theater drifts into raucous energy and back again. For the most part, there is no dialogue at all, only an intense physicality of painful glances from student to student, lanky strides and dancing – some gawky and others packing real musical swing.

There are times when Wallflower feels endearing and sentimental, like when it images the glee of relinquishing an adolescent shyness. But the shedding of post-pubescent solitude is met with its fair share of discomfort and shock; boundary-pushing and aggression are reasonable phenomena. However, its depiction amidst the strange descent into A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though seemingly appropriate, feels a bit forced. Unraveling with a round of spiked, neon punch, there grows a confused sexual tension that explodes in a charged strip-down between girl and boy. Of course, this only after two characters wax eloquent Shakespeare; the interjection of such poetic English seems out of place with the production’s characteristic dismissal of dialogue. But perhaps this is the point. At close, the story ends as Shakespeare’s work does – the wondering of, ‘might this all have been a dream?’ This is a spiraling into that uncertain madness, complete with a transformed donkey’s head. The psychedelic meanderings, abrupt pacing and an unflattering interlude on women (behaving like dogs) leave a funny taste and a little something to be desired. Even so, the cast and crew demonstrate marked talent, and it’s enlightening to witness a production of this kind. Its meaning just feels a little hidden and the entertainment loses its footing to sheer bewilderment.