‘Attempts’ Tries Innovative Theater

Imagine a play. Any play. Now remove the following elements: plot, character, setting, context. What remains is “Attempts on Her Life,” the play by Martin Crimp that opens tonight and runs until November 21 in the Loeb Experimental Theater.

The play is a set of 17 multilingual, multimedia vignettes centered around a theatrical construct named “Anne,” the production’s closest approximation of a main character.

“The arc of the show is that you’re introduced to this person, Anne, and you’re not absolutely certain of who she is,” says director Matthew C. Stone ’11, who is also a Crimson arts comper. “As the play goes on it attaches many different attributes to her, and by the end of it you see this identity that you started out with that’s been completely dissolved.”

Thematically, the play presents a plethora of modern issues—genocide, pornography, consumerism—exploring the destabilizing effects of these elements on Anne who is portrayed by multiple actors in different settings.

“People have claimed that this isn’t even a play; it was written without characters, without setting, without any context for the scenes whatsoever. You can literally go through and make anything you want out of them,” Stone explains. “There are two traditional ways of looking at it. The first method is to look at each scene as a distinct world and focus on the discontinuity of each scene and how each one addresses different issues in the modern world,” Stone says. “The other method is to look at the continuity of the way it’s written and the fact that each scene focuses on writers or people from the media constructing narratives around Anne.” This production, according to Stone, will focus on the middle ground between the two traditional interpretations.

Ella G. Gibson ’13, who plays several of the myriad versions of Anne, agrees with Stone on the essential lack of a central character. “A lot of the scenes are not character-driven but are driven by imagery, so a lot of the focus is on the imagery that the text evokes as opposed to the relationships between the characters,” she says.

“The definition of Anne is expanded over the course of the play until she’s not just a person; she could also be a product, and the play references her multiplicity,” says actor Joe G. Hodgkin ’12, who plays several of the peripheral male characters.

In addition to an absent central character, his play is insistently plotless, focused instead on the fragments of Anne’s identity and the issues that destroyed it.

“I don’t think the play suffers at all from not having a plot, because there’s still a sense of continuity to it,” muses Stone. “Tonally, Crimp writes with such a strong voice that that alone could tie together the whole piece... so there is a sense of continuity and structure throughout the whole thing, and it remains engaging the whole way through...It’s not a play that is interested in story in a traditional sense, but it’s definitely a play that is interested in making you think.”

Multiple forms of media are incorporated into the play, as are nine different languages ranging from Spanish to Croatian to Slovenian. “Another sort of theme in this play is how we talk about the world and how we process information about the world and talk about these elements,” Stone says. “And what those elements of the world do very nicely is they help elucidate those themes by mimicking media and technology in society.”

The show’s set continues the innovative removal of traditional theatrical elements present throughout the production, striving to destabilize and jar the audience. “Attempts” makes ample use of the Experimental Theater, scattering the seats into groups that are diffused across the black box space.

“We started passing around ideas during the summer over email. Basically we just wanted something really different... I don’t think that anyone has used the space in that way—diagonally, asymmetrical, and no seat risers, which is kind of atypical for [Loeb Ex] shows,” says co-set designer Snoweria Zhang ’12, who is also a Crimson photographer.

All of these bizarre elements combine to form the profound “Attempts on Her Life,” which asks some of the most prevalent questions of the modern world in the most uncommon ways.

“The core question in this play is ‘How do you know who anyone else is anymore?—yourself included,’” Stone says in between runs of one of the play’s numerous multilingual vignettes. “I think it asks us to consider a world where terrorism, genocide, and abuse and all these things are sort of the norm and then ask ourselves how we can go on living in this world and why we don’t give these things more thought.”