The Team

Created by Rachel Chavkin, Libby King, Jake Margolin, & Kristen Sieh

The Team, a Brooklyn, NY based company, known for their devised works, draws on American history and culture to develop their quirky, imaginative material which they tour widely. RoosevElvis, currently playing at the A.R.T.’s Oberon Theatre in Cambridge, brings together two American icons, the early twentieth-century President Theodore Roosevelt and the mid- twentieth-century rock and roll artist Elvis Presley. Today, Roosevelt is often thought of as an exaggerated version of the manly man, as he is presented in RoosevElvis and played by actress Kristen Sieh. She also gives the character an extremely funny outmoded aristocratic American accent. Libby King’s Elvis is a gentler soul who toughens up with karate and whose sexual orientation is vague. Each actress plays two roles.

The first scene, perhaps the most comic, has them perched on two high directors’ chairs, Roosevelt, wearing a long waxed mustache and sideburns, and Elvis in an oversized wig and sunglasses. Speaking with increasing rapidity, they discuss their backgrounds. “I never wrote any of my songs,” laments Elvis; “I wrote forty-five books,” brags Roosevelt. The conversation ultimately becomes so competitive that it resembles a game. Their rivalry continues throughout the play as both men try to flaunt their masculinity. Elvis kicks boxes karate style; Roosevelt punches images of buffalos. The fluidity of gender is an underlying theme. In an odd moment, Roosevelt turns into a convincing and graceful ballerina. …

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Photo  Manuel Harlan

The American Repertory Theatre is currently presenting George Orwell’s 1984. Newly adapted by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan, the British company is touring the US after a long and successful run in the UK. It has a lot going for it, particularly the reference to the book’s appendix, which does not appear in the original American edition.

Most people who read the book will remember newspeak, the language which was to replace oldspeak (Standard English). Newspeak would destroy the individual’s ability to think conceptually by limiting the number and complexity of words. Early American editions of Orwell’s book left the reader with the impression that the totalitarian government had won. And it seems that even in Great Britain, few people pay attention to the appendix, an explication of newspeak principles, which although it appears to be written long after 1984 is in oldspeak from which one may infer that the regime no longer exists. To dramatize the appendix, there is a short scene out of time with the rest of the play in which unknown characters – linguists, politicians, historians? – discuss its content.

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Danai Gurira’s The Convert, now playing at the Central Square Theatre in Cambridge, MA, gives the audience a picture of late 19^th century Zimbabwe when it was undergoing British colonization. The British usurpation of the country’s natural resources and the displacement of peoples led to civil war between the Shona and the Ndebele. Cultural changes took place, religious conversion not the least of these.

Although there are several plotlines, the most dominant is the story of Jekesai (Adobuere Ebiama), a young Shona woman whose uncle (Paul S. Benford Bruce) wants to marry her off to an elderly man with a great many wives. The bride price is of great concern to the uncle. Misogyny within the native culture is an underlying theme of the play as is classism.

Jekesai runs off, and is rescued by her Aunt Mai Tamba (Liana Asim), the trickster maid of Chilford, a would-be Catholic priest (Maurice Emmanuel Parent). To keep her job Mai Tamba pretends she is a believing Christian while hiding amulets in the house to appease her dead ancestors. Following her aunt’s advice, Jekesai asks Chilford to convert her. Chilford, a lay religious teacher, thrilled to find a willing convert who claims she wants to dedicate her life to Catholicism, takes her in to his home, after changing her name to Ester. He tutors the gifted Ester in English, reading, writing, and religion. Although he too is Shona, he acquired English as a child when he was taught by missionaries. Ester, enamored of her new religion, devotes time to converting other Shona people. Like her aunt, she is also a servant, and addresses the pompous Chilford as Master. She is now modestly attired like an English woman with a long dress and shoes rather than her Shona self where her breasts were almost uncovered and her feet bare. …

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