Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Director David Levine’s “Venice Saved: A Seminar” at P.S. 122 is pretty much what it sounds like. Less a performance than an audience participatory, intellectual inquiry, the piece employs an unknown activist playwright (Simone Weil) and her obscure and unfinished work (“Venise Sauvée”) from the last century as a jumping off point into the subject of political theater and its relevance in today’s world. With both audience and actors collectively seated around tables Levine gently guides the discussion, beginning with a brief history of the iconoclastic Weil – born a hundred years ago and dying of tuberculosis at the age of 34 – whose longing to bridge the gap between art and the real world led her on a passionate quest for physical experience.

Levine, perhaps best known for a project called “Bauerntheater,” in which an actor playing a German farmer actually tilled a field ten hours a day for a month, is likewise interested in physical labor’s ability to connect spirit with substance (though unlike Weil his bio doesn’t include stints toiling in factories, self-starvation, nor fighting on the front line of a war). So it’s a bit odd that Levine has chosen to create his latest piece with minimal staging of scenes, and sans costumes and props (save for the complimentary swag bags each audience member receives). The seminar only “moves” dialogue-wise, with the actors deftly employing an improv style, as the sedentary audience gathers around to “workshop” Weil’s play. Levine’s fascination with artistic-process-as-art in lieu of finished-product-as-art is a lovely idea and speaks to life itself (as did the in-the-moment immediacy of the actors taking a scene from the top after an audience member’s cell rudely rang). But this is also precisely where the Achilles heel of his production lies. For “Venice Saved: A Seminar” is only as enlightening as the audience it gathers – and with so many similar POVs drawn to a pricey experimental performance, serious true debate about democracy and the artist’s role in politics is rendered impossible.

Sure, the idea that there is a gulf between what artists are creating and what is happening in the real world is a noble focus of both Weil and Levine, but Levine’s choice of venue and the participants he’s attracting is simply maintaining the bridge rather than bridging the gap. For who is the director listening to other than a homogenous group of NY intellectuals“ By asking only the opinions of the liberal elite, and not those factory workers and soldiers that Weil strived so hard to embrace, Levine is not taking any risks, not fearlessly exploring like Weil did. If the director is truly interested in reaching out to a broad public, engaging with a diverse array of thinking minds (including those that make up 99.9% of the rest of the population), then “Venice Saved: A Seminar” should be in the streets and free to attend. In other words, the production would be a hell of a lot more exciting and alive with a mixed class audience. As it stands the only people livening up this seminar are the actors and other theater folks – i.e., artists, teachers and the occasional student.

On the evening I attended a sweet young woman volunteered that the word “prostitute” had a “horrible, drug-addicted life” connotation for her while “courtesan” evoked romance. Neither Levine, the actors, nor anyone in the audience asked why this was so for her. An older gentleman brought up the Iraq war parallels in Weil’s play. Again, no one challenged him with questions of why this was important to him. Nor how everything can be made to resemble modern events, as history is always repeating itself (the reason Shakespeare is timeless). Nor how it’s easier for one to graft his own experiences and ways of seeing onto something foreign than to try to see something from a foreign POV – like perhaps that of a hooker or a Sunni tribal chief. Yet in order for political theater truly to remain relevant in the real world the artist himself must desire and seek to have his very own point of view challenged and upended, wholly and completely. What Levine fails to realize is that his laudable and necessary inquiry cannot happen in a black box space – it must be taken directly to the people; for at $20 per ticket this seminar actually sidesteps democracy, becomes that rarefied academic/intellectual kingdom that Weil gave her spiritual life to overthrow.