This is art.
This is global metamorphosis.
This is what we’re stuck with.
This is Piper McKenzie.
- From the Piper McKenzie website
Jeff Lewonczyk and Hope Cartelli have been putting in a little overtime. Lewonczyk’s showing me a book. Cryptozoology A to Z by Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark. “It’s considered a pseudo-science by many,” he says. “The study of unknown creatures.”
Cartelli, Lewonczyk’s business partner and wife of two years, interjects, “But not mythical.”
“There’s some overlap, “ Lewonczyk adds. “Cryptozoologists study creatures that are believed to be extinct. It’s sort of a shadow world between mainstream science and the lunatic fringe.” His company’s latest piece, Lady Cryptozoologist, is “about this character named Karma Kingsley, who’s a cryptozoologist, and the shadowy Caliban League, a consortium of creatures that wish to remain hidden run by Bill Yetison, a half-man, half-Yeti hybrid who is an ex-boyfriend of Karma’s—they knew each other in college when he was passing for human.”
There is nothing unusual about this conversation.
Over the last seven years, the productions Lewonczyk and Cartelli have mounted under the moniker Piper McKenzie Productions have featured Chinese mummies, mad-scientist guidance counselors, and an SS officer whose brain has been transferred to the body of a penguin. Their productions are brazenly experimental, unapologetically populist, and surprisingly endearing. Through it all, the aesthetic has been firmly anti-aesthetic. If Piper McKenzie is one thing, it’s a sensibility formed through years of collaboration, a methodology that found its roots at Bard College in the mid-'90s, where Lewonczyk and Cartelli met in the weeks preceding freshman year. The pair’s first production was Lewonczyk’s play The Demon Children, which he describes as “a Satanist immigration farce.” Cartelli acted and served as producer. Lewonczyk directed and co-produced.
To some extent, this is still the model. While much of the Piper oeuvre is company-conceived and created, the name is mainly a header. Piper himself was born on a press release, for the company’s 1998 production of Piper McKenzie Presents The Tinklepack Kids In The Great Yo-Yo Caper at the Cocoon Theater in Clermont, New York, a Winsor (“Little Nemo”) McKay-inspired fantasia about a squabbling couple plagued by disturbing dreams. The name Tinklepack came from a sign on a local barn. Piper was just the silliest-sounding thing they could think of. The play reemerged at HERE in 2002 in a version entitled Piper McKenzie Presents The Tinklepack Patrol In the Curse of Count Morpheus, flanked by two productions of plays by Polish polymath Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885-1939), The Water Hen (2002) and The Pragmatists (2004). Significantly, Lewonczyk and Cartelli decided to stage the latter at a new hole-in-the-wall on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg run by Michael Gardner and Robert Honeywell, The Brick.
The Brick has become the space most closely identified with the company. “We would not be able to do the work we’ve done without it,” Lewonczyk says. “It’s given us the leisure [to create that] we’ve never had before, and that has been crucial.” Cartelli agrees. “We knew we wanted to play around and do something, but we didn’t [want to] have to worry about space or about ‘utilizing our time to the fullest’.” At The Brick, aside from acting in shows by Gardner and Honeywell, Lewonczyk and Cartelli created the Bizarre Science Fantasy (BSF), a semi-wordless dance-theater hybrid that utilizes found music and sound in place of dialogue. The first of these was Hell’s Belles (part of the Brick’s 2004 Hell Festival), followed by longer-form romps The Perfect Girl, Sexedelic Cemetery, and this past summer’s Macbeth Without Words, Piper’s entry in the Brick’s Pretentious Festival, and its first attempt to adapt a classic to the BSF format.
Of course, there are numerous other projects that Lewonczyk and Cartelli create, or in which they are involved, from Jason Robert Bell’s The Adventures of Caveman Robot to this year’s FringeNYC musical John Goldfarb, Please Come Home (book by William Peter Blatty). In between, they return to the Bizarre Science Fantasy. The reason is clear: it’s their style, the one they’re in the process of perfecting, and the one through which most audiences have come to know, and appreciate, Piper McKenzie. Intriguingly, it almost never came about. “When we first officially came on with The Brick, we had these ideas for a play we were going to do that I was writing. I had actually put together a cast before realizing there was no way I was going to finish it in time. An idea that Hope and Alexis [Sottile] had discussed was to have a bunch of dancing girls called the Hell’s Belles. We had no idea how it would get woven into the festival, but when we decided to start from scratch, we ended up appropriating that idea. I had just gotten an iPod that week, so I was listening to music, just something to practice with in rehearsal. It ended up being a lot of jazz stuff, and then I found this stuff from The Anthology of American Folk Music that I’ve always wanted to play around with. And I brought this playlist to first rehearsal. I had them go out and just do some moving to the music, walking around interacting. Then I started seeing little images I would pick at and be like, Okay, Devon, keep doing that thing with the broom, or with the microphone, and I started to see this story come together as a combination of what everyone was doing and the music.”
The result was a devilishly comic, startlingly original tale of a young businessman making his way in the big city, tormented by dancing girls for an indiscretion he may have committed involving a woman in white who appears from time to time, mournfully walking the perimeter of the stage. Hell’s Belles appeared again in an omnibus of BSF pieces that included the sublime North of Polaris, about two comely, lost astronauts who are accosted by an impossibly upbeat set of aliens, and The Amphibians, a menacing sketch about a backwater dive besieged by a plague of frogs.
Lewonczyk and Cartelli have always lucked out at finding actors who clue into their particular brand of funny, actors like Robin Reed, Devon Ludlow, Katie Brack, Jessi Gotta, Fred Backus, and Stacia French, among others. Lewonczyk explains it simply: “Some people are more natural movers or dancers than others, but the beautiful thing about the BSF stuff is that it exists in a no man’s land between theater and dance. There are circumstances in which we can bring non-dancers into a BSF and find a way to make it work for them, because it’s not always about dance. It’s closer to silent film in some ways. So actors comfortable with any kind of physicality—they can be channeled, harnessed, translated into the style.”
Lewonczyk and Cartelli bristle at the idea of nailing down a mission statement, at least for now. That said, they’re clear enough to be able to point out the underlying commonalities in their work: a heightened theatricality, a disdain for naturalism (“A pretty broad thing,” Lewonczyk admits), pop culture references (specifically pulp or genre stories), and an appreciation for the forms and styles of the past.
As for the future, there’s Lady Cryptozoologist (running until February 2008), a new 8-minute BSF for the Vampire Cowboys’ Revamped series in November, and next spring’s Babylon Babylon at the Brick, a riff on Herodotus. Working at such a breakneck pace might hamper some companies and force them to organize more stringently, but Lewonczyk sees it differently. “We’ve never worked more than a year ahead. We finally signed up with Fractured Atlas, for fiscal sponsorship, and we’re going out for more programs, the idea being maybe we can develop a show and perform it at the Brick, or develop a show at the Brick and perform it somewhere else.”
Where, I ask, might that somewhere else be? “We’d love to perform at P.S. 122, HERE, The Kitchen, Dixon Place,” Lewonczyk says, his eyes lighting up. “We’ve been so caught up in running the theater and doing our shows at The Brick that we’re only just now slowly beginning to reach out to these places and form relationships. One of the things that’s tough for us in terms of positioning ourselves is we’re a little left-field for mainstream theater, but a little too non-aggressively experimental for the downtown establishment. I mean, we’re not the best fit for P.S. 122 because there’s a more populist element running through what we do that they don’t always cater to. We don’t pride ourselves on being cutting edge, per se. I’m fascinated by the middle. I think that the middle is a very big, rich, evocative place and I think a lot of the things that are the most enduring are the things that take place in the middle. But that’s a hard sell in the short run. So we’re still trying to find our place, and explain to people what that means.”
On a whim, I ask Lewonczyk and Cartelli the standard interview closer, about how they measure success. Cartelli laughs. Lewonczyk explains. “We haven’t had the chance. I mean, on the most crude, mercenary level, we measure success by having the most attended show in the Pretentious Festival with Macbeth Without Words, which was definitely our biggest success to date. Another way of measuring it is [by asking] how well have we executed what we set out to do. Macbeth is a perfect example of that, ’cause we worked a long time on it, and it came together the way we wanted it to. So for me the true mark of success is when we feel we’ve brought an audience somewhere they haven’t been before. That’s harder to tell with a silent piece in some ways. People are little afraid to react sometimes.”
I ask Lewoncyzk to elaborate. “People come up to us afterwards and be like, I thought that scene was so funny, but I didn’t want to laugh. It was silent, I didn’t want to interrupt the show.” The three of us pause to let the irony settle in. “And it’s like, Dude, we’re doing a show, it’s live theater. Laugh.”
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