Something's Got Ahold of My Heart

Hand2Mouth Theatre Company out of Portland Oregon is heralded as “the old guard” in a vibrant theatre scene. Their show, "Something's Got Ahold of My Heart," now playing at La MaMa on the Lower East Side was one I recently got to go check out.

This show is regarded as an epic in their press materials; it:

“…wrestles with the yearning, euphoria and eviscerating tragedy of love. Weaving an energetic blend of 70's pastiche, romantic comedy excerpts, dance theater, testimonials, original music and aggressive physicality, it invites its audience into a deeply emotional experience.”

Okay. So that’s the show I saw tonight. I want to table that for just a second and dredge up another old quote I saw recently. It was from legendary playwright Edward Albee who said:

“When you write a play, you make a set of assumptions – that you have something to say, that you know how to say it, that it’s worth saying, and that maybe someone will come along for the ride. That’s all.”

So I came in from the rain of a Friday night in January to see this play with all the hope and anticipation that anyone could have for something which sounds, on paper, so promising.

We arrived to La MaMa just before the show was to start and the woman who gave me my tickets told me I could “write down a dedication and a song lyric on a sticky note” and it would somehow or other find inclusion in the show.

I have worked with one of the great experimental theatre companies; The Groundlings out in Los Angeles before. So I was familiar with this conceit. Have people write something down and it would somehow make it into their long-form improv.

“But was Hand2Mouth improv?”

I was suddenly very confused. It doesn’t say anything about them being an improv group in their playbill…but it also doesn’t say that they’re not an improv group. In fact if you look closely at the program it says that the show was “created” by the performers.

Hmmmm. Okay.

Anyway we were late getting to our seats so I declined to write anything down; the woman at the desk made an indignant snort.

“Oh!” she exclaimed.

We sat down and surveyed the scene before the lights quickly went dark. The space was wide with audience siting on either side. I opted for a seat on the more full side and I immediately noticed a couple of things. There was a synthesizer, there was a drum set (both off to one side) there was a turntable, there was a wine bottle, and we would see that there were these numerous rugs and pillows which would change shape from scene to scene.

A girl/woman appeared onstage speaking French-gibberish. Some of what she was saying was indeed French but as she continued along many of her words sounded like a garbled gibberish. She asked another one of the performers to translate. Which another girl/woman did. This went along fine for a while before being cut off by another one of the performers; I think the word was “liver.” Inside the human body; the first translator called it something else; spleen(?); then the second translator got involved and they began sniping at one another.

And this was how the show started. For about 5 minutes it was this. Then suddenly the show became about “the true meaning of love.”

• Can one person know what another person feels?
• Is love able to be verbalized?
• Does love translate across miles, across continents, and between two people?

All heavy subjects I must admit for a Friday evening, but there you have it. And on it went. None of the highfalutin language was lost from scene to scene; to the players onstage it got more and more intense as they used other artist’s emotions and they riffed off lines from love songs. Which I guess is where the sticky notes come into play.

My wife and I have this game; I’ll call it “Title & Artist.” It doesn’t really have a name but it does have a hook. I have a long background in music; my digital player flits with 10,000 entries. I know music every which way; she, less so on the surface but unlike me she’s got a really good memory and an ear like a hawk. So when we are driving in the car and I plug my music in I will start the songs anywhere in the alphabet and the game is that she guess the title and artist before the first words come in.

Imagine my surprise then when we were sitting in the audience and these performers came out trumpeting lines from the love songs of Dolly Parton, Lionel Ritchie (twice!) Whitney Houston, the West Side Story Cast Album (song: “Maria” – twice!) and many, many others.

There were underwear-clad Greco Roman wrestling struggling poses, there was an assumption of roles without words and only birdy-on-shoulder thought bubbles being emitted by the omnipotent fellow players. There was an opining to the love gods and there was considerable heartbreak.

Which I guess gets me to my one big distaste for this play. The press release says that Hand2Mouth are hoping to draw the “audience into a deeply emotional experience.”

But, so far as I could tell, there was 0 emotion going onstage this night. They were not connecting with the audience and they seemed even to not be connecting with one another. At first I thought that I might be seeing the most genius work around; I thought that maybe this was what avant-garde was, I thought I was the problem. Unfortunately by the time the 105 minute show had let out, I was decidedly convinced otherwise.

Their overly simplistic, black and white, jubilation or heartbreak navigation point was one of the real issues I had with this show. If people weren’t breathlessly grinding on one another in one sexy scene they were suicidal and forlorn in another scene. This was a place I had been to before; it’s called middle school. For a moment I was convinced that this show had been written by 13 year old girls; or manatees. I thought that there was no way that they would come out here and try to sell us this bale of hay when the whole barn’s ablaze.

The last 40 minutes or so of their show was the presentation of a few original songs, injected with vignettes that they read off of sticky notes. This must have been the dedication portion from before the start of the program. I get it that they were trying to “connect” with their audience but they looked like they were nervous teens reading off the schools prom dedications.

That’s the thing about this cast though; they were not old but they also certainly were not young. To take a page out of my own high school memory book; it’s a little bit like they all though they were somehow channeling belligerent Uncle Rico –

“…she says I’m still livin too much in ’82.”

One thing about this show was that clearly all the performers were really proud of themselves; they thought they were the bee’s-knees. They all had an awful lot of enthusiasm and it emanated; even if it wasn't always towards one another.

Obviously they were going for something that was way above my pay-grade. I don’t doubt the performer’s prowess were they to have a cogent script, a clear storyline, an emotional arc which connects with the audience and with their cast-mates, and some kind of realistic conclusion. But I just didn't see it tonight.

All the players seemed to be very pleasant, talented, and fine from a technical standpoint. In my estimation though “Something’s Got Ahold of My Heart” is a high concept piece which still exists in their own heads. 

Which brings me back to that Albee quote above. As I watched this show I began to wonder if the cast had any idea really what they were doing, whether we the audience were complicit in our lack of due diligence, and whether what was being said was even worth saying at all.

As Hand2Mouth Theatre Company signed off with their original arena-rock sendoff I felt as though I were in Times Square 10 nights earlier with Ryan Seacrest. But this was not New Year’s Eve, I did not know what I was cheering for, and as I fell back out into the evening mist, I felt a deflated confusion and somewhat shirked of my time and investment more than anything else.

Hand2Mouth is playing dates through January 20 at La MaMa First Floor Theatre, 74 East 4^th Street.