VIE Scena Contemporanea Festival

Vision Disturbance

Richard Maxwell/New York City Players

19/10/2011 ,  21:30
20/10/2011 ,  23:00
21/10/2011 ,  23:00
22/10/2011 ,  16:00 ,  23:00

A new play by Christina Masciotti presented by the New York City Players
Directed by Richard Maxwell
Performed by Linda Mancini and Jay Smith
Staging and light Adrian W. Jones
Sound Ben Williams
Costumes Victoria Vazquez

Running Time 1h 10'

National Première

Played in English with Italian subtitles

Reservation required

In Vision Disturbance, two lost souls converge in Reading, Pennsylvania: Diamondo, but she goes by Mondo, a Greek immigrant whose eyesight suffers from a vicious divorce from her traditional Greek husband, and Dr. Hull, the retina specialist who treats her with an unorthodox approach involving music therapy. In fact Mondo’s occluded vision has more to do with stress than anything somatic. Mondo is unfixed: not only is she unable to judge the distance between objects, she can’t even locate herself in the world. As a greek woman, she has failed in what she was asked to do: have a husband and have kids. Her session with Hull might help things come into focus-emotionally, culturally and otherwise.

Also dr. Hull has his own problems, a chronic back pain that has led him to abuse painkillers. He isn’t assertive but a lonely bachelor who lives with his mother and an aging cat.
At its core, the play is about two people who struggle to find new ground and belonging as their structured lives suddenly fall apart.
Vision Disturbance is the first production in New York City Players' new program dedicated to staging the work of playwrights early in their careers. Under the direction of Artistic Director Richard Maxwell, the award-winning New York City Players have been making theater since 1999 and have toured to over 20 countries.
Here follows an interview (July – August 2010) between Cristina Masciotti – the playwright – and a journalist of the Brooklyn Rail, Megan Falvey:

MONDO
Things keep changing where they are. For example, I have a chair in my living room, it’s out in the middle of the room. And next to that, a coffee table with a vase of branches, and behind that a sofa. Well, all of this, the whole room, could have been some kind of wallpaper. It was all completely flat. Like when I walked into the room all the furniture jumped into the wall. It was an empty room with very detailed wallpaper.
—from Vision Disturbance

Falvey (Rail): Is it a real thing, Mondo’s Idiopathic Central Serious Condition? She can only see two dimensions.

Christina Masciotti: It is. When I was writing this, I had an eye operation on my eyelid, just superficial, but I had to wear a patch. I remember coming into the living room here and everything looked like it was receding. As you come closer to things, they seem to pull away. If you close one eye, you can get a little sense of how discombobulating that is. You can’t get close to anything because your depth perception is skewed. I centered this story around this woman’s vision because it had so much to give as a metaphor, that what she’s seeing is parallel to what she’s feeling as her life breaks apart. There are all those clichés about the world looking different when you’re falling in love, but for Mondo seeing in two dimensions is like looking at a flat picture outside of her. She’s not part of the picture, she’s cut off from everything. With only two dimensions, she can’t trust that she can accurately judge where things and people are, what distance they’re at from her.

Rail: She can’t picture herself in this flattened world around her, where her husband has left her for another woman and he’s trying to soak her financially, for $8,000.

Masciotti: Everything has fallen apart for her. She says she knew he was a junk collector from the beginning and she should have known. She’s Greek, and it’s not just that she’s a foreigner who doesn’t speak perfect English, but she doesn’t have anyone to look to for support. She also comes from a culture where the number one thing is marriage and having kids. She didn’t buy into that, but she did marry and try. So when her marriage fails it has a big impact. Mondo really has no one to talk to, so she talks to the audience. She’s imagining someone she could talk with; it’s this hope that eventually you’ll know someone you can tell this to, so you want to get it right.

DR. HULL
Have you been under a lot of stress lately?

MONDO
No.

DR. HULL
Can you describe your lifestyle?

MONDO
Whatever it is, I love it.
[…]

Rail: […] What always hooks me into your stories is the spoken language, the idiomatic accuracy of tone and malapropisms and all the mis-speaking of actual speech. I don’t hear that anywhere else. It’s not played for laughs, although it’s often funny. It’s not a distraction, it adds sense. You always know what the character’s getting at, and the irregular way they speak clarifies what they mean. The way you render your characters’ speech sounds so naturalistic it almost shades into surreal. According to Richard Maxwell, your writing is “attuned to the nuances of Americans in a way that is hilarious and meaningful.” All your characters, not only the Greek ones.

DR. HULL
It takes time to heal. It’ll take as long as you need it to take.

MONDO
Need? I don’t—what? To take this long? I don’t need to long take this! Put those words in the right order!

Masciotti: I am interested in the way people talk, and in my writing that manifests in a way that’s not normal. I think that’s where the surreal part comes into it. I’m thinking about how people communicate—what they say, what is not said. I have an innate sense of exactly what words need to be in a line. If there’s one extra word of explanation there I know it’s too much, that it needs to be cut. When I’m watching TV or watching a movie, I’ll be cutting off words as I’m listening. I am really a listener, and so partly this comes from listening to people and wanting to honor them. And it happens that many people I listened to growing up had accents and spoke in unconventional ways. When it comes to the actual line, I know what the character would say though it might take awhile to write exactly how they would be saying it. But I do feel like I have an extra set of eyes saying yes, no, yes, no and that only happens when I’m writing a play. When I have to write stage directions it’s like, oh God! I’m fumbling around and the sentences feel clumsy. So, in some ways my writing is realistic, but what I believe can constitute a line of dialogue is different from what traditionally constitutes a line of dialogue. Also, there’s an audience and you want them to be able to follow what’s going on. There’s an art to being able to keep it from feeling like exposition.

Rail: I always know what’s going on, but I never noticed how the story is folded into the dialogue. There aren’t seams.

Masciotti: I think about the story arc the same way I think about the dialogue—every play starts with the problem and in the middle the problem gets worse and by the end it’s resolved or not. That kind of an arc happens every day. You go to the bank and the deposit isn’t there and the manager has no record of it and by the end of the day—you know what I mean?

Rail: Sadly, yes.

Masciotti: At the end of the day either they found the money or you’re screwed. There’s an ending. I am very interested in how to resolve the dilemma. Some plays are really traditional, and sometimes I feel stifled by that structure and maybe it can be a little stale. But sometimes, in the name of pushing the form forward, that structure is dispensed with—as if, in order to be experimental we’ve got to break the narrative. That’s not interesting to me because what I think really pushes the form forward is each artists’ point of view about what dialogue is, what an arc is. It’s not just being weird, unless the story gives some reason for it. It’s satisfying to replicate what it’s like to go through a big problem. Mondo has some great problems that are not unusual, but her experience of them isn’t usual—her marriage is falling apart and she doesn’t speak English very well and she can’t see. There are really high stakes there. There are a lot of mundane problems where it feels like your life is really at stake. It’s not about getting a suitcase and going somewhere in the last scene, it’s about finding a way to keep living where you are.

http://www.nycplayers.org

Richard Maxwell/New York City Players

Richard Maxwell (1967) is a playwright and director living in New York. Maxwell studied acting at Illinois State University. In Chicago, he was a founder of the Cook County Theatre Department. He is now the artistic director of New York City Players and resident writer at New Dramatists. Maxwell has been selected for Guggenheim Fellowship, an Obie Award, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Best in Festival Award at Zürcher Theater Spektakel. His plays have been performed in over twenty countries and translated into six langueges. A volume of his plays, Plays, 1996-2000: Richard Maxwell, has been published by Theatre Communications Group.

New York City Players is a theatre company producing original work for public presentation, under the artistic direction of Richard Maxwell. The company’s aim is to initiate a new dialogue with an ever-growing audience of live and recorded performances using original text and original music. Whether in the realm of theatre, music, or video, New York City Players rigorously strip away the habitual identities that may encumber a work, thereby allowing pursuit of the power of language, of story, of image, and of what happens when people gather in a room. Individualism is celebrated by collaborating with performers and designers from all backgrounds and levels of experience. New York City Players has performed in over twenty countries. Their work has been selected for national and international recognition, including several Obie Awards and the Best in Festival Award at Zürcher Theater Spektakel.

The show

Programme