Kuharski, Allen J.

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Review Of  Pugilist Specialist  By A. Shaplin And Performed By The Riot Group

 Swarthmore CollegeWorks   Theater Faculty Works   10-1-2005  Review Of "Pugilist Specialist" By A. Shaplin And Performed By The Riot Group  Allen J. Kuharski Swarthmore College,  akuhars1@swarthmore.edu Let us know how access to this work benefits you.  Follow this and additional works at:  http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-theater Part of the  Theatre and Performance Studies Commons  Recommended Citation Allen J. Kuharski. (2005). "Review Of "Pugilist Specialist" By A. Shaplin And Performed By The Riot Group".Theatre Journal. Volume 57, Issue 3. 524-525. http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-theater/34  This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Swarthmore College Libraries. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theater Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu.                                                        Access provided by Swarthmore College (2 Jul 2015 15:20 GMT)?????????????????????????????????????????????Theatre Journal, Volume 57, Number 3, October 2005, pp. 524-525 (Review)???????????????????????????????????????????DOI: 10.1353/tj.2005.0111For additional information about this articlehttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tj/summary/v057/57.3kuharski.html524 / Performance ReviewPUGILIST SPECIALIST. By Adriano Shaplin.The Riot Group, 45 Below Theater, NewYork City. 5 November 2004.The 2004 American debut of the Riot Group inNew York and San Francisco with Pugilist Specialistarrived after years of growing critical acclaim forthe company in Great Britain. This belated home-coming is but one facet of the company’s excep-tional artistic trajectory. Based until recently in SanFrancisco, the Riot Group was originally launchedby a small band of discontented undergraduatetheatre students at Sarah Lawrence University.They developed a minimalist production and per-formance style combined with the baroque ex-travagance of actor/playwright Adriano Shaplin’slanguage. The company, like countless other Ameri-can student groups, started taking its work to theEdinburgh Fringe Festival in the late 1990s. In 1999,the Riot Group began an ongoing winning streakof Fringe First and Herald Angel Awards withWreck the Airline Barrier. They made their Londonprofessional debut in 2003 with Victory at the DirtPalace. Pugilist Specialist (premiered in Edinburghin 2003) has become the company’s most discussedand visible work, with two critically acclaimedruns in London in early 2004 book-ending a five-month tour of the United Kingdom and Ireland. In2005, London’s Soho Theatre commissioned a newwork by Shaplin and company entitled SwitchTriptych, with first performances slated forEdinburgh in August.In Pugilist Specialist (whose title bears no literalrelationship to the characters or plot), the set con-sists of a group of plain moveable wooden benchesand a microphone suspended center stage. Thebenches are rearranged when the setting shifts. Thefour actors never change places within a scene,never touch, and never make eye contact—theyplay directly to the audience in a series of tableausperformed over Shaplin’s own looping, digitallymanipulated score. Any lighting cues are simpleand functional. The elegant simplicity of the actingand staging is consistent with the earlier work ofthe Riot Group, a Brechtian response to their initialpoverty, lack of professional training, and the needfor high mobility for the work.As with all of the Riot Group’s scripts, PugilistSpecialist is simultaneously driven by character,plot, and language. The play revolves around theultimately fatal betrayal of its only female charac-ter, Lt. Emma Stein (Stephanie Viola), by her poker-faced duffer of a commander (Paul Schnabel) andher two fellow Marines (Shaplin and Drew Fried-man) in the midst of a mission ostensibly to assas-sinate a Middle Eastern dictator code-named “thebearded lady.” Stein remains acutely aware of herexceptional position as a female Marine of greatcompetence, confidence, and a history of speakingher mind to both fellow soldiers and superiors.From left: Lt. Studdard (Drew Friedman), Col. Johns (Paul Schnabel, standing), Lt. Emma Stein(Stephanie Viola), and Lt. Travis Freud (Adriano Shaplin) in Adriano Shaplin’s Pugilist Specialist,directed by the Riot Group. 45 Below Theater, New York City. Photo: Aaron Epstein.PERFORMANCE REVIEW / 525“Punctuality is my feminism,” she announces inher opening soliloquy. In double counterpoint toStein, Shaplin plays an undisciplined, hot-doggingbraggart of a sniper named Freud, and Drew Fried-man is a laconic communications expert namedStuddard, whose duties include maintaining anaudio record of the entire mission being planned(hence the microphone above). In the bitter lessonon the nuances of status, power, and victimizationprovided by the case of Emma Stein, Shaplin andthe Riot Group build on the line of work developedearlier by Brecht in Man Equals Man and The Excep-tion and the Rule.Shaplin’s language combines soliloquies andmonologues with quick, jabbing games of verbalone-upmanship that recall Mamet rather thanBrecht. Ultimately, however, Shaplin’s voice is un-like any other in American drama. Here he offers abracing pastiche of military slang and pseudo-jargon, peppered with epigrams worthy of OscarWilde or Edward Albee, swinging without warn-ing from the absurd, crass, or obscene to flights ofterse poetry. A development and rehearsal processbased on a heightened version of Sanford Meisner’srepetition exercises that emphasizes verbal aggres-sion grounds the company’s stark Brechtian em-bodiment. Shaplin’s writing both feeds and feedsoff of this kind of work by the actors. Shaplinwrites for specific actors (including himself), andindeed the organic relationship of actor, character,and language in the Riot Group’s work serves aspart of its power in performance. The aggressive,competitive stance of character to character is in-separable from that of specific actor to actor, andultimately extends to the direct confrontation ofthe actor/character with the audience (where eyecontact, if not verbal or physical contact, is permit-ted). In performance, the Riot Group actors in turncruise, withhold, and challenge through their choiceof focus.The British and American critical response toShaplin as a playwright has begun to take on a lifeof its own apart from the work of the company. Theimportance of Shaplin and the Riot Group to con-temporary American theatre, however, lies notonly in the appearance of a young dramatic voiceof great talent and originality (Shaplin is twenty-six) but also in his insistence on the value andnecessity of this kind of company-based writing.This is all inseparable from Shaplin’s artistic workin other aspects of the company’s productions (hefunctions simultaneously as actor, playwright, com-poser, and co-director in the Riot Group’s work).To their credit, Shaplin and the Riot Group dare tofall between the cracks separating two dominantspheres of American theatre practice: the domainof the playwright as independent contractor foundin Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional reper-tory theatre versus the text- or playwright-scorningworld of experimental auteur ensembles. Shaplin’sunapologetic identification at once as playwright,actor, director, and composer further flies in theface of the artistic specialization and compartmen-talization that the American professional theatrefirmly enforces in both the commercial and not-for-profit worlds, as well as in training programs. Thepitch-perfect shape of Shaplin’s lines and speechesfollows directly from the fact that he comes towriting from acting, and that the actor in himultimately both inspires and confronts the play-wright at every performance. In this embrace of theactor-playwright, the Riot Group in its downtownfashion revives and honors the actual practice ofthe Greeks, Shakespeare, or Molière more than anyclassical repertory company.Shaplin’s success will surely place him undergreat external pressure to simplify his own artisticprofile and to distance himself from the very com-pany—and its political and intellectual underpin-nings—that has provided the extraordinary vehiclefor his work to date. The Broadway and Holly-wood systems depend upon playwrights as freeagents, and the nonprofits have proven a tepidalternative—consistently timid, stingy, and con-formist in their approach to process, much lesscontent. The American homecoming of the RiotGroup may prove as artistically and personallytreacherous for Shaplin and his collaborators astheir own Lt. Stein’s attempts both to stand withand stand apart from the Marine Corps in whichshe serves.Will they prove the exception or the rule?ALLEN J. KUHARSKISwarthmore CollegeTHE BLUEST EYE. By Lydia Diamond, basedon the novel by Toni Morrison. Directed byHallie Gordon. Steppenwolf Theatre, Chi-cago. 20 February 2005.Toni Morrison’s novels tend not to adapt wellacross other media. Their frequent use of personal,retrospective narratives, combined with heavy dosesof magical realism create stories that dazzle thereader’s imagination but often fail to materializevisually onstage or on screen. Steppenwolf Theatre’srecent production of The Bluest Eye seems theexception. Lydia Diamond’s world premiere

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Review Of Pugilist Specialist By A. Shaplin And Performed By The Riot Group

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