INTERVIEW: Broken Box Mime Theater theatrically explores ‘SKIN’
Photo: The members of Broken Box Mime Theater perform SKIN. Photo courtesy of Bjorn Bolinder / Provided by Glenna Freedman PR with permission.
The Broken Box Mime Theater is back with another collaborative show displaying the company’s mastery of French pantomime. SKIN, which explores the many interpretations and stories that come with identity and one’s skin, plays through Feb. 3 at the Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at the A.R.T./New York Theatres in Midtown Manhattan.
Becky Baumwoll serves as artistic director of Broken Box Mime Theater, which previously presented See Reverse in New York City. Joining her on stage are Nick Abeel, Duane Cooper, Blake Habermann, David Jenkins, Marissa Molnar, Joél Pérez, Regan Sims and Matt Zambrano.
These performers have a difficult challenge for each of their 90-minute performances. They string together a series of short vignettes, all with a common theme of human skin. They need to inspire the audience to fill in the imaginative blanks and see the commentary on race, identity, gender, sexuality, vulnerability and strength.
“We write the entire show ourselves, and we started the process in August,” Baumwoll said in a recent phone interview. “So we’ve been slowly devising and then bringing things to full fruition.”
In the show, the performers do not use language or props, and Baumwoll sees the “medium” as the audience’s imagination.
“We work with the audience to create everything on stage in the invisible spaces that we hold in our hands or we hold through our regard or through our relationships on stage, all of that gets filled in by the audience,” she said. “So in See Reverse, we had a set of 10 short plays that all were self-contained and a range of theme and genre and content and mood. This show also is a collection of shorts, but we have far more than 10. And the themes are more woven together than in the past. As opposed to reading a collection of short stories, this sort of feels more like parts to a whole. The theme of SKIN really excited us, and there are so many different interpretations of that word.”
Some of the scenes blend right into the next one, and there is imagery that repeats itself throughout the show. Besides the theme of human skin unifying the vignettes, there is also the sense that Broken Box Mime Theater is offering commentary on today’s society.
“It’s a bit less of an escape into a world of narrative and storytelling, and a bit more of a reflection of the world we’re in at present, not to say that we don’t have those escapist pieces,” the artistic director said. “We have one called The 16th Annual Brooklyn Beard Awards, which is the most ridiculous thing we’ve ever written. We all act out different, absurd beards, so there are those goofy pieces. But I think on the whole this one feels really timely and immediate and more of a singular experience as opposed to an evening of shorts.”
Baumwoll and company want to know what the audience believes about the skin they’re in. They explore how it performs, how it softens, how it hardens, how it relates to another person.
“When we perform in mime with the costume and the mask that we wear, there’s this idea of bringing everyone to a common neutral of the mask and the body, which allows us to transform into various characters throughout a show,” she said. “We have this uniform look, and therefore I can become a chameleon. And then I can become a princess, and then I can become an older sister. And all these things happen with the uniform of the mask and the costume, and all of us dress the same. But, of course, there are certain things that the audience notices, like I’m a woman. I have white skin. I have brown hair, my weight, my shape. All these things are things that the audience sees, so even though we have this premise, or this idea, that we’re introducing that we will all transform, there are those things about us that don’t transform. And this show for the first time in our eight-year history as a company addresses these things.”
Baumwoll is also relying on the audience’s references in their own lives — the signs and signifiers they use and see in society.
“For the first time in this show, not only are we addressing issues of gender and sexuality, but also race, and that’s new frontier for us,” she said. “And we’re really excited to do it.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
SKIN, a production of the Broken Box Mime Theater, plays through Feb. 3 at the Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at the A.R.T./New York Theatres in Midtown Manhattan. Click here for more information and tickets.
