Pulse

City centered

By Jay Weitz

JOE MAIORANA PHOTO

As apt as the title might be, Available Light Theatre's newest production, Dead City, is not a lament for Columbus' Downtown shopping mall.

The celebrated play by Sheila Callaghan is, however, what's been called a "riff" on James Joyce's Ulysses, transplanted from the Dublin of June 16, 1904, to the New York of June 16, 2004.

Internet consultant, betrayed wife and mother of a dead son and a living but unfathomable daughter, Samantha Blossom is a modern-day female variation on Joyce's Leopold Bloom. Jewel Jupiter, a punk poet who worships Patti Smith and is the age Samantha's dead son would have been, corresponds to Joyce's Stephen Dedalus.

JOE MAIORANA PHOTO

Blossom wanders New York, has encounters that parallel those of Bloom (a morning funeral, a discussion in the library, a visit to a maternity ward) and crosses paths several times with young Jewel, just as Bloom did with young Stephen. Both novel and play end with monologues by the unfaithful spouse.

None of that hurts to know, but as director Matt Slaybaugh noted, "Rest assured that no knowledge of Ulysses is at all necessary to enjoy Dead City, in the same way that no knowledge of The Hidden Fortress is necessary to enjoy Star Wars."

Dead City stands — and wanders — on its own. "It's a really beautiful story about a woman who's in a lot of pain," Slaybaugh said. "She's so lonely, and so scared, and she won't show that to anyone. That strikes me as very true of many, many people that I know.

"Eleni Papaleonardos, who plays Samantha, is very brave; she really gets to the heart of it, she really makes me ache for the character," he added. Anyone who saw Papaleonardos in the title role of Schiller's Mary Stuart last summer will know what Slaybaugh is talking about.

Like Ulysses, though, Dead City is also full of comedy and what Slaybaugh calls "moments of unreality" scattered throughout an otherwise very realistic play. The original New York production at 3LD Art & Technology Center used high-definition video to achieve some of these effects.

"Our challenge is to do it with more practical means. So we use movement and imagination, and a touch of magic," Slaybaugh said.

Those exact qualities have been trademarks of Available Light wherever they perform. But this time around, after what Slaybaugh says were "months of negotiation," the company has secured the Riffe Center Studio Two Theatre for Dead City. Whether this portends a longer-term relationship with CAPA and the Riffe Center facilities remains an open question.

"We're in talks," Slaybaugh explained. "It depends heavily on what kind of experience we have with Dead City and how our audience feels about coming to see us there."

The play shares its title with the song from Patti Smith's 1997 Peace and Noise album, in which she mourns the death of her husband, guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith and despairs of the city "building scenes on empty dreams."

"Modern life sometimes makes authentic connections between people very difficult to come by," Slaybaugh said. "The play both stares that fact in the face and provides a beautiful counterexample. It's about how the most unexpected people can be so helpful to us when we need them. It's a reminder that we need to stay human and not disappear completely into our computers."

Available Light makes it pretty easy to stay human in this instance by offering every seat to every performance on a "pay what you can" basis. If big enough audiences make the odyssey to the Riffe Center, it could just help Available Light add that much more life to this particular city.

April 10, 2008

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