A Maze

REVIEW: Puzzling out the nature of artists
By Nelson Pressley
Thursday, August 16, 2012

More than halfway through Rob Handel’s agreeably ramshackle drama “A Maze,” a debate breaks out about the special nature of artists. Are creative people different from the rest of us? Are they allowed to play by different rules ethically? Emotionally?

“You don’t get to write ‘Layla’ unless someone’s got you on your knees,” one character contends.

That dry, quirky line is swapped among members of a confused megastar rock band called Pathetic Fallacy. And the debate comes as the wildly disparate strands of Handel’s graphic novel/pop-culture satire/abduction drama start intersecting in patterns you may anticipate quickly but that are weirdly watchable anyway.

A centerpiece is the graphic novel’s fantasy, which makes “A Maze” terra firma for Rorschach Theatre. The scrappy troupe, settled at the Atlas Performing Arts Center after a decade performing all over town, has a taste for tales that stretch reality. So the plotline about the oddly dysfunctional cartoonist writing an elaborate, multi-volume saga featuring a defensive maze designed by a half-man/half-dog -- well, in local theatrical terms, that’s pure Rorschach.

Not that “A Maze” is full-on wacky; it’s measured, thoughtful and largely sober (also Rorschach traits). The main character is Jessica, a 17-year-old who was kidnapped at age 9. She’s just broken free, so of course she’s now a celebrity. So is Kim, the TV personality who seems to own Jessica’s story, and Paul and Oksana, the damaged former child prodigy stars of Pathetic Fallacy.

Rounding out the roster of the famous-but-wounded is Beeson, the reclusive graphic novelist who’s in rehab with Paul and whose dark books become central to the play. Escape and coping are themes, and as the characters grope toward their various freedoms and protections, the maze becomes a neat metaphor.

It’s also the essence of Robbie Hayes’s set. Large jigsaw hangings and big sections of the floor are on hinges, and the actors push them into different configurations between the scenes.

That’s clever, but you end up watching it happen a lot. Handel’s brief scenes toggle and toggle between subplots, and director Grady Weatherford hasn’t entirely solved the problem of constantly switching gears while sustaining momentum through the 2¹ / ₂-hour show.

In his favor, Weatherford has a largely winning cast charting Handel’s complex psycho-scape. Andrew Ferlo and Sara Barker, in ripped-up leather and denim, have a relaxed intensity as the brooding rockers (Ferlo is especially good with the relaxed bits, and Barker delivers the intensity). Ryan Mitchell does well not to make the near-manically focused Beeson too precious, and, as the precocious Jessica, Jenny Donovan grows more compelling the more mysterious the character gets.

The crime and its connection to art: Does Handel’s shaggy fantasy soft-pedal that? The thought nags briefly now and then, and it seems that Weatherford and crew might have made the show creepier, possibly pressed for connections with recent events (the sadness around “The Dark Knight Rises” is an inexact parallel, but in this issue’s orbit). Mainly, though, you see it their way, that “A Maze” isn’t that kind of disturbing social critique. It’s a gentle puzzle.

PREVIEW: Untangling a creative 'Maze'
By Jessica Goldstein
Wednesday, August 15, 2012

I am asking director Grady Weatherford what “A Maze” is about. One would think this is a fairly simple question.

“It can be a difficult question,” says Weatherford, which is a sign of how straightforward this conversation is going to be. “It’s about a lot of different things.

“At its root, it’s about the creative process and the different ways that we look at it,” he goes on. “It’s a kidnapping story, a rock-and-roll story, an art story.”

I sense us getting closer to the plot.

“For anyone who has ever tried to make anything, it is sort of a maze to get there. You have to find your way to what you’re trying to create.”

Hang on, we are zooming out again.

“Finding our way to these creations is really the maze of life.”

Weatherford is excited about this Rorschach Theatre production in a way that prevents him from describing it to anybody who hasn’t seen it. He is almost comically spoiler-averse. Each shot of summary is chased with a cautious admonition of “but I don’t want to give too much away.”

At the risk of giving too much away -- “too much” apparently being “anything at all” -- here is the gist of the show: A 17-year-old girl has just escaped from captivity, where she’s been held for eight years, and is about to tell her story to the world on an Oprah-style show. Meanwhile, a rock-and-roll band has discovered a gigantic graphic novel around which it’s decided to build a concept album. Funny thing about that big comic book: The central character is our teen escapee.

Eight actors play the 17 characters, who are “a lot of very self-involved people who are all trying to tell their own story to benefit themselves,” Weatherford says. “And we end up sort of crossing paths, and it becomes a much more serious thing than just the self-involved, ‘this is my story’ situation. It becomes a giant shared story.”

The 34 scenes unfold over 10 years, and the play goes forward and backward in time. Its nonlinear nature appealed to Weatherford, who often works in film, as did the notion of creating an original song for the band’s epic album to go along with the story.

The post-punk band “that lives in a three-chord, three-minute-verse sort of world,” Weatherford says. “And the creation of this album is stepping out of that to move into a more soaring” sound. Sound designer Thomas Sowers wrote an original song for the band, which is teased out throughout three acts -- a riff here, a chord there -- and isn’t revealed in its entirety until the end of the play.

The set is the maze of the play’s title, a two-level shifting floor with a maze pattern that changes between scenes.

I admit to Weatherford that I am having some trouble following this. He assures me that’s okay.

“It’s so dense and so thick,” he says. “You probably shouldn’t sit back at the end and say, ‘Oh, I get it.’ ”