Storm still
Trying to make sense of The Nonsense Company
Madison has many genres of theater—musical, dignified/dramatic, radical, queer, camp, and Shakespearean—but it rarely witnesses a company taking so many elaborately conceived risks on its own terms, or with such immediacy, as The Nonsense Company. Rick Burkhardt, Andy Gricevich, and Ryan Higgins create shows that expand the perspectives and materials of theater, twitching from one vantage point to another, from ghastly grandeur to snips of irony.
On a Sunday night in August, the three men shovel down rice and beans at the house they share on the west side. They’ve been rehearsing a commissioned interpretation of King Lear, Act 3. Later this month, they’ll perform it as part of an experiment in Philadelphia, where five performance groups will each take on one act without coordinating with the others. The rules allow the teams to take liberties with the text and stipulate that they must offer the audience a dessert item during the course of the act. (The Nonsense Company plans to perform an extended version of their act in Madison sometime this fall.)
The group moved to Madison from San Diego about three years ago, but they hadn’t performed here until a July show at Nottingham Co-op. That night, their original works Great Hymn Of Thanksgiving and Conversation Storm made for a startling introduction to what the group does. The cacophonous Hymn, for example, featured the performers scratching at plates, scraping chairs on the floor, culling odd creaks from an autoharp, and uttering clipped bits of sentences. And every bit of it was scripted.
Rehearsing Lear at home, the group deals with about three pages of script at a time. The piece begins with King Lear’s mental state on trial—literally—with Act 3 itself on the witness stand. Gricevich plays the Act and acts as a puppeteer, pulling a string attached to the book to make it speak as Burkhardt questions it. Gricevich also leaps up to play the part of an unctuous trial lawyer, who at one point turns around with an impish smile to tell the judge (Higgins): “You see, your honor, this hovel is bugged!”
This is where the parsing begins, and it reveals a lot about why The Nonsense Company works. Each scene in the original act comes with the stage direction “storm still,” and everything these three have done with it thus far feeds on King Lear’s ambiguity, madness, and turbulence. Burkhardt coaches Gricevich through that one line, turn, and facial expression over and over again.
“It takes a while to figure out what all the images are doing and how they actually relate to each other,” Burkhardt explains in a later interview, “and that’s starting to make sense to us, so that’s nice.” Still, even this early rehearsal exudes confidence, perhaps because the piece so effectively takes advantage of the personalities within the group. Higgins’ words come out with a croak, and he tends to stare at, or past the people he’s speaking to, as if in fierce concentration or dread. Gricevich’s round, beaming face spikes the proceedings with mischief. Burkhardt, a lanky guy who wears a short-sleeved, button-up shirt with a floppy green tie, balances those two extremes.
The turn-and-smile move refined, they move on to a part in the scene that incorporates some of Shakespeare’s dialogue, in which Lear imagines putting his treacherous daughters on trial. Burkhardt, now in the role of Lear’s Fool, cuts this off, modernizing the line “Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool” into “Well, fuck my socks, I took you for a footstool.” Higgins, now straddling the roles of judge and Lear, rebukes him: “Obscenities will not be tolerated unless they are couched in highly figurative language!”
Burkhardt, who does most of the group’s writing, can try and explain his work, and eventually it will make sense, just not until he’s covered a dozen tangents, sources, and inspirations. The company’s Act 3 ends with Lear’s daughter Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, tearing the Duke of Gloucester’s eyes out and accusing him of treachery. No surprise plot there; that’s how the original reads. But don’t expect a normal adaptation.
“The scene, as we've written it, has Reagan and Cornwall, and Gloucester too, really, as people who can essentially barely talk,” says Bukhardt. “They sort of speak like the kids in South Park. They’re spewing invective of all kinds and don't make complete sense a lot of the time.” In other words, he thinks Shakespeare is ironically contrasting Regan and Cornwall’s “so-called sanity” with Lear’s madness.
The piece also addresses Shakespeare’s contrast of majesty and vulgarity, which often gets lost in stuffy theatrical and academic settings. The middle of the act examines a murder trial and public execution: As Lear describes the process to a psychiatrist (Burkhardt) in righteous, regal terms, he moves to sodomize the accused (Gricevich) with his scepter. It’s a cruel, irrational route to the heart of a cruel, irrational play. “The punishment is already taking place and we’re talking about it like it’s slowly unfolding,” Burkhardt tells Higgins and Gricevich during the rehearsal. “We’re going to a place where people don’t do or say things for poetic reasons.”
For more information, see nonsensecompany.com.
