Mrs. Marx, about Karl Marx’s wife Jenny, reminds me of my late mentor Mordecai Gorelik’s prediction that we’d be getting more and more of theater that is “not to be understood or reasoned but inhaled.” Clara Francesca’s mime-dance-interaction exemplifies such a drama, to be found fascinating to a coterie audience determined to find it new and magnificent when it is actually magniloquent. To produce a suitable adumbration of a play which captures such an audience, present at the last SaraSolo manifestation of 2016, necessitates my rendering a sesquipedalian explication of it. Mrs. Marx commences with the title figure couchant, then emerging from a down center engulfing black coat . . . a device recently also used in Sarasota at Urbanite but not novel in any case. Though possibly having suffered from an incommodious position, Francesca proves ready to employ her body and facial constructs with sedulity, the distinguishing trait of her performance. All else proves incommensurate with accustomed characteristics of what those of us who share not the rarified air breathed by a coterie (or just don’t wish to admit something they don’t understand) might expect of a biographical play. With a visage half made up as if poppled on an apprentice clown, for some perplexingly chimerical purpose, Francesca produces various emotions while ducking behind two chairs in a row. At high points, both literally and figuratively, one chair has to be positioned off-center to serve as an escalade stood atop by Francesca. This permitted her uttering buncombe into a microphone elevated to twice its usual maximum verticality. Throughout the play, lights will be extinguished, possibly to designate scene breaks. Recorded polyphony in darkness and its relief contain messages ostensibly of instruction to Francesca on how to speak. Despite recalling Hamlet’s advice to the actors at Elsinore, these utterances go unutilized. Indeed, in her few bits of informative narration, Francesca eschews coherence, her characteristic speeches being affected by aposiopesis. Interactive theater comes into prominence as Francesca invades the front rows of onlookers, swigs from a bottle of water held by one, and distributes copies of a poem called “Creation” by Marx. Characteristically, it seemed to have no bearing to onstage events. (After the show, I asked her to explain a prominent metaphor that made no sense to me, it being a contradiction, but Francesca could offer only to supply me with a copy of the original in German. To be fair, it seems Francesca had not done the translation. To be pertinent, she apparently did not understand what the translated words meant or why they were illogical.) Because Francesca appears enthusiastic, has mastered movement, and seems comfortable confronting her audiences upfront, most of her performance proves more admirable than her play. Its sole bits of information about Jenny Marx are the number of her and Karl’s children and that she was anguished because he had procured a paramour. All else occupies a void. According to poet Marx, that means it could have been pulsating. Uh-huh.
