Slow-Motion Meditation on Movement and Life in ‘The Green Shoes’

In the 1960s, Sissy Boyd was a promising practitioner on New York City’s experimental dance scene. Then, the unexpected--a paralyzing bout of Guillain-Barre syndrome--ended her dance career and left her groping for a new artistic direction.

Boyd states in the press notes that “The Green Shoes” is not autobiographical. However, her new play about a once-paralyzed dancer and her relationship with an emotionally reticent artist was obviously partially inspired by the events of her youth.

Boyd, who also directs, wavers between the austere and the ponderous in this Oxblood Theater production at the Salvation Theater, a new venue in Silver Lake. Boyd is one of six playwrights who make up Oxblood, an artistic collective with spiritual ties to the Padua Hills Festival.

A Padua-esque avant-gardism prevails in the production, a simply staged affair propelled by Sharon Heather Smith’s unearthly original music. The plot is as bare bones as Garfield Smith’s rudimentary set design. Malvina (Mary C. Greening), a dancer now fully recovered from temporary paralysis, visits the studio of Howard (David Weininger), the painter with whom she had an intense affair while she was ill.

Also present is Aldo (Wesley Walker), a lonely gofer who nurses an unrequited passion for one of Howard’s models.

Conversing obliquely about their lives and needs, the characters move with the slow deliberateness of flies perambulating through congealing amber.

The acting is elegant and spare. Greening, in particular, is a sophisticated yet yearning presence whose performance suggests a slow-motion Martha Graham, Boyd’s former teacher and a palpable influence here. Yet for all its accomplishment and grace, Boyd’s measured meditation on movement is so lulling, it verges on the anti-theatrical.

F. Kathleen Foley

“The Green Shoes,” Salvation Theater, 1519 Griffith Park Blvd., Silver Lake. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Sundays, 4 p.m. Ends Nov. 25. No performance Nov. 22. $12. (323) 692-2601. Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes.

‘Gertrude Stein’ Talks

in Circles--With Flair

Flamboyant though she may have been in life, 20th century arts icon Gertrude Stein is not the first author to whose writings one would typically turn for theatrical inspiration. Famous for her flowery tautology (“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”) and other circular, often ponderous conundrums, the fiercely anarchic Stein trod a different path even in her plays, relying on cerebral deconstructions of language rather than the traditional dramatists’ toolkit to render human experience on the stage.

The challenge of impenetrability hasn’t intimidated Aresis Ensemble’s Frederique Michel from tackling “The Gertrude Stein Project” at Santa Monica’s City Garage. Honoring what she calls Stein’s “Cubist” approach to theater, Michel has assembled passages from Stein’s writings into a fragmented, kaleidoscopic presentation.

The concept could easily succumb to heavy-handed treatment, but Michel opts for a light, whimsical approach to her staging that makes the piece more fun and lively than it sounds on paper. Deep philosophical musings alternate with puns and even recipes from the cookbook of Stein’s lifelong companion, Alice B. Toklas. Part recitation, part performance, this esoteric pastiche is framed with the company’s usual stylistic flair, juxtaposing heady conceptual dialogue with erotic imagery.

“Plays are either read or seen or heard” goes one of the self-evident truths invoked for more detailed contemplation as a defiantly nude woman (Katharina Lejona) strolls across the stage. Later, she dons a mink coat as she and the other characters (who are really little more than presences) explore the psychosexual associations with the word “fur.” Think Helmut Newton meets Webster.

Lejona’s onstage companions include Kathryn Sheer as a comely ballerina with whom she suggestively mirrors Stein’s lesbian relationship with Toklas, Jed Low as a bald aristocrat, Maureen Byrnes as a chic cafe diner, and Ford Austin and David E. Frank as a pair of bowler-hatted gentlemen. Together, they grapple with the paradoxes inherent in statements such as “Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. The emotional paragraphs are made up of unemotional sentences.” (This and other puzzlements are repeated several times, so you’ll have ample opportunity to consider them.)

Augmented with Charles A. Duncombe Jr.’s customary evocative production design, this “Project” represents solid work from the company applied to material that doesn’t easily lend itself to the stage. Trying to follow anything like a linear narrative or character continuity is a recipe for frustration--you’ll have better luck following Toklas’ brownie recipe instead.

Philip Brandes

“The Gertrude Stein Project,” City Garage, 1340those 4th St. (alley), Santa Monica. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 5:30 p.m. Ends Dec. 16. $20 (Sundays, pay what you can). (310) 319-9939. Running time: 1 hour, 10 minutes.