Ghosts and Whimsy by Way of Cage

The late composer John Cage wrote his verbal fantasia, “James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet,” for German radio in the early ‘80s. He imagined his fellow 20th century avant-garde artists as ghosts, simultaneously inhabiting the same stage, joined intermittently by a variety of other well-known figures, from Brigham Young to Buckminster Fuller.

Now Laura Kuhn--who worked with Cage and directs the John Cage Trust--has mounted a moderately satisfying staged version of this whimsical yet dense opus. Co-commissioned by nine organizations including UCLA Performing Arts and the Eclectic Orange Festival, it’s on a tour that played three performances at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse on Friday and Saturday.

Merce Cunningham, the master choreographer who was a collaborator and partner of Cage over five decades, appears as Satie. Cunningham archivist David Vaughan plays Duchamp.

A narrator (graceful John Kelly) speaks at least twice as many lines as anyone else and is the only figure to move freely around Marco Steinberg’s stair-step set. The famous characters themselves--dressed in casual, contemporary clothes--spend most of the time sitting on piano benches, occasionally shifting positions on cue but seldom straying more than a few feet from their perches.

Cunningham’s lines, many of them drawn from Satie’s writings, make up most of the production’s wittiest and most accessible material. With his implacably majestic visage aimed straight at the audience, Cunningham delivers several riffs on “furniture music” (don’t get married without it, he advises), how to be a proper music student, and why measuring musical notes is more important than using them to make music.

He’s often accompanied by another voice delivering the same words on tape, with each voice occasionally taking the lead while the other falls behind.

Cunningham’s deadpan gaze seldom wavers, even when the narrator says that Satie “never stops smiling,” but then suddenly his face breaks into a screwy grin when he poses for a photograph.

The production’s other dominant performer is Mikel Rouse. He plays Joyce, navigating his way through Joycean thickets with calm precision. But more important, he’s the composer, and operates an onstage keyboard.

Rouse’s name is atop a list of five contributors to a score that consists of cued effects that directly correspond to passages in the text as well as (in the words of a program note by Rouse) “irrational sounds” that were selected and timed according to chance operations in Cage’s signature style. A remarkably eclectic array of aural effects ricochets through the hall, sometimes at the most surprising moments.

The soundtrack begins even as the audience enters, with a tape of Cage’s disarming introduction--apparently recorded before a live audience who got his jokes. With his acknowledgments that even he didn’t understand the work of some of the artists he was writing about, Cage makes his audience less defensive about its moments of incomprehension.

A program note by Kuhn also lowers traditional theatrical expectations by calling the piece “a performed installation ... where such things as time, sequence and movement are demoted ... where sharp climaxes or denouement are largely avoided.”

Still, the piece remains one of those experiences in which a previous reading of the often intimidating text--and the ability to reread passages as you go--is an enormous advantage, freeing the mind to appreciate more of the subtleties, once inside the theater.

The text contains flights of fancy that could be visualized in much greater detail if the actors were allowed to move more freely and if the set were more flexible (video, anyone?). At times the staging hovers uneasily between the qualities of the printed page and the opposite qualities of a more fully fleshed-out production.