In 2 New Plays, Sound Design Is Front and Center (for a Change)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/theater/sound-house-this-is-the-color-described-by-the-time.html

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Seeing “Sound House” and “This Is the Color Described by the Time” is a bracing reminder of what most other shows do not do. The two plays, presented in repertory at the Flea Theater explore a sense that too often falls by the wayside onstage — sound.

Going to the theater, you would be forgiven for thinking only sight matters. Sound design is a stepchild that’s neglected at best, abused at worst. The mud coming out of speakers at too many Broadway shows, supposedly the apex of stagecraft, is appalling.

Vision — ahem — is lacking when it comes to theatrical sound. Everybody knows you need to have it, but too many productions do not care all that much. Can the audience hear what the actors say? Good enough! What about playing songs during scene changes? My, what an inspired device! Are singers properly miked? Bring on the Tony! (Or not: It took until 2008 to have awards for sound design. The category was eliminated in 2014; it will be back for the 2018 edition, but voting will be restricted to a subset of expert voters — as if everyone else doesn’t have functioning ears.)

The combo, which is presented by the theater company New Georges, radically departs from this cavalier approach. Audio helps tell the story in “Color”; in “Sound House,” it is the story. And both deal with female artists.

Conceived and directed by Lily Whitsitt for the Door 10 company, “Color” provides each audience member with headphones that plug into the mind of Gertrude Stein (Christina Rouner). The technique, which is akin to the one adopted by Simon McBurney in his 2016 Broadway solo, “The Encounter,” creates a simultaneous sense of dislocation and intimacy.

“Color,” which runs through March 3, focuses on a lesser known part of Stein’s life, when she and Alice B. Toklas (Stephanie Roth Haberle) were holed up in southern France during World War II. The godmother of modernism, Stein busied herself translating into English speeches by Marshal Philippe Pétain, the collaborator ruler of Vichy France. Ms. Whitsitt’s text incorporates lines from Stein’s 1916 play, “Mexico,” as well as from letters by the American playwright Thornton Wilder (Ben Williams, also the show’s sound designer) and Bernard Faÿ (Ean Sheehy), a Vichy sympathizer with fascist tendencies.

Stein is a great choice for a sound-heavy show because she was a most musical writer, with her use of repetition, the literary equivalent of, say, Steve Reich’s loops or the incremental changes, in Terry Riley’s composition “In C.” Via incantation, the three artists aimed to change not just our perceptions but our very consciousness.

Ms. Whitsitt attempts something similar here as her play shifts from cozy domesticity — Toklas cooks while Stein labors at her desk — to an unsettling descent into the writer’s inner world. The show liberally borrows from horror tropes: flickering lights, strange apparitions, people popping out of cupboards and a dense sonic environment incorporating everything from cicadas to tectonic grumblings to the crack of snapped necks as Toklas kills pigeons for dinner. In that last case, there are no birds on stage: Ms. Haberle is merely digging her thumbs into tomatoes. But we visualize something gruesome, and that is what lingers in the memory, anchored by one simple, queasy-making sound effect.

The mood is considerably lighter in Stephanie Fleischmann’s whimsical, melancholy “Sound House,” which runs through March 4. The play puts in parallel the stories of one Constance Sneed (Susanna Stahlmann), a young contemporary woman, and the real-life Daphne Oram (Victoria Finney), who in 1959 left her job as a BBC studio manager to explore the nascent field of electronic music.

Marsha Ginsberg’s set is strewn with artifacts such as a portable turntable, oscillators and proto-synthesizers, a reel-to-reel machine — remnants of a time when music-making and music-listening involved a physical rapport with cumbersome objects. The actors (who also include James Himmelsbach as Oram’s fictional former engineer, Horace Ohm) are miked so the sound designers Tyler Kieffer and Brandon Wolcott can manipulate their voices and integrate them into the audioscape.

Constance and the composer often share the stage, but mostly remain in their respective timelines. The one question in the show, which is directed by Debbie Saivetz, is how these arcs will meet. There is something Tom Stoppard-esque about the era-hopping intermingling of reality, fiction and art. But the elusive link proves anticlimactic when it finally emerges, and even at a mere 90 minutes the evening wears out its welcome. A problem is that despite Ms. Stahlmann’s warm, quietly quirky performance, Constance pales besides the intriguing Oram, who created an “Oramics” machine that combined sound and visuals — something the show might be trying to evoke with synchronized dance-like movement (by Brendan Spieth), only to drop the device halfway through.

Still, as flawed as these two shows are, it is refreshing to see them try to use technology to refresh theatricality. Let more follow suit and bend our ear, in the best sense of the term.