“White Rabbit Red Rabbit” by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour has opened at the Fountain Theatre, and the less I tell you about it, the better.
Soleimanpour is known for his “cold read plays,” which are performed by an actor immediately after receiving the script in front of an equally unprepared audience. Mystery is built into the theatrical experience.
“White Rabbit Red Rabbit,” which doesn’t rely on the services of a director, can be thought of as a theatrical message in a bottle. Soleimanpour wrote the play about 15 years ago when he was without a passport for not having fulfilled his required military service. Unable to travel and fearful of what might happen to him next, he wrote the piece to communicate with an unforeseeable future.
It’s less of a play than an interactive theatrical experience. Audiences are summoned to the stage at random by the unrehearsed actor. Writer and performer Sandra Tsing Loh had the honors Sunday, and she gamely followed the script’s instructions as though presiding over an evening of charades that an oracle had dreamed up in advance.
Scenarios are acted out involving a rabbit who enjoys frequenting the circus and a ticket-taker bear who relishes enforcing the rules with all his brutal might. We’re clearly in allegory territory here, so the silliness isn’t without substance. Soleimanpour wants us to consider our own posture toward brutal authority. Do we obey in advance, or do we retain our moral common sense in the face of terror?
A vial of “poison,” introduced at the start of “White Rabbit Red Rabbit,” is set beside two glasses of water. Is this a theatrical ruse or a murder plot in process? Choices will have to be made by audience members, who play at least as large a role in the experience of “White Rabbit Red Rabbit” as the evening’s headliner.
In New York, the piece attracted a revolving door of big-name talent, including Nathan Lane, Whoopi Goldberg and Cynthia Nixon. At the Fountain, the play leans heavily on leaders in the local theater community. Rogue Machine Artistic Director Guillermo Cienfuegos, Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum Artistic Director Ellen Geer and actor and former Antaeus Theatre Company Artistic Director Bill Brochtrup have all signed up for the Fountain production, which runs through June 22.
“White Rabbit Red Rabbit” doesn’t need boldface names, but it does depend on the curiosity of ordinary theatergoers. Searching for comparisons, I flashed back to the theatrical work of Peter Handke, who in unclassifiable performance pieces like “Offending the Audience” forcefully deconstructed the spectator-spectacle relationship.
Soleimanpour is less formal in his aesthetic strategy. A more genial invisible presence, he is also a good deal more gentle than the Austrian Nobel Prize winner. A little more structural force wouldn’t have been amiss.
The performance is so good-natured about its unusual nature that it becomes slack at times. To make a deeper impression, it needs greater conviction and control. But perhaps these missing ingredients would be supplied by a different set of participants. I left the theater mildly beguiled, smiling as I entered my car and shrugging as soon as I hit the road.
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