All at sea …
Katharine Sherman’s retelling of the story of Ondine opened this past week at The Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco. The play is part of this black box theater’s well-conceived experimental theater program, “Risk Is This … The Cutting Ball New Experimental Plays Festival,” which continues through March.
The story of the sea sprite Ondine has a complex and long artistic history. A novel by the 19th-century German writer Friederich de la Motte Fouqué, Undine had been adapted from various European folktales. Fouqué transformed the story into an opera with music by the brilliant and influential Romantic fantasist and polymath E.T.A. Hoffman. That story in turn was adapted into an opera by Tchaikovsky and later a ballet choreographed by Frederick Ashton. A film by Director Neil Jordan, in a decidedly contemporary adaptation, was released in 2009. A number of other mermaid-as-unloved-heroine stories, among them Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and Dvorak’s Rusalka, are associated with the story.
In Fouqué’s version a water spirit, Undine, marries the knight Huldebrand, in the hope of gaining a soul. And while it is true that in Sherman’s new play the central characters are the somewhat scaly water sprite Ondine (Jessica Waldman) and the alchemically distracted knight Hildebrand (Kenneth Toll), this new theatrical version of the story suffers from an embarrassment of possibilities. It is simply too complex.
There is the theme of love and lost love, the theme of alchemical transformation, the theme of woman’s inscrutably fishily inhuman nature, the theme of man’s search for deeper meaning, the imagery of scales, the imagery of tea and cakes, the imagery of primal matter, the metaphoric nature of elemental water in its various permutations of Mist (Marilet Martinez), Ice (Danielle O’Hare), and Rain (Molly Benson), and the should-have-been overriding theme that if love will survive it needs to stay awake.
Among others.
Any selection of these might have pulled the work into an emotionally powerful piece. But all of these strung out on the formal network of flashbacks interspersed with scenes of the present moment moving toward an inevitable future lead finally to confusion. We know what is going to happen but we’re not sure what’s happening.
This isn’t to say that the piece isn’t engaging. We engage because the mystery is so primal that it holds our collective mind in thrall. Themes shift seductively from the fantastic to the symbolic. But cleverness swims to the surface too often and finally we are left with an intellectual puzzle wrapped in an emotional enigma. Somewhere along the way the mystery has evaporated like Andersen’s little mermaid. Nonetheless, this current version of Ondine will give you something to think about even if you’re not moved by it.
Rob Melrose was the very competent director of the very competent actors. Michael Locher did the substantially abstract scenic designs, and I’m just wishing he had lowered those candelabras so that their floating jellyfish qualities were more apparent. Lighting was by Frank Butler. Megan Finley (costumes) and Theodore Hulsker (sound) completed the creative team.
– Jaime Robles
Ondine continues through March 6. For information and tickets, visit cuttingball.com.
Photo: Mist (r. Marilet Martinez) and Ondine (l. Jessica Waldman) in Cutting Ball’s World Premiere of Ondine