SALLY DOESN’T KNOW WHICH WORLD TO SAVE IN BALAGAN’S NEW PARK SHOW
Balagan Theatre has misstepped and stumbled along the way in creating Sally and Thor Save the World (at Summer Camp), a new park show for audiences of all ages. An underdeveloped script creates most of the problems for a hardworking cast that is hobbled with a confusing plot, an overabundance of unclear characters, and unstable styles of performance.
Writer Matt Smith, co-directors Nik Doner and Sam Hagen and fight choreographer Ryan Higgins are noted as the “creators” of the play in Balagan’s press materials, and so it’s a little difficult to distinguish how the best of intentions went awry. The collaborators had goals for fusing many fairy tales from numerous cultural backgrounds with creation myths of the Northwest First Nations. They stated hopes of devising a “twisted remix of age-old stories.” Well, it’s a twisted situation all right, but the remix is so confusing that this audience member and many others seated in my immediate vicinity were left utterly bewildered as we tried to discern just exactly what story was being told and why.
One of our title characters is Sally (Danielle Daggerty), a determined little 10 year-old who is furious at her arguing parents for dumping her at a camp where the only activity seems to be gluing various shapes of pasta to pieces of cardboard. Sally is an adventurous outdoorsy gal; she wants to go camping for real: build fires, sleep outside, go fishing and the like. Arts and crafts in a recreation room with glue and macaroni is hardly her idea of real camping. We don’t know what problems the world might have, we are only told that Sally’s got a problem at home.
Somehow Sally flees the camp and imagines for us a magical portal in a cave. She is transported to a world that seems endlessly full of monsters of every imaginable literary source. The creators must have brainstormed an unedited list of monsters and animals: wolves, bears, dragons, whales, giants, monsters, monkeys—even an “avalanche” was somehow personified as a character. The audience might have recognized snippets from Little Red Riding Hood, Snow-White, Hansel and Gretel–but then things got crazier when Balagan added the Wizard of Oz, Swiss Family Robinson–Greek and Nordic myths, the Bible, Lord of the Rings—-Wait a minute! Where is Sally and what world is she trying to save? Where are we? Is this play about her four tests of character or does the world need saving? Could this play actually be preaching that there is no such thing as global warming?
The difference between an everywoman’s search for self-identity is a far cry from a super-hero saving the world. The collaborators might have studied Gullivers’ Travels or Peer Gynt in order to gain a firmer handle on the essential structure of this kind of quest and to help them decide what kind of play they wanted to write. With incomplete costumes and a too-spare set of otherwise clever forest trees, we are simply not transported. We don’t even meet the other title character of the play, the mythic boy Thor (Matt Fulbright) until we are more than halfway through Sally’s foggy journey.
There are some highly energized performers in the ensemble. The rich voice of Aaron Allshouse, creates a nice tapestry of characters that we find out far too late in the game are all supposed to be the trickster Raven. Ensemble member Jordi Montes was particularly adept at the style of performance made popular by other outdoor performance companies such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe and Teatro Campesino. The show could have used a lot more of the percussion that the ensemble tried to provide. But many in this Balagan show simply were not skilled in the performance techniques necessary for live music, much less for bringing masks and large puppets to life. The theatricality of the larger monsters were disappointing to me, if a little less so to the youngsters in the audience. Balagan is one of Seattle’s most innovative theatre companies. With this project, they needed to move past initial brainstorms and attend to the task of a telling a good story. Which is, after all, what they wanted to do in the first place.
Sally and Thor Save the World (at Summer Camp). By Matt Smith, Co-Directed by Nick Doner and Sam Hagen.All performances are free and begin at 2pm in the following parks:
Sat, June 30: H.J. Carroll Park, Chimacum
Sun, July 8: Cal Anderson Park, Seattle
Sat-Sun, July 14-15: Seattle Outdoor Theatre Festival, Volunteer Park
Sat-Sun, July 21-22, 28-29 & August 4-5: Cal Anderson Park, Seattle
Sat, August 11: Redmond Acts Out, Anderson ParkSally and Thor is recommended for children five years and up. For more information call 718-3245. www.balagantheatre.org