Word: clemenson
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...Flat is nominally concerned with the death/suicide/hoax of Niles--a Pynchon-like musician whose experimentations with sound and composition have rocketed him so far into the stratosphere that he can barely exist on the mere surface of the planet anymore. Two detectives, Louis (Christopher Randolph) and Pablo (Christian Clemenson) come in out of the mainstream and attempt to reconstruct the crime. What follows is a collage of random psychic violence and free association, philosophy and claptrap, all so intricately conceived that to follow it in any sort of literary sense is ridiculous. They talk about Shepard writing in dream language...
...character in itself--a totem, sinkhole and vortex of the show--but in its opening scenes the play draws the audience in with a witty sortie into slapstick and high comedy. The two detectives are something of the classically mismatched partners. Pablo is a prissy fussbudget, a wheezy bureaucrat. Clemenson flounces through the role in grand style, with his nervous gestures and his half-exhausted grandiosity (he tires before he can really come through). His gestures become more frantic, his reasoning more strident as he is the antithesis of Louis, who prides himself on his logic and dispassionate aloofness...
CHRISTIAN CLEMENSON plays this Duke with an extraordinary degree of control, and it is here that the production maintains its delicate balancing act. The Duke, a big bear of a man whose own, somewhat cheap, sense of theatrics keeps the play from dissolving completely into schizophrenia, is played with just the right measure of perverse magnanimity. Clemenson has a commanding presence, and plays the part with a nice sense of discord--the Duke seems to have convinced himself that he is only delaying justice; he wanders around with great relish, half-distracted and yet half-taken with his own powers...
...supporting cast works with the same attention to comic detail that enlivened Epstein's baroque production of A Midsummer Night's Dream last year. William McGlinn's mincing music teacher. Thomas Derrah's stuttering judge, Chris Clemenson's lumbering clerk and Albert Duclos' staggering, alcoholic gardener together cover the entire spectrum of sycophancy...
Almost every technical element of The Hostage is relentlessly straightforward, from Jon Monderer's unobtrusive lighting design to Bundy's simple blocking. Chris Clemenson's set, while extremely well-crafted, poses a major problem for the show. High stacks of appropriately beat-up furniture and clutter surround a vast, empty space, thus forcing almost all action center-stage. When actors deliver their lines from near the bed that stands upstage they are sometimes inaudible and seem miles away, "swallowed up" by that infamous monster, the Loeb Mainstage...