Word: screens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Night, Mother is the screen adaptation of Marsha Norman's Tony-winning stage play about the confrontation between a mother and daughter before the daughter's suicide. In simple, elegant scenes the comfortable monotony of daily tasks is made eerie and frighteningly unusual...
Running the gamut from emotional to logical to sneaky and underhanded, Thelma's efforts to keep her daughter alive move lickety split across the screen and will leave you gasping for breath. In one sequence, she goes from resignedly making Jessie a cup of cocoa--a pitiful last request--to throwing the pot across the kitchen in disgust at Jessie's unwillingness to salvage her own life...
...best things in Komachi do not happen on stage--images flashed across a large screen at the back of the stage and voices and music on the soundtrack are more powerful than the acting. Using these three elements, Banks' prelude starts off his production in excellent form...
...stage is dressed in stark white, the screen shows bizarre close-ups of fish, and the soundtrack makes it sound as if these fish are screaming every time they open their mouths to breathe. A propulsive and eerie score is then joined by a multi-voiced reading of the Austrian writer Peter Handke's Prophecy. A series of isolated and unpleasant predictions like "the flies will die like flies, the open wound will fester like an open wound" echo throughout the theater...
Banks puts another text to good use: an excerpt from Beckett's Rockabye--"Time she stopped. Time stopped..."--signals the end of the play. Both additions contribute intriguingly non-sensical asides to the production. Even better are the photography and films that appear on the screen throughout the work; they are often mesmerizing and pleasantly distracting...