What if Mario was one of us?
I was invited to an empty vault steps away from Trinity Church down on Wall Street to watch a preview of the off-broadway play The Dudleys! A Family Game.The play was written by Leegrid Stevens a pseudonym for the show’s co-director Steven Gridley. Gridley sat like a maestro, in a fire hydrant colored chair made for toddlers, controlling a short table overwhelmed by equipment at the foot of the performance space. The classroom sized vault was donated to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space Program by Capstone Equities. Gridley wrote the auto-biographical piece while completing his M.F.A in playwriting at Columbia University School of the Arts.
The venue was oppressively hot and left the audience reeling at the fact that vaults were certainly not created to store humans! The play centers on a mourning Mormon family before and after the loss of their patriarch. This personal story is told as if it were a Nintendo Entertainment System video game. One would assume that this is a memorable artifact from Gridley’s own childhood. The name Nintendo translated from Japanese to English means “Leave luck to Heaven”, a phrase well suited for this play about a family questioning their faith in a god that would allow such pain and chaos. They push the limits of their suburban lives in hopes of figuring out whether or not life is controlled by a greater power.
The concept was amusing and served as a solid storytelling tool, but one wonders how compelling the bare bones of this script would be not draped under this visually stimulating costume of an idea. The characters were robust as were the grounded performances of the ensemble. It is impressive to watch the cast members so honestly stay connected to their characters’ objectives while dancing like avatars in front of projected backdrops in motion. This play is not perfect, but its imperfections are to be expected when taking such theatrical risks. I cannot decide whether the scripts dependency on the concept is a problem or an ingenious choice that heightens the piece. It definitely serves as rich storytelling device while dealing with Erin Treadway’s jovial matriarch’s suicidal thoughts by projecting a health meter behind her to indicate the success of her attempts. It also adds depth to the guilt of her controlling sister in-law Meg, played by a relentless Karen Forte, while she accrues points by gunning down her disillusioned patients that chase her like slow-motion zombies.
The original score composed by Gridley and Jen Hammaker, accomplished Theremin player and member of the hilarious band Stickerbook, is not only catchy, but also haunting, especially as it lingers on some dreamy angst filled moments between Brandon Bakes and Anna Lamadrid. Gridley and his co-director, the talented actor-director, Andres Munar led the piece with a playful leash towards a solid climax. The final scenes transform into this perfect metaphor placing a devoted son in a fight with an unbeatable machine in the hopes of saving his sick father’s life.
[...] Meanwhile, in North America, a man I met through a chiptune email-list was cooking up a grand design. Emerging theatre writer and director Steven Gridley put a call out for chiptune musicians and pixel artists and animators, to help create a world that slips between the ‘real’ and that of a glitchy 1980’s Nintendo game. I was originally eager to animate many projected sequences throughout the play, but in the end the team expanded and the workload was shared nicely. Below is a showreel featuring some of the animated sequences from the play, and a chiptune score also written by Steven Gridley. Mine is the flat-looking Mario-esque sidescroller. You can read more about the show at the blog Brooklynshiner. [...]
Hey, nice to see a write up of this play! I was one of the animators who produced imagery for the NES moments. Leegrid has just posted an animation sampler to youtube- you can see it embedded on my blog, Creativity Base. Link above!