Performance art turns park visit into drama

Performance-art Review |

Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park is a haven for joggers, dog walkers and amblers.

You wander amid artworks, taking in magnificent water and mountain views, maybe chatting with a friend. But do you ever wonder about the strangers strolling by? And their conversations?

The ingeniously riveting piece "small metal objects," by Australia's Back to Back Theatre, turns you into a voyeur. Seated in a small, open-sided tent, you wear earphones to listen in on a chat between a lonely, troubled young man, Steve, and his concerned friend, Gary, before you see them.

At first, the show is a guessing game, about which pair of park-goers are having this talk. Once you spot them (Sonia Teuben as Gary, and Simon Laherty as Steven), they're off in the distance. But as the hourlong piece progresses, they forge a curious bond with you that alters and deepens.

Part absurdist drama, part "Where's Waldo?" exercise, "small metal objects" was devised by Back to Back Theatre (a 21-year-old company focusing on actors with intellectual disabilities) with director Bruce Gladwin, in 2005, for a bustling train station in Melbourne, Australia.

It's since been staged in airports and other public spaces in the U.S. and Europe, and is indeed a "small" work, in its focus on socially marginal people and their largely invisible dilemmas. But it reverberates on several levels.

One is the visual perspective. Gary and Steve are at first dots on the horizon against a picture-postcard backdrop; but the frame shifts as they move nearer, or farther away. When an actor plants himself on one swatch of grass, refusing to budge, he becomes a kind of human sculpture.

Also intriguing: the Pinter-esque dialogue that can be banal, fervent, funny, surreal, with gaps for odd silences. And the slender story line, about a potential drug deal with two anxious, yuppie-scum customers (played by Christopher Brown and Tina Bursill), is like "Waiting for Godot" in reverse.

This is hardly the first site-specific show to deliver dialogue and music (by Hugh Covill) via headphones. But its sense of alienation and intimacy in a public space, and low-key championing of friendship over commerce, make it special indeed.

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com