Octopus

Tonight I saw an interesting play called Octopus by Steve Yockey. This was its "West Coast Premiere" so I assume it's been out on the East Coast for a while. You should catch it if you can, it's definitely worth seeing.

Here's the blurb:

A love story rendered through a post-modern gay lens, Octopus examines the fallout of one night of lust on four men. This universal story of love, jealousy, and commitment commingles with a mysterious telegram delivery boy and a ravenous monster from the ocean floor.

There's a lot of cool stuff say to say about this play, as well as some things to critique. Without wanting to ruin it too much, I'll just make a list of what made it really different from anything I've seen on stage before:

• The opening scene involves a four-way full-nude make-out scene with four men. The eldery audience didn't quite know what to make of it.


• The use of water in this show was absolutely amazing and truly refreshing :). Not only would certain characters show up with water pouring out of their clothing somehow, but the set itself was slowly flooding during the entire show. This becomes more effective when rivers of water start running through the main character's apartment and soon a lake pools on the apron of the stage (clear plastic walls keep it from spilling into the audience). Quite a few dramatic arguments take place in this lake, and even a few fight scenes- which is a really satisfying thing to watch on a stage, with all the splashing! It was also fantastic when and how the characters entered and exited water to mirror what was happening in the story.


• I think most post-modern writing usually tends to bring in more and more surreal things to a normal person's life until chaos spins wildly out of control and it all spirals downward infinitely until the lights go out or the novel ends or someone dies. But to my complete joy, this play takes you into the depths of total chaos and insanity, but then pulls you out with a very satisfying and not despairing conclusion. Granted, it's no "happily ever after" but it's definitely a new twist and I thought it worked in a hopeful yet realistic way. A character grows and changes, rather than just "going insane" upon realizing his tragic flaws- which I never see!! It was great.

Now to be fair, I will add a few critiques:

• It was disappointing to have HIV be such a prominent issue in this play. For a play that is being lauded as "universal" and pushed as one of the few gay-themed plays whose characters could easily be straight and have the same script, I was definitely disappointed to see how much time was spent focused on HIV. I think this play would've been much more powerful if the "unknown" was left vague and although it still tried to keep that possibility going, there was far too much insistence on correlating "gay" and "HIV", in my opinion.


• Since so much of this play was modern-day and "every-day", it would've been nice to see the dialogue also more modern. It felt "theatrical" and "formal" and that took away a bit from the believability, thus making the surreal events less shocking and effective.

But all in all, still definitely worth seeing. Check it out if you get a chance! I'm curious how other directors/set designers would handle the water- I bet there are a lot of fantastic ways. I asked the lady-answering-questions-in-the-lobby how it was handled in the Atlanta version, but she didn't know.

Lee