Review: Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, an Old-Fashioned Downtown Head Trip

You know you’re at the experimental theater when the cast collectively greets the audience with a bracing look of disdain. Good luck articulating a pithy takeaway from this, they wordlessly challenge us with this thesping bitch face. And it perfectly sets the tone for Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, the first new Richard Foreman play in a decade, which is receiving its world premiere from Object Collection at La MaMa. As gorgeously staged as it is inscrutable, it’s sure to delight theatergoers tired of being spoon-fed meaning.

Foreman is one of the last remaining luminaries of the golden age of off-off-Broadway, having founded his Ontological-Hysteric Theater in 1968. More than any living writer-director (with the arguable exception of puppet artist Basil Twist), Foreman has been able to create an onstage world that feels completely alien to the one we inhabit, offering audiences a window into a different plane of existence. And that can feel liberating here in the 20s, when the 90-minute issue play is ubiquitous.

I hesitate to describe Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey as about anything, but a few things seem clear: Beautiful Madeline Harvey (Maggie Hoffman) is having an existential crisis … she’s not sure she actually exists. She can picture herself standing on a crowded boulevard sidewalk and catching the eye of handsome Roger Vincent (Daniel Allen Nelson) as he waits for her at an obscure café. But are these memories the only thing keeping her from spontaneously combusting?

As with so many previous Foreman plays, the playwright speaks — but don’t expect him to clear anything up.  “Suppose beautiful Madeline Harvey,” he says in a voiceover, adopting a tone somewhere between theoretical math professor and LSD spirit guide, “surrounded by her dearest friends … in a world … within which the depth and intricacy and apparent solidness of this same world were REPLACED by a very DIFFERENT world in which ALL human beings were, well, so to say, paper-thin somehow, minus any enfolded depth. Mere surface alone, even if that surface seemed so clever and quick about the intricate ways of that same-such world. Which still had, you know, NO DEPTH?” Totally, man.

Your depth perception in Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey entirely depends on your patience for such flights of metaphysical fancy. The actors speak directly at us, delivering lines overflowing with run-on hypotheticals similar to the one above. Like an expert defense attorney giving her closing statement, the intense Catrin Lloyd-Bollard is especially good at convincing us that the threads will all eventually lead somewhere. But, unlike Roger Vincent, who “fails to understand that by trying so hard he’s always missing the point,” I decided fairly early to end my game of Clue and bask in the aesthetic accomplishments of this production.

This is a chance to see a Richard Foreman play directed by someone else — specifically Kara Feely, the founder of Object Collection, who brings a retro surreal vibe to the stage that makes the whole thing feel like a collaboration between Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch. Karen Boyer’s costumes are a hodgepodge of colorful vintage looks that eventually fade to black, with everyone in the cast donning long ratty wigs. A runway-ready spin on a plague doctor costume is particularly breathtaking.

Peter Ksander’s set at first resembles a basement rec room with dusty mismatched glassware occupying metal shelves behind two bars (stage left and stage right imprecisely mirror each other, which allows Feely to stage repeating passages flipped on the other side). It later opens to reveal the full depth of the Ellen Stewart Theatre, lit dangerously and seductively by Kate McGee, with musicians Chloe Roe, Jack Lynch, and Travis Just situated on the upstage mezzanine, accompanying the proceedings like musical gods.

Just’s distorted and often menacing original music underscores this 90-minute play, lending it a cinematic quality and steeping us in a world of wonder that we can see and hear but cannot quite grasp.

I suspect that what anyone actually does manage to glean from Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey will have much more to do with the viewer than the artist or Madeline Harvey, who exists as much as anything conjured in the human imagination exists. But, like all stage inventions, she is fleeting: This theatrical dreamscape is slated to evaporate after December 22.