The title "Heads or Tails?" fittingly applies to the immediate reaction likely to come from audience members as they file out of the Balch Arena Theater, trying to make heads or tails of what they just witnessed. Indeed, the most pressing thought on one's mind as the house lights come up is a seemingly unanswerable question: "What did I just see?"
Director and assistant drama professor Claire Conceison's production of "Heads or Tails?" provides a distinctly foreign experience for the audience. This exotic feel is not linguistic; translator Zhang Fang has taken care of that for the play's English-language world premiere.
Rather, the use of poetry to express character development, the highly conceptual song and dance interludes and the truly bizarre feel of the show make the play a unique and unfamiliar experience, both intellectually and sensually.
In its intelligent experimentation, "Heads or Tails?" positions itself as a perfect piece of theater: one that captures its audience's attention during every moment of the production and leaves them talking and thinking about the experience long after it has ended.
While "Heads or Tails?" is more style-driven than plot-driven, it does focus on two stories: one of toilet factory employee Chen Xiaolong (played by junior Brendan Shea) who must live in confinement with an amateur gymnast (sophomore Elaine Harris) after an incriminating car crash, and one of Goalie, a former soccer goalie (freshman Ben Samuels) who, while lamenting his forced retirement from his soccer league, falls in love with Penguin Girl (junior Molly O'Neill).
Said the play's author, Meng Jinghui: "These two people [Chen Xiaolong and Goalie] are like two links of a chain that can move around but can't separate and can't pull away from each other."
The play's lack of focus on plot and its ultimate lack of a moral are by no means oversights by the director or author. "This is an avant-garde play that doesn't necessarily have a moral but has an artistic meaning," said sophomore Angi Kang, who plays Chen Xiaolong's wife. It is this artistic meaning, said Kang, that "makes the audience think."
The unique style makes it impossible for audience members to watch passively.
The play's vacillations from strangely beautiful and clever choreographed dance sequences to historical Chinese references to Penguin Girl's open-mic-night-esque poetry keep the members of the audience constantly wondering why they're seeing what they're seeing, whether they like what they're seeing, and why they're reacting the way they are.
The show further discourages audience passivity through the show's lack of formal boundaries with the viewer. "In this show, we welcome the audience in - sometimes directly and sometimes subtly," said Samuels.
Said Kang: "I seriously feel that at some point during the play I make eye contact with every single member of the audience."
The design decision that serves as the most brilliant metaphor for the audience's experience with the show is actually found on the floor of the stage. Painted white with grey spots, the stage is asymmetrical and varied in order to appear to be nothing more than arbitrarily chosen shapes that create a simple, minimalist stage design. If one is lucky enough to notice it, upon closer examination, the grey spots give way to abstract images of actors Shea and Samuels' faces. "The grey blotches are faces or they are just shapes. The audience will enjoy them either way," said Samuels.
Indeed, "Heads or Tails?" provides each ticket holder with a wholly individual experience. Because there is so much happening on stage, be it the different, simultaneous movements of all of the actors or the overlapping dialogue, "there are things you're going to see or not going to see," said Samuels.
The poetic dialogue also lends itself to interpretation by each viewer. To its credit, "Heads or Tails?" manages to proffer its seemingly nonsensical lines so that each audience member feels free to discard or appreciate each sentence as he or she sees fit. Goalie's claim, "If I were to take out my heart and throw it on the ground, it would make the sound of love" will sound exquisitely poetic to some and embarrassingly asinine to others, but either response would enhance an audience member's overall interpretation.
Each line, said Kang, "could mean something different for anyone or nothing for everyone."
Conceison also points out that the play will garner a different response depending on the audience member's experiences, both macro- and microcosmically.
"Some of us couldn't get a parking spot, some of us were dragged here, and some of us are excited to see the show," Conceison said. Each individual experience leading up to the viewing, suggests Conceison, will inform that audience member's reaction.
Ultimately, said Meng, the audience will "react with their instinct" to what is happening.
"This is a play that you would have to see several times to fully absorb it and fully take it in," said Conceison. She likens the seeing the play to watching the film "Airplane!" (1980), in that each subsequent viewing allows the audience to pick up on a new joke or line.
Bringing this production to the Arena was no easy feat. "Heads or Tails?," titled "On the Newest Ideas About the Destination of Love" in Meng's Chinese version, was difficult to translate "because of the style of the play and because Meng has a very unique way of expressing himself," said Conceison. "He uses very imagistic words; the English language just doesn't give us words to do that with."
Meng said that he didn't have any anxiety about the show being translated and directed in America. "If this didn't happen," he said, "your work as a writer dies."
In addition to its title change for the English-language debut at Tufts, "Heads or Tails?" also differs from Meng's own production in many of its stylistic and tone decisions. Meng, who watched Conceison's production for the first time at Monday's dress rehearsal, sees in Tufts' version "undercurrents and subtexts that I didn't see before," he said in a talk with the actors following their rehearsal.
Meng, Conceison, translator Fang and Chinese theater scholar John Weinstein will participate in a talk-back in Alumnae Lounge at 1:30 this afternoon to discuss the play and its translation for an American audience. Meng will also participate in a question-and-answer session following the screening of his film "Chicken Poets" on Friday at 2:00 p.m.
"Heads or Tails?" is a refreshing example of true art being presented at Tufts. It is at first a visually and emotionally overwhelming experience. However, the moment the audience stop expecting to fully grasp what's going on and allow themselves to appreciate the aesthetics and quirkiness of the production, the play becomes one of the most impressive and experimental pieces of Tufts theater in recent memory. The play's unwillingness to neatly hand down a meaning, moral or message is truly a compliment to the audience on the part of Conceison.
What did the audience of "Heads or Tails?" just see? Conceison isn't handing out the answers. "The most interesting thing about that question," she said, "is that everyone in the audience can take a breath and then answer it for themselves."
