When I was first told to leave the theater during the beginning of “Hitting Bedrock,” I grinned, thinking I’d misheard. A repeated request, however, was hard and clear enough to let me know that this was no joke.
That demand was soon made of everyone in the audience, and within a few minutes we were shepherded out of our seats and downstairs into a basement passageway, then relocated to another shadowy space, all while carrying our belongings in bags.
This experimental docuplay at La MaMa, which relates stories of Ukrainian war refugees, loses power the longer it goes on. Yet those early moments effectively mimic the confusion felt by people caught in war’s upheaval.
“Hitting Bedrock,” conceived and directed by Virlana Tkacz, started out as a relatively benign project. In 2013, the Yara Arts Group traveled to Donetsk, Ukraine, for a theater program that asked residents to describe their dreams for the future. It seemed an interesting question to pose to those who live in an unassuming town known primarily for mining (hence the play’s title), and many were eager to participate.
War broke out in the country a short time later, and some residents fled Donetsk. The troupe contacted a number of the initial contributors via telephone or the Internet, and their updated stories are occasionally heard here in translated voice-overs, as is poetry by the Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan.
It’s an admirable undertaking, and the audience relocation scene and one in which a woman is accosted by soldiers are potent. Yet so many devices are eventually employed (among them monologues, video projections, live music and singing) that it can be difficult to grab hold of anything during this plotless 75-minute piece. Sometimes that cacophony is its aim, of course. Yet often it’s just as much a case of too much being thrown into the mix.
Marina Celander, as a refugee, and Sean Eden, as a builder who speaks about his projects in Ukraine, are fine actors, and Julian Kytasty’s bandura music fosters an aura of menace. Those three and the rest of the cast help convey the mayhem of horrid circumstances, a situation best summed up by a woman who, mired in the country’s chaos, declares: “It’s frightening to see how history is made.”
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