A brother and sister dwell in a bunker. She doesn’t have a name for most of the work, and his keeps changing: Noa, Colin, Mark, Josh. We don’t know why they’re in a bunker. We don’t know who they are. We don’t know why they’re endlessly playing deadpan games of Let’s Pretend. We don’t know whether the third character, Betsy the Rubber Chicken, is a rubber chicken, an imaginary chicken, or a prop standing in for a real chicken.
Samara Hersch’s NOA got off to a promising start, with a trip upstairs to the La Mama office, which had been kitted out as a lounge room, and then a descent by rickety ladder into the bowels of the blacked-out theatre-slash-bunker in which the action takes place. The interactions between Noa, his sister (eventually revealed as Eliza) and Betsy are intriguing and often very funny, but unfortunately, they’re almost totally lacking in any sort of narrative continuity. Each successive game of Let’s Pretend, rather than focusing and resolving the story, instead adds yet more confusing details to be explained.
Both Joshua Ferenbach (Noa) and Karen Sibbing (Eliza) acquit themselves excellently in this work: in particular, Sibbing’s work with Betsy the Rubber Chicken is unfailingly hilarious. Ferenbach, an artist with a disability, has worked before with director and writer Samara Hersch in Permanence; I find myself torn between not mentioning his disability at all, because Ferenbach is a perfectly good actor on anyone’s scale, or mentioning it, because of the neat work in the piece done to make up for Ferenbach’s mild speech impediment, including careful scripting and some (largely) successful use of speech synthesis technology. The piece did have a number of issues with sound, however, most notably a 30-second-long physically painful car alarm interlude, as well as a couple of unfortunate underperformances on the part of the speech synthesis at a few key moments.
The main problem with NOA is one of reveals and foreshadowing. The art of the reveal is a fine one, and the art of foreshadowing is even finer, but in NOA, the foreshadowing events are totally lost among the barrage of events on stage: there’s no reason to suspect that Sibbing accidentally choking on a whole boiled egg is any more significant than her answering a ringing roll of masking tape, or pretending a can of baked beans is a glass of water. The result is that the work’s big reveal sort of drifts in, and the audience are left to try to retrospectively piece some kind of narrative together out of the preceding hour of signal and noise.
There’s a lot of humour in NOA – mostly thanks to Betsy the Rubber Chicken, who was a bit of a stroke of genius – and the characters and interactions are certainly entertaining. As a narrative, though, it was like being pelted with stuffed animals and asked to catch and hold as many of them as possible: disorienting, uncoordinated and probably mostly unsuccessful.
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
NOA
Written and directed by Samara Hersch
With devisors and performers Karen Sibbing and Joshua Ferenbach
Dramturgy by David Woods
Software and sound design by Marco Cher-Gibard
Lighting design by Amelia Lever-Davidson
Set and costume design by Eugyeene Teh
Produced by Erin Voth
Production and stage management by Julia Truong
La Mama Theatre, Carlton
13 – 21 December