From:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/theater/in-solo-shows-lip-syncing-hamlet-and-investigating-home-movies.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share
By JESSE GREENJAN. 9, 2018
But it is “Margarete,” by Janek Turkowski, that feels, despite its deceptively homey aspect, more profoundly experimental.
For one thing, “Margarete” takes place in a small, dingy classroom tucked away among the Public’s public spaces. The audience of about 16 people is seated on a motley collection of chairs, stools and cushions. Coffee and tea are served in mismatched china.
The gesture is both disarming and thematic. It was at a German flea market, we learn, that Mr. Turkowski, who often works with found video, bought for 20 euros the trove of eight-millimeter-film reels he now begins to project. Genially, self-deprecatingly and in charmingly accented English — he pronounces the “w” in “answer” — he tells the story of how he became captivated by what are evidently someone’s silent home movies. But whose? And why should we care?
Even overlaid with lovely recorded music (by Roger Anklam and Przemek Radar Olszewski), the films do not at first seem fascinating, filled as they are with banal images of people en route to Eastern European tourist sites in what seems to be the late 1950s or early 1960s. Here is a bus! Here’s a cruise ship! Here’s a brutal Soviet-style building called (we are mordantly told) the “finger of culture”!
But the finger of culture points in unexpected directions; as Mr. Turkowski becomes fascinated with one particular figure who appears in much of the footage, so do we. She is a white-haired woman he provisionally calls Margarete, and the bulk of the play’s 55 minutes consists of his sometimes comical attempt to pin down her real identity and understand the meaning of her movies. One scene, which Mr. Turkowski repeatedly replays on a video transfer and enlarges for study as if it were the Zapruder film, suggests, at least to our credulous host, a possible spy mission at a nuclear facility. Another hints at a gender transformation.
I won’t say what Mr. Turkowski eventually discovers; the revelation may not be on the scale of a Cold War thriller but in its ordinariness turns out to be just as exciting. Or rather: exciting and sad, as old family mementos so often are. (The found-audio mystery “Say Something Bunny!” has a similar setup.) It seems that humans must look for meaning in everything — and seeing that dramatized in Mr. Turkowski’s retelling was enough, for me, to turn “Margarete,” though just a bunch of film clips, into theater. For what does theater need beyond a story and someone willing to let it unfold?
