Mimesophobia

[August 13th, 2008]

We’ve lost a good one: Kristan Seemel, one Portland’s most promising young directors, is leaving this month to spend three years as one of just two students in Brown University and Trinity Rep’s elite MFA program (though he swears he’ll return).

Ever ambitious, Seemel has taken on many difficult, problematic plays, including a Drammy-winning production of Gertrude Stein’s Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights. His farewell show is no exception: Carlos Murillo’s Mimesophobia, or Before and After is a complex, meandering story that frequently shifts in time and narrative voice.

The play takes the form of a self-aware documentary, described by its narrators (Gary Norman and Paige Jones) as a “reenactment” of the events surrounding the writing of the screenplay of Before and After, a true-crime drama that sounds, from the pieces of it we hear, like the worst film the Cohen brothers never made.

The screenwriters, Aaron (J.R. Wickman) and Henry (Tom Moorman), are holed up at an artists retreat outside of Los Angeles, hopelessly stalled in adapting the story of an infamous murder-suicide. They meet Shawn (Brittany Burch, in one of her best performances), a near-catatonic academic who’s stuck at chapter seven of a pop-history treatise on death and entertainment. When Aaron discovers that Shawn was peripherally involved in the events that inspired his script, he commits the first of a series of horrific creative betrayals.

Mimesophobia (defined for us as “the irrational fear of slavish imitation”), though engaging, is difficult to parse. Murillo has a stack of axes to grind: Academics, filmmakers, profiteering relatives of murder victims, and even Charlie Rose fall under his scornful gaze. There are some other problems—the last scene fails utterly to make Web-surfing dramatic—but Seemel and his cast deftly navigate its convolutions. Staged with video projections and seatside speakers in the tiny Shoe Box Theater, the show feels like a drive-in movie crammed into Mary’s Club, with all the uncomfortable intimacy you might imagine. It’s weird and obtuse and thrilling—a fitting farewell from a real Portland talent.