written, directed
& performed by Thaddeus Phillips
Performance
Dates:
January 11 - February 11, 2001
January 14th & 15th, 2002
8:00pm
The Club
$15.00
Thaddeus Phillips is an
ingenious whirlwind of a performer whose solos at La MaMa have included a puppet
version of "King Lear" drawn out of a suitcase and "The Tempest"
while splashing in a children's swimming pool. "Lost Soles" is his
saga of a tap dancer who escapes to Cuba and gets stuck there. Phillips plays
seven parts and works the lights with his hands and tapping feet throughout
the production. The play centers on a young
tap dancer from Wyoming who, just before his premiere at Carnegie hall, escapes
to Cuba following a mysterious phone call. His "shuffling off," it
seems, was ill-timed: it is 1963, the beginning of the U.S. embargo. The
Dancer fails to get work in casinos, as they have all been closed by Castro,
and then loses his passport, making it impossible for him to return. Thirty-seven
years later, the CIA sends an operative to shuffle him back. The show is set on two
long dance tables which the audience sits around. As in all of Phillips' work,
the set morphs and transforms into different scenes and places. Inspiration
for the design was taken from the colors and designs of Cuban streets, lampposts
and interiors. Video footage shot in Cuba is incorporated via a large television
set amid a surreal mirrored dressing room at the back of the tables. Phillips
employs various innovative and playful techniques to create atmosphere, from
a remote controlled 1950s car to laundry lines which hold sheets and fans which
suggest the breeze of the sea. Reviewing the original
production, Francine Russo (Village Voice) wrote, "He harnesses an intuitive
theatricality--and a background as a puppeteer--with ingenious use of setting,
light, and props....All these tricks work to enhance what's really the main
event: Phillips' reverberating feet. With a dexterity and rapidity that's dazzling,
he click-clacks up and down the tables, on a grate, over open space. To the
swelling strains of 'Rhapsody in Blue,' he leaps to his toes, he juts, he clatters.
As a dispirited waiter, he does a spellbinding swoon with a broom and drums
on plates and water glasses with his toes. Phillips taps so fast his feet are
almost a blur, but each sound is as distinct and startling as the crack of
a bullet."
