Ovation Fellows are current students or recent alumni from Los Angeles area universities. Fellows are paired with a Mentor, currently serving as an Ovation Award voter, and see productions and meet artists around Greater Los Angeles throughout the year. Their articles, posted on LAStageBlog, are intended to be their personal responses to their experiences, and not as critical reviews or representing the views of LA Stage Alliance.
Marta Portillo is an Ovation Fellow from Los Angeles City College.
If you decide to see Absinthe, Opium and Magic: 1920s Shanghai, be sure to dress up for the occasion. I wish I had. As soon as you step into the theatre lobby you will leave behind modern-day Los Angeles and step into a 1920s cruise ship that will take you to your spectacular destination, 1920s Shanghai. Before departing you’ll meet the crew including two mischievous clowns. Upon arrival you’ll experience Shanghai with its beautiful sing song girls, hilarious and naughty puppets and, of course, opium laced with magic. As always when traveling there are a few safety precautions that need to be taken into consideration: mind your hands and steer clear of gangsters. In the meantime, enjoy your Absinthe!
The world Debbie McMahon and her ensemble troupe have created is something that has to be seen. It’s a colorful world filled with beautiful sequences, where fights are works of art in slow motion, puppets analyze their own existence, umbrellas turn into puffs of opium smoke, and giant dragons and rabbits are involved in epic battles. It’s also a world filled with darkness and gore. Corruption and greed drive people to commit heinous acts. It’s what I was most fascinated with when I saw the piece, the contrast between the beauty of the spectacle I saw on stage and the dark truth that lay underneath.
After the show I had the opportunity to sit down with Debbie McMahon to talk about what I had just seen on stage. She explained a little bit of the history behind the Grand Guignol Theatre. It involved a series of vignettes that were small horror plays. The middle class would go see these plays in the seedy part of town as a guilty pleasure, a way of having an adventure with a bit of danger. Absinthe, Magic and Opium isn’t straight Grand Guignol Theatre but it does follow the format in that the show itself is compromised as a series of vignettes. The troupe’s shows have evolved from performing classic Guignol shows from the turn of the 20th Century to the fusion of commedia dell’arte, vaudeville, physical theatre and puppetry that is evident in Absinthe, Magic and Opium.
We then discussed the idea behind the show itself, which was inspired by one of the pieces in the show entitled Cabinet of Hands that takes place in 1920s Shanghai and is written in the Grand Guignol style. After that, all the other vignettes in the show fell into place.
Absinthe, Magic and Opium is about an age of decadence in Shanghai where underneath all the fun and enchantment was a truly dangerous world: exciting but deadly. Now an expert in the era Debbie tells me, “Shanghai at that time would be a city you’d want to visit not live in.”And like the vignettes throughout the show reveal, there was always a price to pay for a good time and it wasn’t always cash.
