Review: ‘The White Album,’ Joan Didion and the seismic shifts of California in the ’60s
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." —Joan Didion, The White Album
Lars Jan is a Los Angeles-based director, writer, visual artist, and a former CAP UCLA Artist-in-Residence. His newest piece, The White Album, is a multimedia performance that uses Joan Didion’s seminal essay to apply a uniquely inventive approach to the intersection between observation, storytelling, audience participation, choreography, and architecture. The set was designed by Georgian Huljich, UCLA assistant adjunct professor of architecture and urban design, and her firm, P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S.
"Joan Didion’s 1979 essay “The White Album” is both a classic of new journalism and an artifact of the tumultuous period it chronicles. Composed as a series of high-resolution prose snapshots of late 1960s California, this elegant literary mosaic bears witness, in both its form and content, to the breakdown of the prevailing postwar American narrative as Didion’s own faith in the conventions of a stable, communicable reality begin to unravel amid all the radical upheaval.
Scene from "'The White Album" at Freud Playhouse. (Reed Hutchinson / CAP UCLA) Lars Jan, a director, artist and activist who practices his own discipline of collage through multimedia performance, has himself sought out the secret connections between personal history and seismic societal shifts. In “The Institute of Memory (TIMe),” which was performed at REDCAT in 2015, he pursued the documentary trail left by his late Polish-born father, a mysterious Cold War operative, in the context of the contemporary debate on identity, data and privacy in the post-Edward Snowden era.
In “The White Album,” staged at the Freud Playhouse this weekend in a Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA presentation (in association with Center Theatre Group), Jan paid tribute to Didion’s essay by having it incanted by Obie-winning actress Mia Barron, a co-creator of the piece and his offstage partner. This recitation was at the core of a multilayered production (developed by Jan’s company, Early Morning Opera) that radiated with a light hallucinatory touch."— Charles McNulty, Apr. 7, 2019
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
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