An extremely long and image-dense New York art fair report by Janet Bruesselbach

Everything I shot from Wednesday to Sunday is here.

FIRST COURSE: The Armory Show

I registered as press in advance for this and showed up about ten minutes after the press conference to pick up my badge. I briefly glanced at Pier 92, where they only show dead artists, or at least which consists primarily of resale by historical, museum-level galleries. While there’s much more interest in the first market of Pier 94, the historical gap is small.
Example:

Juan Genoves, Transcurso, 2006 detail. From the press balcony this looked like a photograph but it’s really thick impasto.

As press, I have exchanged my attention and goodwill for privileged access, and operate as free publicity for the show. But as a cultural consumer advocate in the attention economy, I now consider anyone non-VIP who pays for access to be a Sucker. If you have a blog or anything I recommend you write yourself an assignment letter or just register on their site and get in free.

Maybe my research-fu is weak but I cannot find an image of how the pier is laid out. It’s basically a T. I started on the right arm of the T and methodically went down the rows. Because there are an odd number of rows on the staff of the T you can end up redundantly walking along it this way (and thereby seeing the featured Berlin part twice), so it’s best to do the arms by row and the pier over the water in a zig zag with a little overlap in the middle. It’s easy to get distracted by something on the other side and overwalk. With the white lights and walls everywhere, my eyes got much tireder than my feet. One thing I found I ended up doing was lingering in a corner staring at a piece I found completely uninteresting, just to rest.

I felt I was coming into this one with preferences different from ones I would have other years or even other days. Some of my arbitrary rules, and why:
1. Galleries that are basically retail shops for pop art stars (Hirst, for example) aren’t worth discussing.
2. I’m sick of contempt for the audience and easy cultural critique. True, just because the economy’s down doesn’t mean artists should make collector-friendly work, but conceptual laziness just means you have nothing intellectually complex to talk about. It looks like some idiot has scammed the gallery and that’s just business.
3. I’m paying particular attention to class issues as well as ethnic politics. While the Armory is aggressively post- and inter-national, it began as an American exodus for the European avante-garde. Without contemporaneity entrenched in the Obama Era we’re just looking at aesthetic balloons.
4. Things that are difficult to transport or install are interesting. Animatronics, performances, digital media.
5. But contrary to (4), things obviously marketed towards a particular part of the market - either museums or collectors - aren’t as interesting as those that really work just for the Armory. It’s like admiring mall displays. I’m looking for what is essentially intimate public art without the effects of public funding.
6. Every year I am less and less inclined to like something just because it resembles my own field, figurative painting. There’s a lot of figurative painting that’s done either photographically or non-representationally that is to be considered more as conceptual.
7. Things that would appeal to people with no art background and anything that disregards the whole modernist project hold a certain fascination, if only because I find myself so willing to dismiss them. This also goes for “bourgeouis” or “kitsch” work aimed at a theoretical market solely about interior decorating. Many critics overlook this work because it’s boring, and it does take up the bulk of the show, but it’s the sanctuary for the many many artists who just want to make beauty. Escapism is practical.
8. I like computers and science. And environmental issues. Grids, numbers, language: these are things I look at because they’re not something I can do well. HOWEVER. I am, if not a dogmatic technophile, at least an anti-Luddite, and will dismiss anything that’s simply critical of technology/modernity/”synthetic”.
9. Unless it’s something new by a favorite, I’m not looking at things I’ve seen before, either at Basel or at last year’s Armory. There are actually repeat pieces, which looks like it would be embarrassing or at least appears lazy. It could be argued that the galleries are standing behind their investments but it’s a waste of time to a spectator.
10. I am not looking at other art blogs and I am trying to see things other art blogs don’t before I read them.

Ultimately it’s just what caught my eye, which has an average sort of attention bandwidth, and VIKI’s camera.

What struck me in particular yesterday was the sort of economy simplified by postcolonialist Ngugi as the rich stealing from the rich. Or rather, most galleries are investments by rich people who consider themselves smart enough to try to find the few stupid rich people, or to catch the rich in moments of irrationality. Hence the free flow of champagne for handpicked VIPs. I can barely speculate on what percentage of art sales are gallery to gallery. At the super blue chip level there’s little to firmly connect particular artists to particular galleries besides geography, and even that’s irrelevent when the fairs, especially in an art hub like NYC, consist of the fattest international ambassadors.

Lets look at pretty pictures now.

Okay, Ian Davis does these awesome wide-angle landscapes full of identical figures, commentaries on industrial science, but I can’t find the new ones he had up and the picture didn’t come through. Look out for “hubris” and “skeptics”.

I ran into Jack Tilton, and had a look at Roberts & Tilton, his L.A. branch, which had some Kehinde Wiley (who may have stepped on me) and Titus Kaphar, who deconstructs canvases to comment on race history:

“Nip tuck” (or “Lillian Dandridge”?), 2009, Crumpled canvas oil painting.

Markus Schinwald, Carola, 2009. 22×18cm oil on canvas. 19th century style portraits of cyborgs are a good direction (and many were made in the 19th century already)

Also at Yvon Lambert was one of those “difficult to reproduce” near-conceptual museum pieces by Zilvinas Kempinas, Serpentine, consisting of magnetic tape blown in a corner by a fan.

This is interesting because apart from context it’s illustration or at least kind of gross pedophiliac erotic art. It reminds me of Gravity’s Rainbow a bit. I apparently didn’t photo the attribution - if you know it, say it.

Muntean/Rosenblum: another of these paintings entrenched in photography, but there’s something about the children/escalator imagery and the discouragement of connection between photo and caption that has a poetic kick for me.

You know what? Because I’ve been just taking photos of labels (when they were there, because they weren’t always) to attribute, I may as well use those. Let’s try that.

It is a photo of a moon landing with the astronauts made black.
No, that method doesn’t really work.

The galleries that featured shows of individual artists seemed to be very proud of doing this - it was something they could afford to do, selflessly. It definitely paid off in attention to have an immersive, consistent space. A prime example is Adam McEwan’s “I Am Curious Yellow” installation at Nicole Klagsburn, which consisted of a series in only white and yellow, including blowups of Soviet German buttons, swastikas, and large prints of an article about an Olympic runner’s alleged gender fraud.

Peter Liversidge got a bright little room with two installations (”Come On In” of handpainted dice, and “little by little” neon) including the proposals for those installations.

The preponderance of high-hung neon was nicely deflated by a Japanese artist’s smashed neon sign near the ground.

I always like what Mizuma has, but if there’s a message to take from this show it’s that Orientalism doesn’t even work any more.

My bandwidth was shutting down in protest and I started favoring one-liners. I chatted with the Andrew Kreps assistant working under a painting consisting only of the words “tiny little microscopes” for a few minutes as a kind of high-stress palate cleanser. Kreps also featured a pro-choice piece by Andrea Bowers, consisting of a pre-Roe v. Wade letter from a shudderingly oppressed woman who had no idea where to get an abortion to a sympathetic (or maybe not) organization.

English mega-gallery White Cube featured this life-size bronze of a trans man by Marc Quinn.

What I find interesting about Benjamin Edwards (”Solo”, 2010 and already sold) is that 3-d is already, especially if done right, far beyond the glitchy emptiness he foregrounds.

Limning the differences between him and Justin Faunce is a quick exercise.

SCHNELL.

I love David Schnell very much.

I wonder if the title “world map of genreal hazards” is intentional. I rather like “genreal” better than “general” or “natural”. I don’t know who did the Scrooge McDuck but it’s excellently posed for this photo op.

South African galleries felt especially strong this year. This taxidermied farcegory had a live band playing incidental music that I saw VIPs covering their ears for.

I think that’s about all I can salvage. I don’t want to declare a judgment on the show overall, because it’s a lot of different galleries trying a lot of different tactics, and sometimes the good parts are just good and the bad parts are really interesting. I’ll do further posts on the many other venues that have sprouted up this week. There are qualitative comparisons to be made, and I’d rather not debate context or content.

Oh yeah. I nearly forgot Reid Seifer’s Forget perfume booth. They had spray, for forgetting. It didn’t work.

SECOND COURSE:Scope

I went to their offices first by accident instead of the Lincoln Center tent.
It turned out an hour was enough to go through the whole thing, though. The gallerists were friendlier but unlike its Miami incarnation this one did not provide free food and drink. Given the freebie culture of NYC, calorie constraint was wise - there probably wouldn’t be enough security personnel even with well-behaved, informed crowds.
That’s part of the sense I get of New York art conventions and fairs as consisting much more of people doing business than art tourists. Art tourism is a theme of a lot of the art, but in this city, that theme is a commodity rather than meta-commentary.

Are you imagining this? Doesn’t it taste great? David Stein’s absurd books, at Eleanor Harwood from SFO, give me an opportunity to mention the weirdness of SCOPE’s corporate identity, and the political paradoxes of art. People’s Revolution, Kelly Cutron’s PR and Marketing firm, arranged SCOPE’s VIP list and opening reception. There are multiple reality shows involving these people.

The entangling of leftist politics into the corporate intentions of a field about and for the rich is morally dizzying. The deliberate imagery of appropriation, the complications of the extraordinary inequality created by an abundance of artists of all different qualities of ignorance, layered into multiple generations of terrifying people and movements and strategies, is enough to make me wonder where I even got the principles I seem to have, and how best to shut them up so I can think about this more like the emergent poly-consciousness it has already become.

Bad boy scout making noises.

THIRD COURSE: Verge

It’s young and cheap and unlikely to rise to the prominence of the one-word fairs it tries desperately to emulate. Its problems are exacerbated by being held in a midtown hotel, which does not exactly have the best lighting. There are bottlenecks in the doors of the hotel rooms. Rather than adapting to the context and the claims of these smaller fairs to embrace “emerging” and “overlooked” art, this one resembled a particularly cramped craft market.

I left a terrific opening of sculptures by Sudarshan Shetty at Jack Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side to go to this thing. I probably shouldn’t have - Steve needed me and Jack serves food. I was hungry. Verge in the Dylan Hotel was above Benjamin Steak House and the flesh made me crazy.

There seemed to be a lot of little Japanese outfits at Verge. There was at least a comfortable middle-class feel to the thing - watching Alex at Mighty Tanaka made opening a little art-selling business look fun.

Van Uxem projects, at first glance, was a sparse and intimate vanity project, but in retrospect, Heather’s was the best use of the hotel setting, and the least commercially desperate. She projected an abstract mouthlike video on a screen beside sex toys coated in wax. On the other side of the screen, of course, she sat exhausted while her son tried to sleep and strangers walked through looking uncomfortable.

Whereas Rebecca Leyche’s Vagina Doorknobs (exactly what they sound like) were slightly deflated by their sales pitch label.

FOURTH COURSE: Pulse

Rumor is this is the best fair. It was probably worth ditching both works. Tonight’s theme: Cybernetics.

Bill Smith Magnetically stabilized, air driven, computer interfaced, chaotic emu egg pendulum, 2010. Water, vacuum formed poly carbonate, carbon graphite rod, aluminum, stainless steel, brass, wood, clay, one emu egg, pumps.
Another reason to love PPOW. They just seem to show good artists. Bill was there and very nice, very able to deal with my chaotic conversation.

Erik Thor Sandberg at Conner Contemporary.
I think what people mean about Pulse being good is that, to be cliche, it has a large proportion of art that speaks for itself.

Here’s what I came for, at the invite of the superhumanly gregarious Charlie James, who runs a damn fine gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown.

William Powhida and Jade Townsend, ABMB Shantytown, 2010, 40×60 graphite on paper
Bill Powhida is art’s snarky political cartoonist. He’ll probably unseat and replace Koons (unless we’re really post-Oedipal, and I don’t think so). He’s been working incredibly hard this year, and I don’t know why he’s not the only art anyone buys. More on this when I get to the weekend’s dessert, #class - its strength is that it’s such a relief from all the other stuff, especially the less thorough institutional critique.
Detail: “Have you seen all these grad students coming out of this giant fucking hole?”

Walter Robinson, Safe, 2009, mixed media

ALICIA ROSS. Motherboard_7 (Sacred_Profane), cross-stitch on cotton & pearled needles, 40 x 90 in, 2008
Thank you, Black and White gallery, for either reminding me or introducing me to one of those artists that makes me envious. My mission has already been fulfilled.

Shane Hope, atom_name_wildcard, 2009. These prints are made from images generated using ridiculously complicated 3-d visualization software that uses biological data. Shane Hope is a posthuman from the current future. I’d already seen his stuff because Winkleman is hosting what I like to call dessert (see Part The Sixth).

Who did the hypervirtual photo that’s on the cover of Lethem’s Chronic City? Scott Peterman, that’s who.

Laurie Hogan, Myth and Empire, oil on canvas, 2010, 48″x60″ (Koplin Del Rio in L.A.)

DESSERT:

Sunday was to be the day I caught up with the last few shows. What I missed, in order of regretting missing it:
INDEPENDENT (in the X Project / former D.I.A. building)(Art Fag City comments)
The Art Show
PooL
Volta
Red Dot, Korean, some panel on art blogging, wev.

Fountain was like a sideshow consisting of all the desperate, sad parts of the art world that all artists should be warned is what they may look like. I don’t think it was just the old dock it was in. Even the few things I saw there that I liked look embarassing in retrospect.

So I ended up in #class, an experimental project by Jen Dalton and Bill Powhida at Winkleman Gallery. It’s ongoing with seminars proposed by various artists for the next few weeks and I highly recommend going there. It is fun. It is said that the classroom, particularly in teaching art, is a utopian assertion, and yes, I have a bit of an academic fetish, but this is mine. Dalton and Powhida have already captured my cynic’s heart, their institutional critique / Marxy-Feministy drawings (where drawings mean mostly-penciled rants, lists, and charts), seperately, are especially refreshing amongst the art fairs. This kind of inside joke doesn’t work without placing itself inside its butt. If all art was like this we’d get tired of it. But still.

There was a truly involving conversation on art, school, and economics on the green board walls in chalk that made me wish I could remember more of the smart things I’ve said, and also that I could be in school forever (but also remember I shouldn’t teach). Drawings are on silent auction and bidding involves an application form.
I gave a hasty interview to “social media expert”/attention economist and former finance guy Zac Cohen. We happened by during Open Gaming, and I ended up sucking at Catan with Jen Dalton’s husband and friends. Everyone’s kids were there. Powhida showed up midway through with some story about leaving a laptop at a strip club. It was one of the happiest hours of my life. I don’t think I could have gorged on any more fairs.

I’m made nervous that everyone else there had day jobs, but better-paying ones than mine.

This shit is bananas. S-H-I-T.

by Janet Bruesselbach

Back in October, Steve Cannon called me up at work and told me he wanted to send me to Art Basel Miami. I had no idea what form that would take, and said as much, and then didn’t fully take him up on the offer until three weeks beforehand. Since I figured I didn’t have a gallery to show with, I figured I’d do a curatorial wander, make connections, and plan for future visits, or not.

What allowed Steve to send me down was, in fact, the sale of the David Hammons installation that is truly incomplete without him. The original buyer, Jeanne Greenberg, gave him a percentage of the proceeds. Jeanne’s gallery, and the gallery of another of Steve’s art patrons, Jack Tilton, would be showing there, which is also, probably, how he heard about it. On Thursday, stopping by Salon 94’s booth, I didn’t know if I wanted to remind its proprietor that her largesse sent artists to hound her. I suppose it’s better to be briefly bothered by artists than aggressively pursued by the sort of charity organizations that spend all your money to get more of your money.
Anyway, consider this a ninja gonzo report. During and after the trip I read Sarah Thornton’s 7 Days in the Art World, which colored my perceptions a bit and turned up the dial on my five different kinds of status anxiety (as artist, as dealer, as curator, as some kind of reporter, as politically aware, or rather not very) with its outsider viewpoint. In her chapter on art fairs she quotes John Baldessari saying that an artist at an art fair is like a child walking in on his parents fucking. It’s more like a child walking in oh her father making sausage with a high-class escort. Also the sausage is made of poor people. Then the father says “I’M DOING THIS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEN THOUSAND OVEREDUCATED SIBLINGS”, and then your older brother gets to give the escort a wedgie. Where was I?
On a plane, sitting next to Rickshaw Spiderman, who called everyone he didn’t like a “nitwit” on the phone. I did my best to make it onto his nitwit list. We shared a cab driven by a Jamaican woman who didn’t know where anything was. I stayed with someone I may or may not have ever met before, besides on Facebook, who moved down there from NYC to earn scary money through one of those companies that advertises skin cream and tooth whitener on the internet.
I was frozen for an hour or two Wednesday morning, and not just because of the air conditioning. Ha ha. Whoa, deja vu. Eventually I headed over to the mainland on a city bus. I sat next to a couple of dudes who were supposed to help install David Lynch’s show at O.H.W.O.W. and tried to pretend I didn’t exist, and then tried to lose me. Then I went to Pulse Art Fair being set up nearby at the Ice Palace film studio. Ninja’d in there very easily, wandered around avoiding dealers and their minions setting up (although it’s likely most wouldn’t have cared). It was probably the best fair there.
By ninja what I mean is that if you’re dressed well enough, as long as you’re neither giving or getting money out of this superfair, you are invisible. Thornton’s first chapter does not state, but implies, genders to buying and selling art, amongst collectors. By extension, everyone selling their labor is in a femme role, and the few buyers are the only butches. So perhaps it’s a very dystopian gender structure. Androgyne symbiotes like myself may still be in the majority.
I walked up Miami and ran into a warehouse that Brooklyn’s Pierogi had rented out. They had a pretty terrific show there, with some rooms dedicated to individual artists and larger rooms with multiple pieces, working well with the space. It had a recurring Urban Studies feel. I know I’m being unspecific about things I like and specific about things I don’t like. Good people, anyway.
Next were the conjoined twins of Scope Art Fair and the Asia Art Fair. Together they were nearly as large and busier than Art Basel. I believe I overheard a few collectors enthusing about seeking out Asian art specifically, in the manner of stock traders. BUY. I like Scope because they had an opening party while I was there with free rum and Cuban food.

I knew there was another party at Art Miami but I did not make it in time. I’m not sure what sidelined me - I was supposed to meet my host back in South Beach for dinner, and there were yet more galleries along the way. There were at least three satellite fairs I missed (Red Dot, Aqua, Nada). Art Miami kind of felt like the resold art that only a collector could love.
It took me two hours to get back to South Beach because they’d stopped running shuttles, all the cabs seemed to be taken, and the bus I needed left from and dropped me off half a mile north of both my origin and destination. But I took the opportunity to walk along the boardwalk and take a dip in the ocean. I ran into a couple art pro girls with a joint and they didn’t share.
We had dinner at a Peruvian diner, where I discovered that the very best Telenovela is Victorinos. Then caught the end of the Ebony Bones concert on the beach, and found that alcohol increases in price over the course of the day. We managed to join one of those outnumber-the-guard sneak-ins to some swanky hotel’s party where Santigold was playing. The chess pieces in the hotel’s lounge could not play traditional chess, but we imagined some kind of Democratic Chess with too many pawns and only bishops and knights. The goal could be to kill one’s own bishops.
Thursday I figured would be a rushed day, taking in all of Art Basel and the remaining fairs. It turned out to be pretty leisurely. Sneaking in was easy through the front and not so easy through the back, I discovered after returning from a two-mojito lunch. Basel was clearly on a grander scale but, as many have been saying this year, quantity beat quality. Still, there was plenty worth seeing in person, like Evan Penny’s hyperreal optically stretched sculptures.

I could sense that this was a deliberately staged battle in the class war, and that a reaction to the sorts of parties that are more work than work was coming, but possibly only in the form of more parties.

I didn’t take note of who made this. Oops.

As an artist, especially one traveling as someone else’s ends, I am declaring this whole thing’s teleology (art itself) unsacred. No, I do not have to report on the art. At least not yet. I have a pile of cards. I’m sorting through them. Looking at all the websites induces nearly as much aesthetic fatigue as the fairs, and makes me glad I went only as long as I knew I would be able to.

LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING

    A play by Don De Lillo

    Reviewed by Bonny Finberg

    As Aristotle stated that a man doesn’t know his life until he dies, Don De Lillo asks: what is a life and whose are we living?

    Love-Lies-Bleeding, his third and latest play, also the name of an ornate plant with hanging clusters of red flowers, is written in the compressed poetics of speech between intimates. DeLillo paints a compact miniature of the injured relationships that cluster around a life at its end. As Bachelard illuminated the poetics of space, DeLillo demonstrates the poetics of mind with exquisite force. People speak to each other as one would to oneself, speaking to themselves as if speaking to another.

    DeLillo constructs his play by containing the present action between a past moment split into the opening and closing scenes.

    In the opening scene, Alex, a 70-year-old painter, living in self-exile in the Arizona desert, is seated in a wheelchair after a stroke. He speaks, with great difficulty, about the first dead body he ever saw. He was an 11-year-old boy riding a NYC subway train with his father next to him obliviously reading the race results. He watched the dirty grey figure, its mouth wide open, bobbing to the rhythm of the moving train, unnoticed by the other passengers, absorbed in the languid routines that presumably gave their lives meaning. He was unafraid, except that the body might fall out of its seat and tumble to the floor.

    In the following scene, a year later, Alex is seated in the wheelchair, after a massive, second stroke which has left him in a hanging-jaw-coma. Gathered around are three characters: Lia, his devoted, much younger wife; Toinette, the once younger second wife; and Sean, Alex’s grown son, born after Alex abandoned his mother for Toinette. All three present arguments as to whether Alex is aware of them—or even himself—or not.

    DeLillo is a master of portraying how the personal intersects with the universal. In this way, his main character, Alex, kaleidoscopically revealed through a complex of relationships and time shifts, reminds us of the cautious attempts we make in trying to forge relationships without disappearing. Memories are brought out of the darkness through the prismatic recollections of Alex’s son and two wives.

    Toinette tells Lia about Alex’s indifference to Sean’s birth. When Sean later speaks to his father, now in a vegetative state, he describes feeling ignored, but in awe, obsessed with this still inaccessible father. He makes a case for easing his father into death with increased doses of morphine, ultimately convincing Toinette. They try to convince Lia, who wonders if they are pleading for Alex’s release, or their own. She insists that the dying have a right to suffer, that endurance is the last effort before there is nothing at all.

    Alex’s first act revelations resume in the last scene, suggesting that the past is the only present that matters, existing as it does in a timeless presence, even in our absence. Alex grasps that his early confrontation with a dead man was the defining moment of his life with a clarity that perhaps can only arise from a living mind inside a dying body:

    “What good is a life that doesn’t experience some trace of all possible lives…I mean, shouldn’t the man on the subway train, the man on a park bench who has no shoes, who’s too beaten down even to beg, sitting there, so frail and soiled-shouldn’t I be able to be in his life, be who he is, even for half a minute?”

    Here, DeLillo proposes that empathy is all—we are doomed as strangers if we recoil from understanding. Our unspoken thoughts and observations become part of our fabric and silently die with us. The only evidence of who we truly were remains in the memories of those left behind, where there is still some pulse of the details. And the details are in our recognitions of each other.

    “Loves-Lies-Bleeding” was published in January 2006. It will open in Chicago in May 2006. Don De Lillo’s two other plays are “The Day Room,” first performed in April, 1986 and published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.1987, and “Valparaiso,” first performed January 1999 and published by Scribner, 2003.

    The premier performance, by the Steppenwolfe Theater Company , will take place in Chicago April 27-May 28th, 2006, Amy Morton directing; then as  part of the Kennedy Center Theater Series in Washington, D.C from Jun 17 - 25, 2006.

    ©Bonny Finberg, May, 2006, NYC

By Evelyn McDonnell

www.evelynmcdonnell.com

A child’s leg ripped off by a runaway car in a riot. A politician thrown in jail for his peaceful community organizing. An unarmed motorcyclist brazenly beaten to death on the street by cops. Sitting in the audience inside the Carnival Studio Theater of Miami’s half-billion-dollar Cesar Pelli-designed Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts and listening to accomplished actress April Yvette Thompson recount these memories of her childhood, it would be easy to imagine she’s talking about things that happened in, say, apartheid South Africa. Or some other regime a million light years removed from Obama’s America. But in fact, these events took place just a couple miles up the road, three decades ago, in the predominantly black community that inspired the title of Thompson’s riveting one-woman show, Liberty City.

Thompson and co-writer and director Jessica Blank conceived this award-winning production in New York; it premiered at New York Theatre Workshop last year. But it came home to Thompson’s birth city for a two-week run in February, and drew crowds of both those who came to Miami long after the McDuffie riots tore the city apart and were shocked by the play’s depiction of how blatant ‘70s corruption and racism were, and those who lived through that era – and remember it ever so well. Thompson slips into the skin of the various family members she portrays, from her sexy aunt who succumbs to crack to her sometimes hard-headed activist father. Liberty City is a well-written, skillfully performed show that deserves an extended run, at either the Studio, or better yet at the Caleb Center, the community center in the middle of Liberty City itself. This is history Miamians need to see.

The next weekend (March 5-8), the Studio hosted another important performance: the Miami Light Project’s annual Here & Now festival of newly commissioned performance art. Choreographers Alexey Puig Taran and Rosie Herrera presented one work each. In Symbol, Taran and two female dancers moved energetically and frantically around the stage, at one point swinging on platforms hanging by ropes, seemingly in a constant battle to survive. The energy was impressive, but the movements were just not convincing/breathtaking enough. Herrera’s Various Stages of Drowning: A Cabaret, on the other hand, was funny and insightful. Her cast of drag queens, a little girl, gay lovers, a gamine, etc., were like a rococo photographic tableau by Miami Beach artist Carlos Betancourt brought to life. Repeatedly, women were humiliated in their performances of femininity, while the trannies were triumphant in theirs: It’s easier to act like a woman than to suffer the oppression of actually being one, Herrera seemed to be saying.

The Friday and Saturday performances were followed by a special presentation by Here & Now alum Natasha Tsakos. The creator of Up Wake gave the lecture she delivered at the TED conference earlier this year; in its wide-eyed, wow-I’m-a-benighted-liberal-intellectual sincerity, it came across a bit as a parody of a TED lecture. Tsakos rambled about the importance of the marriage of technology and theater, as if Laurie Anderson hadn’t already done that back around the same time Liberty City was burning. But the overall point of the evening was crucial: Theater has the ability to make us aware of our everyday lives in radical new ways. “Through your mask, people let theirs go,” Tsakos put it poetically.

The Arsht center has struggled financially and aesthetically. But these two shows, along with the commission of Camposition’s 1000 Homosexuals last fall, demonstrate the important role the Studio can play in housing risky new works by Miami’s growing cadre of creative performers and their producing organizations (like Camposition and MLP). Encore!

by

Carl Watson

The subject of John Adam’s opera, Doctor Atomic has been close to my consciousness and my heart most of my life, having been raised in the age of the fall-out shelters, air raid drills, duck-and-cover exercises.  In the 50s and 60s we lived with the constant threat of “The Bomb.”  It informed everything from our ideas of love (doomed love, uncommitted love, serial monogamy) to our concept of the future (no future, apocalyptic future).  Our entertainment was inhabited by monsters that were scared up out of the blood-red radioactive depths of the sea, and giant atomic men who roamed the cinematic landscape crushing cars in their fists while their faces melted like great decaying billboards for the end of time.  These were, of course, projections of the demons that inhabited the individual and collective psychology.  They were the products of atomic mishaps, human errors and human hubris, experiments gone woefully wrong or successful atomic explosions that had ugly unpredicted results.  Ultimately all this mayhem produced many a pessimistic and cynical psyche, something that is both reviled and sadly missing in today’s happy media climate full of good Friends and Manola Blonics addicts, the kind of people you see crawling the streets of the Lower East Side today.

I have been revisiting the early 60s of my youth lately as part of my studies, and Doctor Atomic came around just in time, as so often happens, when my private obsessions soon become those of the culture at large, or vice versa. Doctor Atomic, like other new operas, takes on a rather controversial and not necessarily romantic subject.  Commissioned as a modern Faust, Daniel Mendelsohn in The New York Review of Books more accurately calls it a modern Frankenstein.  The other new opera I am thinking of is, of course, the Fly, which takes place in a similar time.  Both The Fly and Doctor Atomic deal with versions of the Mad Scientist myth and the quest for the cosmic dream of power.  For any number of reasons, which I will not elucidate here, the time is apparently right for the resurrection of this typically B genre in high art. 

Unlike The Fly, Doctor Atomic especially has garnered all kinds of validating attention. The CUNY Grad Center where I endlessly inhabit the library, recently held a veritable Doctor Atomic festival with learned seminars and atomic wine tastings, etc.  Every publication in this city has already reviewed it so there is really no need for yet another review, especially since, in large part, I tend to agree with Mendelsohn’s opinion.  (One wonders why it is reviewed there since it is not a book, but this question is beyond my reach.) 

Mendelsohn sees the weaknesses of the Met version mainly in its lacking the dynamic of the earlier (San Francisco) staging.  I contend that the Met version is an improvement, although it does not mitigate the fundamental flaws of the work. Mendelsohn says the “ambitions curdle too often into pretensions,” and I would not argue with that.  However, I don’t find Adams’ music nearly as interesting as most critics; I will admit, however, that it is far more evocative when you don’t pay any attention to the lyrics, a problem I will address later.

The San Francisco (SF) version, which Mendelsohn prefers, is more dance-oriented; men in casual dress (polo shirts and khakis) sport a lightness of foot that seems, to me at least, inappropriate considering the subject. Mendelsohn likes the dance, he believes it grants an atomic motion to the staging.  Without any justification, I will suggest that such lightness perhaps relates to their moral elevation compared to the darker more somber villains of the warrior class, intent on using the bomb as a weapon. Perhaps my preference is based on my indifference to fleet-footed prancing about, but I like to think it is a matter of moral/philosophical tone. The Met’s version is indeed stiffer, which I interpret as based in group or choral motion, perhaps signifying group-think.  The contrast extends to the sets and staging. The SF landscape seems less stark, more colorful, while I would characterize the Met’s version as more noir, more sepia-toned. This difference, admittedly, is less one of fact than of memory, i.e., a projection of my memory, flavored by the monotone sets of 50s science fiction films, as well as a kind of stoic subscription to destiny by way of power. The costuming in the Met version also has a more noirish quality.  The prancing cast of the SF production gives way to stiff men wearing fedoras and suits who remind one of post-Depression gangsters pumped up on a sense of American world dominance and prosperity. Even the backdrop can be distinguished on symbolic grounds. The SF backdrop is a silhouette of painted mountains, red mountains of course, signifying I suppose, blood, whereas in the Met’s version the mountains are represented by a series of peaked sheets covering something hidden,  nature perhaps.  Or they may represent a fateful refusal to see.

Visual aspects aside, however, the biggest source of discord for me came from the core elements of words and music. Much of the libretto is delivered as recitation, which I suppose is common in contemporary opera, so it is hard to judge the performances as proper singing per se. The voices were good voices.  The character(izations) could even be said to have been good enough.  It was the meshing of the total that disturbed me -— as if all the pieces didn’t quite fit but were jammed together with an impending deadline in mind. The various elements of the opera did not seem to jibe for me; the music, on its own, without the singing would have been fine, and the singing might have been fine as well. My problem is where the music meets the libretto -—the cadence of the words never seemed to match where the music was going.  Words seemed to have been stuffed into a musical phrase that was just fine without it. In part this awkward quality is due to personal taste, especially in regards to the English language. I have never been a fan of English language operas, and this is because I can understand them.  Opera lyrics tend to be pretty corny, even downright dumb, and they have a lot more power if they are lost without translation, becoming part of the music.

This awkward quality is also due to the way the libretto was assembled.  Peter Sellars is credited with the libretto, which he admits he did not write but “collected” or rather pasted together out of other sources.  There is thus a lack of dramatic unity or narrative consistency -— it is an assemblage and it plays like one. The libretto is composed in part, of poetry: John Donne, Baudelaire, the Bhagavad Gita amongst others. Mendelsohn says that Adams’ settings of verse are generally “splendid.”  I disagree. It is, of course, great poetry but seemed out of place and out of sync.  Oppenheimer’s citing of Krishna/Vishnu’s famous lines from the Gita (I am Death, etc.) is certainly resonant but there is no dramatic context for it.  Oppie (Oppenheimer) simply breaks into this rather incongruous bit of religious citation.  The same holds true with Baudleaire’ poem about hair, which Oppie sings to his wife. And the Donne piece is to my thinking rather painful to watch or listen to.  “Batter My Heart Three Personed God,” is sung as if from a different opera altogether.  It seems to have been (like the rest of the found material) airlifted into the opera. Mendelsohn echoes my sentiment when he comments on another scene: “Oppie’s big aria of anguish feels like its been parachuted into the proceedings, and fails to suggest a persuasively textured personality.”  Exactly.  One can understand the religious relationships that Adams wants to create -— too bad it doesn’t work. Unfortunately, I found myself humming this Adams/Donne piece over the days to come. I did so as a joke on myself, a kind of Monty Python skit I was producing internally, but still such activity testifies that the piece had become a sort of brain worm you can’t get out of your head, which might be what Adams intended all along -— a psychological atom bomb.

And so lastly I mention the bomb itself -— looking something like an iron sphere salvaged from an old railroad engine factory.  The ball/bomb is in the complicated grip of some kind of electrical octopus made of wires and conduit passing through various hubs and junction boxes.  It is a fascinating and somewhat sinister object.  At first I thought it was a fanciful representation of the real thing, the product of some artist’s conception. Then I saw the photo of the real thing and realized the bomb really did look like that. Think of the human face as a ball of iron and all that wiring as an alien life form clamped onto the face getting ready to inject its own form of brain worm into human consciousness, that worm being the fear of catastrophic end times, and well that’s the picture I had in my mind even now long after the opera is over. 

Review of The Connection(At the Living Theater, December 31 to February 13. Directed by Judith Malina; Music by Rene Mclean; director of production, Gary Brackett, stage manager, Erin Downhour)

Certainly anything Piscator staged would have the same unifying thread in that one set of illustrative usages would be prominent. A character, say, Nora Helmer, was herself but she would also be a congery of class attributes, displayed in her personality, relationship patterns and actions, such as her break with her husband. According to this German director, what Nora did served as an exemplar of social forces (such as the Norwegian suffragette movement), not personal choice. In an interview, Judith Malina put it like this this: “Piscator felt that the actor was duty bound to make his or her performance an explanation of this character’s position in the social structure [and the characterization of that structure] always has to have a Marxist base.” She added, somewhat wryly, “If I have a play about pretty chorus girls kicking their legs that’s also about the social structure, because who the hell are they and why are they kicking their legs like that?”

One has to ask, though, does the Living Theatre, which broke from Piscator’s teaching in order to define a less mechanistic, more anarchist dramatic practice, show the same sort of consistency? The question is not meant to begin to reproach the group, that is, if it were claimed they were not consistent, since thematic consistency across a string of productions is hardly a major virtue, but rather in light of the diversity of the theater’s projects over the years, going from reworked classics (such as Antigone) to collectively played, audience-participatory spectacles (Mysteries) to rigidly choreographed, dance-like pieces (The Brig), to highly literate, scripted performances (the current production, The Connection). I bring this up because I believe the triumphal new staging of the Gelber play reveals that there is a deep continuity woven through their drama.

But before getting to that, let me note the knotty complexity of this current work, which, understandably, confused the Times reviewer Charles Isherwood. He does note the contradiction that appears early on in the drama when the “writer,” Jaybird, comes on stage to say, “I am interested in improvised theater,” claiming the addicts who are sitting around the set are simply riffing as they would in everyday life, but then he later begins yelling at these same actors, telling them, “You are murdering the play … you’re [supposed] to give the whole plot in the first act.” Doesn’t’ seem very improvisatory if what they say is dictated by the author.

While Isherwood grasps this, he then comments, “We are not in the realm of strict naturalism, clearly. The actors … mostly perform in a realistic style, but they break into languid or fervent confessional monologues.” But, for him to say these monologues break with realism is to overlook the fact that (supposedly) these are addicts who are being paid to appear before an audience. They are expected to give viewers their money’s worth, which realistically entails they bare their souls. They wouldn’t do this if they weren’t appearing in a play, perhaps, but the premise is that they are.

This is no side issue for the very crux of the play is to contrast two ways of being artistically creative, either through playwrighting/filmmaking or musicianship. As I see it, the acute contradictions in Jaybird’s conceptualization of this project do not arise from his own naiveté and immaturity (which are considerable), but because of the hollow heart of American drama (then and now) that has proven incapable of capturing reality in any fundamental depth.

(Of course, this position is taken in a play, but I would imagine Gelber would exclude experimental theater from his critique.)

Simply look at the presumption of the producer and writer. The producer, played with harried grace by Tom Walker the night I attended, tells us, “Jaybird has spent some months living among drug addicts.” With this background, he is now apparently knowledgeable enough to cut us a slice of life. Yet, a little bit later, Jaybird (in a fine rendering by Eric Olson), explains to us, “Remember: for one night this [drug addict] scene swings. But as life it’s a damn bore.”

Okay, but that means we are not getting a real depiction of the addict lifestyle, which would be tedious, but a neophyte’s manipulated version. Moreover, this manipulation extends rather far. Later, Jaybird explains to the viewers, “Some of you will leave the theater with the notion that jazz and narcotics are inexorably connected. That is your connection, not –” Okay, Jaybird, but every player you picked for the combo that plays in the performance is a known user. Wouldn’t it seem this selection stacked the deck so the audience would be led to this “connection”?

This is not to say that a documentary depiction that really depicted a junkie hangout would make good theater, but rather to note that Jaybird comes to the scene with a built-in agenda.

And believe me, Gelber’s criticism goes considerably deeper into its indictment of American drama. Kenneth Tynan, in his introduction to the original Grove Press edition of this play, compares The Connection to Gorky’s Lower Depths. I wonder if it would have been more apropos if he had mentioned the American drama, the one the author said he had modeled on the Russian play, namely, The Iceman Cometh.

Now, there’s a curious addict Ernie. One of the other characters says about him, “He hasn’t played that rotten horn for five years now. And him coming on like he was the great artist or something.” It’s curious because such a labeling (and the suggestion that Ernie gets high to hide from himself the fact that he is no longer a musician), is not applied to any of the other drug fiends, whose reasons for their addiction is never explained.

In Iceman – and remember that O’Neill did not spend “some months” observing the denizens of a low-class haunt, but was himself a sponging bum in a Manhattan gin mill in a waterfront tavern off the Hudson River – every single character, all drunks, is consumed with such illusions, all thinking he or she will soon get back on track. O’Neill terms it “puffing on the [opium] pipe of the past,” while, perhaps coincidentally, Ernie, the only Iceman-like personage on view, is always blowing on his mouthpiece, as if in homage to that play. But the very fact that only one character is given this background, which, on top of that, is not necessarily believable, given the untrustworthy character who makes the comment about Ernie, to me suggests that O’Neill’s way of depicting the down-and-out has been found wanting. There’s the hint that O’Neill, like Jaybird, has hoisted his own agenda on the riff raff, making them resemble the illusion-haunted people in his own family, as depicted in Long Day’s Journey.

And there’s another thing. Consider The Connection’s central plot pivot. The addicts are waiting for the man, Cowboy, to bring their drugs. In Iceman, everyone is waiting for fast-talking Hickey, who has always delivered (on his yearly visits) a big helping of hope, but who, this time, is undercut and exposed as a fraud by one malcontent. Here, O’Neill follows Gorky to a degree, in whose play a religious visionary, Luka, delivers the same hope, but when he leaves everyone falls back into despair. In the Gelber play, it seems facsimiles of both of these characters show up: the visionary (Sister Salvation) and the hope deliverer (Cowboy) waltzing through the door together. And this doubling is not the only way the play departs from the line of the earlier works. There is never any faith placed in the religious zealot, who is not heeded, while the hope feeder does bring the expected relief, the dose, and, in a significant turn, is shown not to be an intruder from outside but a user himself.

It’s hard not to think that Gelber made these changes as an implicit criticism of the earlier writers. It would seem Gelber is hinting that in the improvisatory sections of the play, despite the strictures of Jaybird, something real about the addicts life has been captured that the moralism of O’Neill and Gorky, who want to emphasize the wretchedness of the lumpen proletarian, misses. What the first two authors overlook is that the addictive substance (alcohol in the earlier plays) does offer a substantial release. In other words, as a self medication, even if the end result is self destruction, heroin is real.

This is shown, in many places through subtle staging, for example, by having the characters in the Second Act, after they’ve fixed, act and talk more coherently. Sam, played by Eno Edet, in a magisterial performance, complete with a tic of clearing his nose that adds a spooky rhythm to his speech, tells a fascinating story, that more than fulfills the promise of the previous act, where he said, without proving it, “I have quite a rep … repi … quite a lot of stories that would tickle the hairs of your ass. But I’m kinda sick right now.” And the musicians, now high, though they don’t play better, show both a greater interplay (particularly in an intimate interchange of Rene Mclean’s noble sax and Alan J. Palmer’s snappy piano) and a greater willingness to let players follow their muse. This last is shown, when Andy McCloud is playing a pounding bass solo and the pianist and sax player, at different moments, seem about to jump in, but then back off, allowing McCloud to continue the flow.

These players’ aborted moves to enter the music are not broadcast in an obvious way. They don’t strike a few notes and then stop, but suggest their intentions only by shifts in posture. And this articulate but under-stressed acting is evident in all aspects of the performance. Most significantly, as one addict steps forward to “testify” while all around him other addicts are nodding out, it might seem these stoned characters would have little to do. But, occasionally glancing around, I noted that each character, without distracting from the main feature, was doing something (or not doing something) in a way that added to his portrayal. For example, when Solly (Anthony Sisco), one of the greatest jazz aficionados in the flat, who runs over and crouches beside the piano every time the quartet plays a number, gets his shot, he becomes so entranced with fixing his shoelaces, that he forgets to listen to the music.

Of course, Malina, playing Sister Salvation, is past master of such artistry, which is taken to heights in her illumination of this role. As each person speaks, she registers on her face a tortured mix of fear, fascination and, when she seems to spy a soul ripe for saving, excitement. She accompanies whoever is talking with a facial and bodily awareness as steady as that of the combo’s fine drummer (Emanual Harrold) backing the instruments.

But, I’ve said Gelber is using the play to compare two forms of creativity, the second being music. To get to this art’s presence, let me go to the play’s high point. It’s one of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen in the theater, and it’s not even a moment but a transition. In the Second Act, as has happened throughout the night, a jazzl interlude suspends the action. However, in each previous case, the playing has taken off at a juncture or break in the action, perhaps after a minor denouncement. This time, just as an addict finishes speaking, the music spreads out, as if it were a response to what he has said. I don’t know if I can convey this, but it’s as if the characters’ hopes, blues, rivalries and contretemps are being replaced by a mold of sound. And, further, it’s as if we now see that, yes, there is a connection between jazz and the addicts’ world. The link is that this music – at least when played with the virtuosity of Maclean’s group – can capture the effervescent skein of feelings and dynamics in this world, ones that, as we saw, in the face of which (establishment) film and theater are bankrupt. The whole play turns on providing this contrast between jazz, that can make the scene, and film/writing that can’t.

It may not seem so, but now we’re back at the beginning. For what I can now say is that, thought with radically different politics, the Living Theatre has been guided as if by a kind of organic Piscator.

How do I mean this? Anarchism has had an eye to unmask a much greater range of authoritarianism’s guises than has been possible in a Marxism (like Piscator’s) that is simply focused on the class struggle. Yet both theaters are concerned with this unmasking. The Living Theater looks at different forms of oppression, whether those channeled by the state (Antigone), the military (The Brig), the media (Anarchia), the economy (Capitalism Changes), patriarchy or controlling forms of art (The Connection). And each examination has included a tremor of hope. So, in The Connection, over and above the oppressions of poverty and conformity, which seem to draw the men into addiction – there are no women addicts in the play – and beyond the compromised and know-it-all practices of writing and filmmaking, which would depict a world these arts have already prejudged and pre-condemned, there is the tremor provided by jazz. This music can fight past the limitations of the milieu and crystallize its feelings in lively, lovely forms.

Even when it seems so, as it might in The Connection, the Living Theatre’s message is not rendered in personal terms, and this another reason why its dramatic thrust links it back to Piscator. It’s true that characters are rendered with unsurpassed insight. Think of the suavity of Cowboy (Jeff Nash), which suddenly plummets when he removes his shades and thinks of his past. Recall also the harbored, maternal surliness of Leach (John Kohan) or the coiled vigilance of Ernie (Brad Burgess). These are all well etched, unforgettable people, and yet the final impression one comes away with is the different modes of groups: the addicts as ground, the filmmakers/writer, who are the authority figures (yelling at and ordering the addicts around, since they are paying them), and the musicians, also hired hands, but ones who, at times, can anarchistically break bounds by suddenly wailing in the night.

That is the vision.

   “….how government deals with culture

as a distraction from its own pornography.” – Richard  Serra

Here we are well into fall and there’s so much catching
up to do so let’s begin where I last left off with a brief list of
gigs I witnessed, before getting to the heart of this article.

There was the Zorn – Lou Reed duo which culminated with guest
appearances by Mike Patton, Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori, followed 2 nights
later by Zorn, Reed, Ribot and Milford Graves who played impeccably and
tastefully throughout the night and who during set two when Reed
joined in, actually seemed to enjoy being “the drummer in the
band”.This was originally supposed to be a trio of Zorn, Milford and
Bill Laswell but Laswell fell ill and couldn’t make it. These events
took place at a new venue with a very eclectic menu on Bleeker
Street called Le Poisson Rouge which was the bottom part of the old
Village Gate, a club where I had enjoyed many great shows and where I
now intend to enjoy many more. Another recent “Rouge” event I loved
was blues and jug band greats Geoff Muldaur and Jim Kweskin .

Other moments were the warm hug by Kim and Thurston
during the Sonic Youth gig that closed McCaren Pool’s concert series
(the pool will again become a pool and I can’t wait to take a
dip.)
Finally got to hear Wolf Eyes on this program and am still
absorbing them.

Heard the master Lee Konitz interviewed and in duo at Joe’s Pub.

The ICP Orchestra as part of Tonic’s series at the Abrons
Art Center and a fantastic panel discussion at the Bowery Poetry
Club on punk rock by former members of Television, Suicide, the
Heartbreakers, the Slits, etc. This is music I know nothing about
but I learned alot about the political, social and dress code
urgencies of the times and some major differences between
British and American punk. And wow, that Slits chick really slammed
Richard Lloyd. But that’s a whole article by itself.
Now on to what I really wanted to discuss: The Living Theater vs. HAIR.

Improbable comparisons? Not really. First I want to say that the benefit for

the Living Theater at Joe’s Pub,“Revolutionary Acts”, was a sold out affair.

All the performers were basically cabaret and musical folk and though some carried
anarchistic messages in their somewhat funny and theatrical performances their styles

as with the style of HAIR were completely antithetical to what the Living Theater stands for,

though it ended with Judith Malina reading some of her poetry. But it’s the similarities

between Hair and the Living Theater that I want to deal with, the spirit of counter culture
rebellion and the messages that both HAIR and the Living Theater have to offer us.
Though the one (L.T.) is intellectual, high art and the other (HAIR) almost an anti-intellectual,

popular musical  ( fundamental difference being the use of song as vehicle),

they both gives us ensemble players that offer up an anarchistic, pro sex, pro drug,
anti-war palette with other parallels such as nudity, group sex and the pitfalls of so called

democratic (actually oligarchic),“organized” if somewhat fascistic  government.

The authors of HAIR, like the principals of the Living Theater, come from the

experimental roots of theatre. In HAIR one can see/feel parallel moments to such
Living Theater productions as Mysteries and Paradise Now. Also throughout
HAIR, as with most Living Theater productions the audience is constantly being engaged.

Though both are concerned with the way folks react to the material presented

and how that material relates back to the audience and are both willfully,

as with most good art that is not made for its own sake, interested in the activity

as well as its result there is one major difference, aside from the festive catchy pop/rock
atmosphere of HAIR. In the production of HAIR at Shakespeare in the Park the
character who gets drafted and sent to Vietnam (the draft being one of the

only differences between war then and now) dies and is laid out on an American flag

toward the back of the stage. The cast immediately gathers starts singing “Let the Sun Shine In”

and encourages the audience to sing and dance along. The “victim” is completely upstaged, in fact

almost blotted out, forgotten. If this were a Living Theater production, say, as with the end of
Mysteries, we would be left with that dead body to think about and not good
hearted optimistic merriment. Yet, though many of their processes differ many of their

approaches are the same and it’s very interesting to watch them unfold and calculate where, at
certain points “structure and content” of both ideas become “identical.”
I prefer the Living Theater’s approach, though a good song and dance never hurt anyone.

I can say however that despite its happier moments HAIR might just be the one of most anti-war,
counter-culture plays to come along and one that finds itself wrapped up nicely
in a perfect pop culture package and tied off neatly with a yellow ribbon.
This fall look for HAIR on Broadway and the new Living Theater production of Eureka,

the late Hanon Resnikoff’s adaptation of Poe’s epic poem.

And while you’re looking remember that LIFE,like modernism,

though it ends at times, is anti-durational so listen with all your senses.

Review of Maudie and Jane at the Living Theater

Aside from jingoistic battle hymns, fairy tale romances and major league sports, one of the central props of the mass media’s impoverished offerings is a poisoned humanism. One can easily picture what the extraordinary play at the Living Theater, Maudie and Jane, would have been if the writer, director and actors had wanted to create a work in this category. (I am noting this only so as to be able to subsequently show how valiantly Maudie and Jane repudiates the reigning pseudo-humanism.)

If the work had been written this way, the magazine executive Jane would have been (eventually) elevated by stumbling into the reclusive, miserable old lady Maudie in the pharmacy. She would have begun to sympathize with the elderly woman, then realized that she (Jane) had repressed her own life-affirming traits, which now begin to flower in the embrace of this downtrodden figure. Jane is reborn, in such a version, and goes back to reform her corporation.

This theme, that of a hardnosed, repressed insider who is taught to “smell the daisies’ by an eccentric outsider has been the subject of innumerable plays and films, from Herb Gardiner’s A Thousand Clowns (the masterpiece of the genre) on to The Dead Poets’ Society to Irma la Douce and The Madwoman of Chaillot.

And it is always a lie. For one, it avoids the reality of social problems by, using the imaginary case we are considering, representing all indigents in one person whose mission is not to further her own life projects so much as to aid a repressed bureaucrat or corporate underling to improve her own existence. And, even aside from this and other alibis contained in such works, the topic has now been so worked to death that a current production can only evoke a response from the audience through Pavlovian means.

But now let’s talk about how the Living Theater handles the subject. And, to start, we can rewrite one of Althusser’s most celebrated lines, substituting for the word “Marxism” in this way: Anarchism is not a humanism.”

Maudie and Jane, which superficially follows the oft-rehearsed plot line of regeneration through slumming, is actually deadset against it. The play’s premise is rather that, if such a friendship between high and low were to arise, it would not solve Jane’s work problems, would not make her a better person outside the singular connection to Maudie, and would not diminish the crushing injustice of society.

The second point is the most important. Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns or Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society, each playing the eccentric, do not alter their personalities. They are present only as catalysts to inspire the uptight character. In Maudie and Jane, by contrast, the drama is divided between the characters; each of whom is closed off by different doors: Jane by the siege mentality of the corporate office where protecting one’s turf is key; Maudie in reaction to having been betrayed by her husband and mishandled by social agencies. The play’s question is: Can they establish trust, which entails each becoming less defensive and dropping some treasured prejudices.

Moreover – and here’s the greatest rebuke to Hollywood humanism that can be imagined – because the two are from different worlds and speak incompatible languages, they cannot grow close by means of grasping each other’s verbal meanings. They have to approach through the physical, via action.

No matter how sick Maudie is, having a coughing fit or pissing her bed, she still makes Jane tea. And Jane shows her solidarity by her own actions: washing Maudie’s floor, changing the kitty litter, even bathing the older woman in a scene of tremendous visceral force.

And, note, voice-over narration is used to astutely suggest, in line with this theme, the disvalue of words as methods of building contact. Each time Maudie or Jane grow physically closer, one hears a voiceover disavowing the sympathy. Jane is saying, for instance, something like, “What am I doing with this woman? This is the last time I’ll ever spend time with her. I hate her.” Meanwhile, their ties deepen.

As to the actresses, with Judith Malina as Maudie and Monica Hunken as Jane, since it is the physical that primarily draws them closer, each must convey the pair’s (always wary) intimacy through gestures, mincing steps, sounds, head wags. The moves have been so perfectly chosen and played, with such expressive grace, that I (who see a lot of theater) can’t help but say the two women display the consummate displays of acting we are likely to see this generation.

But, to return to the argument, the increasing devotion of the women to each other does not improve Jane’s work life (as it would in a humanist version). Instead of reinvigorating her for the corporate realm, she quits her job.

And it does not improve class relations in Britain. In another flourish that makes against besotted humanism, when Jane finally gets Maudie to leave her flat and visit the park, after observing the birds (as they would in the Hollywood version), the women note the wrecking ball demolishing a building and leading the charge to level Maudie’s neighborhood.

All in all, the work moves at a remarkable level of intensity and headiness, reaching, at points, as at the bathing scene, to the power of a fully realized sacred ritual. By violently breaking with the saccharine conventions of a humanist treatment, the play is able to register new, emergent levels of feeling

But why do I call it (in citing Althusser) and now label it a supreme anarchist work of art? Because it presents one guiding (near blinding) truth of the political movement. That the moment one removes – dares to remove – the authority lines that govern all human relations in capitalism, for instance, the lines that declare the rich Jane can have no concourse with the indigent Maudie, then two people can, unprecedentedly, meet face to face and give birth to gut-wretching hope.

Martin Reckhaus, John Kohan, Jessica Slote, and Sheila Dabney in “The Man who Appear**ed.” photo by chantel cherisse lucier

Gaze and Affect: A Review of “The Man Who Appear**ed.”

By Anitta Santiago

“The Man Who Appear**ed.” a New Science Production now running at the Theater for the New City brings a remarkable innovation on meta-theatricality. The premise is a film adaptation of Clarice Lispector’s short story, “The Man Who Appeared.” Not exactly the Kaufman-esque meta-theatricality of adaptation that turns the camera on the filmmaker to tell a story, the play brings film into the theater to do what film cannot do for itself: it turns the camera on the viewer—literally (but more on that later) to probe how we access a story at all.

The first thing the audience encounters is a wall with three windows, a door, and a screen framed like the windows (set design: Gary Brackett). Throughout the play, actors appear at each opening while the screen shows images, mostly of the action at the center window, so that one is always looking through frames, through the wall, struggling through all the frames to get the whole picture. The screen images are further complicated with overlapping images of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and filmed scenes of the adaptation, putting on display how mediated our experience is.

The actors work through this meta-theatrical, hyper-mediated production seamlessly, each participating in the latticework to produce a crystalline performance. Sheila Dabney plays “the Woman,” Lispector’s main character. John Kohan appears as the “the Man” or Claudio Brito, an old friend and poet from the writer’s past, now a drunk. Martin Reckhaus, Jessica Slote, and Asoka Esuruosa complete the cast as the director, the writer, and the cinematographer, respectively.

There are these wonderful moments with Reckhaus and Esuruosa where the audience is unsure if the “mistakes”—such as a lost feed—belong to the play or are “really” happening, a way to make that meta-theatrical questioning of the “real” really present in the technological absence. One could go into a Zizekian contemplation here, but I won’t. The distinctions between the real and artificial, always complex in the meta-theatrical are, in any event, here more complicated.

On the one hand, the actors playing actors explore the artificiality of performance. In the most repeated scene, the Woman encourages the Man to cry. “Off camera,” we have seen the Writer give the Man tips on how to cry, delivering his line “And here I am, drinking coffee and crying.” We have heard these lines delivered and immediately recovered from after the Director shouts “Cut!” and while these are humorous, self-conscious meta-theatrical moments, they are made more bewildering by the fact that we feel the lines more and more as they are repeated.

In another scene, Dabney walks through the door delivering a monologue, with the cinematographer filming and repeating every line she says. The repetition of the words with Esuruosa’s subtle inflections gives them a new import, so that they do not seem to belong solely to the Woman. The words take on a life of their own, telling, as it were, their own story. Every time the Writer repeats the lines “it’s a terrible impotence not knowing how to help,” they ring of deeper sadness and impotence, as though the words themselves confess that confessing impotence does not alleviate the impotence.

Similarly, the “mania for offering people coffee and Coca-Cola” gets repeated in a meta-theatrical wink in a scene between the Man and the Woman “off camera.” The Woman offers and serves the Man Coca-Cola, not as Lispector’s character, but as herself, and says of herself “I’m very simple. There’s nothing complicated about me”—blurring the lines between actor and character, and winking to the audience that there is something indeed very complicated about her, about all the characters/actors, about the status of person in general.

It is the repetition and recycling of lines among characters that seems to move the story forward. Repetition becomes the greatest deliverer of the lines, a character unto itself, not as a single entity, but as the entire cast and action and scene combined.

Dabney’s stellar performance is the unquestionable centripetal force that holds the gamut together. In one of the most moving scenes of the play, the Woman sits at the center window and, as the Man moves about in the background repeating in variations “you’re beautiful,” her eyes gradually well with tears. The Director calls ‘Cut!’ The Woman wipes her tears and the scene is rearranged, but the heart-wrenching feeling they produce in the spectator, or at least in this spectator, remains, and is real.

We try throughout the play to get a look at the whole picture, through frames and winks and feigned crying and real tears. “Look” and “wink” and “tears” are all optical words, and there is a powerful description of a game the writer plays with a cashier at a store, looking in her eyes to discern the person. We are told that the effort is futile, that the eyes are blind, that people are statues.

One of the central questions this play makes us ponder is how do we access a person’s story, how do we access another person? There are moments when the actors at the windows are doing nothing but looking at the audience. Generally, we come to a play prepared to look. We do not come prepared to be looked at. In one scene, the cast gathers around the camera, turned on the audience, approaching the audience, with the audience, then, appearing on the screen. This turns the gaze, the familiar trope in film criticism, back on the audience. As with the Woman’s tears, the reality of affect is in the audience.

In a play where the story is delivered through repetition and recycling, one cannot locate a narrative progression. It is not how the plot moves that is the focus here, but how the audience is moved. Theater can turn the camera on the viewer because the viewer is present. It can look at the viewer as the viewer looks at it and, with the innovation of the camera in theater, the viewers can see themselves looking. In this mutual gaze made possible by the theater, we access the person, because the person is you. This play accesses you and you are moved. This viewer was certainly moved.

“The Man Who Appear**ed.” Playing at the Theater for the New City.

Produced by Gary Brackett

“…a complex, witty interplay of reality and illusion….The setup leading
to this conclusion occurs in the first, breathtaking scene.”

Sheila Dabney and John Kohan perform “with riveting power. It takes one’s breath away….staples you to your seat with the raw honesty of the emotion.”

“The set is stunning.”

“It’s like being inside a poem.”

FOUR MORE PERFORMANCES of “The Man Who Appear**ed.” a new production from
the creative team of Gary Brackett, Martin Reckhaus, and Jessica Slote

Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave (between 9th and 10th Sts.)
March 6 through March 9 Tickets $15
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 3pm

LIMITED SEATING. Make your reservations now. Call 212 254-1109 or buy your tickets
online: http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/appeared.htm

Review of The Man Who Appear**ed
(playing at the Theater for the New City, Thursday through Sunday, Feb. 28 to March 9, 2008)

Putting pretentious claims aside, I don’t think there has ever been a literary Cubist. Gertrude Stein is the writer most often denominated one, but this was more because she was in the same milieu, indeed, helped support the milieu in Paris, shared by Picasso, Braque and others in the school, than because she adopted a similar stance in prose.
I bring this up because a new play, The Man Who Appear**ed, by Gary Brackett, Martin Reckhaus and Jessica Slote, does recapture the essence of that art movement: its energetic shuffling around of a pulverized reality.
To follow the interpretation of art critic John Berger, the Cubists’ re-viewing of café tables, people and guitars had nothing to do with seeing their surroundings as many-sided and fluidly assembled (although this is the reading the art is normally given). For Berger, the crucial fact is that this art movement arose in a period (1908-1911) when a heavy tide of socialist and anarchist protests, uprisings and propaganda flowed through society, casting doubt on the longevity of the reigning capitalism. Ergo, Cubist painting showed a scene that was unstable because of the future. The painters thought it was possible business civilization was on the verge of disintegration, and that it would be replaced by council communism or cooperative anarchism. Nothing in the present, they thought, was anything but an outline, since its anchor points were about to give way.
Brackett/Reckhaus/Slote have applied a parallel Cubist view to a straightforward short story by Brazilian writer Clarisse Lispector (possibly because they share with the Cubists a sense of the fragility of contemporary social arrangements). They have applied it with this difference: Where the painters presented an individual object as a set made up of itself seen from different perspectives and in varied relations to other objects, all layered and collaged together, The Man achieves a similar effect by taking a single event — the chance meeting of old friends (one of whom, the woman, has become a successful writer, and the other, the man, a derelict) — and makes this the plot of a film being made. From this vantage, individual moments between the characters can be done more than once (to get them right), put in a rearranged sequence (since films are generally shot out of chronological order) and discussed by the actors (masks down) as they consider different ways of portrayal.
Such a basis for the unfolding tale makes for a complex, witty interplay of reality and illusion. In the role of a friend (Slote) tells the woman (Sheila Dabney) she should have acted differently in her encounter with the man (John Kohan). Later Slote (out of role) advises her fellow actor, Kohan, on a different way he might play his role in relation to Dabney. Thus, Slote’s two parts (playing an actress and that actress in part) humorously intertwine.
But to be entranced by these interlocking levels would be to miss the deeper-lying, more painful truths at the heart of the play.
If in Cubism the whole object world is shattered to show its possibly temporary existence, these writers suggest that human connections in our time are so hollow and shallow that they can only contain passion and validity if they are re-imagined (taken apart analytically, that is, shattered) and re-lived.
The setup leading to this conclusion occurs in the first, breathtaking scene. The audience is not facing a stage but a wall in which there are two small windows, one larger one, a door and a screen for projections. Dabney comes through the audience, goes in the door, and takes a chair, back to us, inside the bigger window. She is on a riser. Below her we see an empty space and, further upstage, a row of chairs. Although this is not the case, at this juncture, it seems as if we are about to view a drama over her shoulder. So, the feeling, right off the bat, is spooky, uncanny, suggesting the spectators will experience the whole play at second remove.
To repeat, then, the play’s point, that nowadays rich emotional ties can only be created through very thick mediations, is established here. It’s an idea that can be taken either negatively (underlining the insufficiency of our humanity) or positively (that this way forward can lead to a new level of experience). In any case, three scenes of magnificent power graphically show what so far might seem a rather abstract concept.

1. Dabney and Kohan sit closely together (in character) as she tries to convince him to regenerate himself. He looks listless and diffident while her face is filled with regret, compassion and concern. Here’s the surprise. Kohan faces the audience through the window. Dabney is totally turned away, facing the film’s camerawoman Asoka Esoruosa. Dabney’s face is seen projected on the wall screen, etched with feeling but flattened, mediated.
2. Slote with a seen-it-all, deadpan voice tells Kohan how she thinks he should play a part of the dialogue. Suddenly, she goes into character, his character, and her voice and face ignite with heart-wrenching unhappiness. Reenactment complete, she goes back to Buster Keaton.
3. In a tour de force à deux, Dabney and Kohan act out the scene where the derelict breaks down under the touch of his ex-friend’s solace. They do the scene with riveting power. It takes one’s breath away.

The director is not satisfied. Play it again. Astoundingly, with a reinterpretation of gestures, the second run-through is even more electrifying.
Again, not satisfied. Act it again. The third, and last, version staples you to your seat with the raw honesty of the emotion.
Yet, unsettling enough, this sequence hints that people only reach the emotional truth of their situations through repetition (something not very viable in daily life) and, moreover, more startlingly, a person seems more likely to sound her or his own depths in playing a (contrived) role not in everyday interactions.
I should say, by the way, about this pitiless director, masterly acted by Reckhaus, that he is the only person on stage who seems carried away and convincing in everything he says – that is, he never adopts the deadpan stance. But, here’s the rub. His words are almost never heard. He is talking under others or whispering instructions, so his feelings only appear in his gestures and on his expressive face.
Perhaps, I’ve already said in so many words that the set is off-putting but stunning; the lighting and screen insets well done, and the acting on-key, nuanced and strong. After all, only acting of such trenchancy could balance the intellectual complexity of this rethinking of the Cubist figuration.

“Chaos”

Directed and written by Coline Serreau

(in French, with English subtitles)

 

Director of photography, Jean-Franois Robin

Edited by Catherine Renault

Music by Ludovic Navarre

Production designer, Michle Abbe

Produced by Alain Sarde

Released by New Yorker Films

Running time: 108 minutes. This film is not rated.

 

Cast: Catherine Frot (HŽlne), Vincent Lindon (Paul), Rachida Brakni (NoŽmie/Malika), Line Renaud (Mamie), AurŽlien Wiik (Fabrice) and Ivan Franek (Touki).

 

Not A Whore’s Life

 

review by Norman Douglas

 

“It was a dark and stormy night…”

{ –Snoopy }

 

 

Knowing at least that this film promises to deliver some kind of feministic slant, I spend Friday afternoon and evening trying to get a female to see it with me, but I strike out. The five women I manage to ask have other plans: one needs prior notice, so it’s too late to ask her; another has to work in her theater, and will only be through at midnight; a third only wants to get wasted and bother some guy friend of hers; the fourth is sick in bed and has to work early the next morning; the fifth lives in Jersey City and doesn’t want to be in the city on Friday night. I phone three others, but two never return my call after I leave a message, while the third has given me her business card with a bogus phone number (a rather elaborate foil for would-be cranks, I might add). Thus, I enter the Angelika round midnight alone, and when I ask the cashier for a press kit, she has to call the manager because she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “What’s that?” she asks the other ticket-girl with a look as puzzled as it is annoyed. “I’on’know,” comes the sneered reply, cutting her pretty, made-up eyes at me, the next in a long line of way-too-nerdy-assed filmgoers she’s learned not to deal with. The manager arrives to tell me they have nothing (a subversive comment?), so I suck down a Chesterfield cigarette on the steps outside, then descend the steps inside - the down escalator’s broken - to await the screening. During previews, the light on the projector cuts, so I’m screaming at the empty booth while the other members of the audience try to decide whether or not they should fear my cries of “Give up the light or gimme my money back!” After two entire previews, he responds (I see him through the window), and I sit through six more previews, each one terrifyingly unappealing, all selling the same film with six different titles. At least, that’s the way it seems.

 

Finally, Chaos starts, its opening shot positioned behind the principle actress in a brown evening gown, her alabaster shoulders bare as she looks in the mirror, primping herself. Despite this patently nineteenth century opening, Chaos is shot in France during the year before 9/11, and presumably takes place somewhere during the three to five years before that political milestone. Within thirty seconds, the milky flesh of Helene is draped in a wrap, and her husband, Paul, races to an “important” dinner with Helene in the passenger seat of their de rigeur European compact (at least one can never blame European films for promoting SUV-chic). Through the windshield, we see a desperate young woman wearing the black garb of the night hurtle down the street toward the auto, a trio of enervated riff raff hot on her heels. None too keen on “getting involved,” Paul acts decisively. “Lock the doors!” he orders his not so decisive woman. Dithering, she obeys, her eyes racked with guilt and shame, biting her lip. The montage is relentless, abrupt - and will remain so for the rest of the film - cutting to the windshield as stop, the young brown-skinned woman’s face slammed into it, thrust down by a snarling, black leather-clad punk’s gruesome power, blood spattering like a slice of steaming hot pizza dumped on the linoleum. “Help!” chokes the wretched, scantily clad slut as the pimp yanks her hair and her already mangled snout jerks up, only to be cast down under the horizon of the hood, at which point the other two thugs commence the familiar spasms of the upper body that suggest the act of kicking. The pimp leans at Helene’s window as Paul presses the button to raise it, “She’s crazy,” the procurer grins. He then turns to the unseen woman and cries, “Shut up!” Sirens are heard and Paul screams at his wife, “The police!” and throws his car in gear. He worries about the blood on the windshield and explains in his agitated roar, “We must find a car wash.”

 

Cut to the car wash as the credits roll through the names of the main cast and crew to the director, and then cut to the TGV (the high-speed train) station, as an old woman, Paul’s mum, Mamie (pronounced mom-EE), debarks. Now cut to the apartment as Helene and Paul dress for the day. Paul’s mum arrives, he hides, Helene lies for him, mum leaves, Paul leaves, mum hides under the stairs and sees him. The next scene repeats this deception, as Helene visits her son, Fabrice, who lives with Florence, his girlfriend. The principal characters introduced, Helene visits the hospital where the whore is comatose in the ICU.

 

More than a Greek tragedy, Chaos reads like a botched send-up of expressionist drama, which hardly means it owes a great deal to that expressionist tradition. In a sense, its creators have managed to ape the rhythms and style of expressionist narrative, while turning that spirit on its head. In the end, Chaos is not an assault on the absurdity of established order, though it makes this pretense. Veteran film critic Stephen Holden of the New York Times calls Chaos “a gripping, feminist fable with a savage comic edge,” which will undoubtedly color other peoples’ opinions, but this isn’t the kind of feminism I’m schooled in, though I suppose it takes all kinds. I’m not sure which men should feel “momentarily ashamed of their gender,” though I’m probably biased, and missed the “film’s unrelenting contempt for male ego.” Even if those are feminist goals, I believe the film had other, darker motives.

 

Ultimately, Chaos is a Horatio Alger myth disguised as social satire, but then, that myth is absurd in itself; expressionist plays like Durenmatt’s The Visit and von Kleist’s Broken Jug - among others - argue that, if only implicitly. A rags to riches thing, a CanalPlus (the French Miramax and cable network) affair, a modern Cinderella story in French - not unlike Leonardo as Romeo - Chaos follows this brutalized woman to recovery, then tops it off with every prostitute’s revenge fantasy come true, if prostitution is the oldest profession with every other job modeled after it.

 

Indeed, Helene is the vehicle for the audience’s identification, with her Married with Children menfolk, Paul and Fabrice, bungling their way through domestic “anarchy,” the film presumes that a middle class and white perspective is a universal. In one of its many simplistic potshots at contemporary lifestyles, a scene peopled with the “real-life” adolescent mŽnage - Fabrice, Florence, Charlotte - presents TV in the background airing a sitcom with the kids’ garish “familiars” in clownish make-up. By contrast, Helene is not the Mrs. Al Bundy of that seminal Fox offering, but rather the slack-jawed, self-effacing cousin of Colista Flockhart’s Ally McBeal character, that is, whenever she’s not biting her lip. A kind of saint who is through serving the devil’s brood, Helene discovers an avenging angel in the battered whore with two names, Noemie, Mikaila. Thoroughly uniting her darkest powers with her creative force, this angel Mikaila is a fighter since youth, rejecting first her commodification as a woman by her father, ultimately surmounting and getting even with all the tormentors of her past, including the recent past: Noemie even manages to get back at Paul and Fabrice for her new pal, Helene, who observes the process with her usual vapid mugging, switching between frowned overbite and slack-mouthed grin, poor thing. What doubtless keeps one watching Chaos is its rapid cutting, its dialogue simple and clean. But these technical feats degenerate into symbols in a fantasy reward-a-thon that movies tend to perpetuate, making Chaos no more than a slick Pretty Woman, which certainly has its boosters.

 

For my money, an illiterate junkie whore who learns the stock market after a lucky tip from a trick, and fucks a half billion bucks out of a Swiss banker, and arranges for the whole ring of pimps she worked for to get busted - the most evil one shot by cops - and helps out another streetwalker we never meet, and frees her little sister at the last minute from arranged sale into marriage, and takes Helene and Mamie (Paul’s mum) and her own little sister to her new beach house, well… That may seem feminist to a guy at the Times who has to watch stupid movies for a living, but to these eyes it looked like a riff on some neoliberal moral tale/revenge thriller, the beating having purified Noemie for her transcendent defiance of the gravity that surrounds prostitution and all the other forms of capitalist, state, and religious terror, i.e. work. Call it patriarchy, if you must, no one can argue against the fact that we can do fine without that. Maybe my inclination to see the film with a woman was well-advised, after all, as I’m clearly missing the “feminist” point. However, that same weekend Penny Arcade hosted A Whore’s Life at Tribes, featuring a reading and two original videos. While their tales of survival as addicted street workers covered all the violence Chaos revels in, along with a whole lot of sex the film explicitly avoids, neither of these two women from Vancouver - Leslie Bull and Ariel Lightningchild, a good ten or fifteen years apart - felt compelled to frame their experience in the lotto-driven terms of suddenly merited billions. At the end of the day, stylized conceit condemns this technically-contrived and narrative-thin conventional fable to a mere insult to the intelligence of anyone whose notions of gritty reality are not framed by the sale of soap to clean it up, but rather, by the fingernails we sharpen and cut to dig in beneath appearances and the surface of things.

“The Brig”

By Kenneth H. Brown

Directed by Judith Malina

general manager: Gary Brackett   produced by Hanon Reznikov

assistant director: Claire Lebowitz

Cast: Gene Ardor, Kesh Baggan, Gary Brackett, Brad Burgess, Edward Chin-Lyn, Albert Lamont, Abraham Makany, Jeff Nash, Berry Newkirk, Bradford Rosenbloom, Jade Rothman,Lucas Salvagno,Isaac Scranton, Joshua Striker-Roberts, Evan True, Antwan Ward

(The Living Theater}

21 Clinton Street

New York

 

Thurs., 8pm $20

Fri.-Sat. 8 pm Sun.  4pm  $30

Wed. 8pm Pay-What-You-Can (no reservations)

reservations: www.livingtheatre.org  tel 212 352-3101

Students half price: info www.livingtheatre.org

 

 

The Silence of “The Brig”

A review by Martin Reckhaus

 

Martin Reckhaus, actor/director/writer, has been living and working on the Lower East Side since the early 1980s.  He is co-founder of Loretta Auditorium, a collaboration of theater artists whose latest work, NEW SCIENCE, was produced in November 2006 at Theater for the New City.

 

Jeff Nash, John Kohan, Albert Lamont,  and Isaac Scranton 

Photo courtesy of (John Ranard}.

 

 

History sweeps through our consciousness. Her movements are the most familiar and the most foreign of affairs. And even if we do not grasp the story fully, we are bound by her seduction.   When the theater opens the gates, the tablets are held high again.

 

The theater’s limitless renewal ….

 

The Brig, written by Kenneth H. Brown and directed by Judith Malina, outlines the daily ritual of order and punishment in a marine prison of the 20th century. The scene is an unrelenting cacophony of marching boots, shouted orders, and screaming requests for “permission to cross the white line!” The only relief comes when the prisoners read from the manual of the U.S. Marine Corps in silence. The audience is silent. The guards watch.

 

That sound — its absence and desire — that helpless desire of actors undone by relentless rehearsal, relentless repetition ….

 

Actors as prisoners. And us, the audience — prisoners as actors.  How to undo the silent participation in a culture of military economics and military science?

 

We have become the history eaters and are left with a military menu.

 

In the Living Theatre’s production, the dividing line between stage and audience is barbed wire. We look at our historic condition across this line.

 

The others, the prisoners onstage, held in check by obedient guards of ritual humiliation — who are they?  Who is Number 3?  Do I see the actor through the forced mask of Prisoner Number 5?  Do I see the person through the endless repetition onstage of what hasn’t changed in 2,000 years?

 

Remarkable about The Brig is that nothing has changed — onstage. Yes, this same production could be seen in this city decades ago.  But if The Brig falls under the genre of  “revival,” it is due to its reception in the press, rather than to the reoccurrence of its radical theatrical proposition.

 

To explain the importance of The Brig, critics point to the history of theater, measuring the difference between “then” and “now” as an influence on the spectators’ perceptions.

 

History, criticism, and military ritual — three civilian concerns that engage us — as ever.

 

When Abu Graib happened, were proponents of theatrical realism calling for a theatrical representation that would make the audience relive torture and sexual abuse in order to change American foreign politics?

 

What is the consequence of knowing?   If nothing has changed onstage, what makes the performance of The Brig such an extraordinary event?   The history of experimental theater?   No.  The appearance of history?   Yes.

 

How does history appear?   In undeniable collective emotion.

 

In The Brig, this is called silence.

 

 

 

“Mickey 2″ picture: (l.to r.) Albert Lamont, Jeff  Nash  and Gary Brackett

(no photo credit available)