My Friday nights of late have found me in rather strange places: hanging out with friends until it is no longer Friday, nor night, but the dawn-tinged beginnings of Saturday morning; recovering from a day of surfing with a massive burger at an Italian-owned soda on Playa Sámara in Costa Rica (yes, Tweed, I'm talking about surfing even on our blog); fretting over that last encyclopedia entry on structuralism due way too soon... The strangest so far, however, might have been playing the role of Chinatown pawnshop-owner and crystal meth-user Dana Williams as part of Cruel Theatre's Street Limbo Blues, reprised after its spring run.
I met the effervescent Taurie Kinoshita, Cruel Theatre founder and director , outside the East Village Café Pick Me Up, where she informed me of my role, got me a cup of joe, and shared some of the how-to for the night. The idea behind the show is predicated on Richard Schechner's environmental theatre, Augusto Boal's spect-actor, and Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theatre, though Cruel Theatre (which, yes, is derived from Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, and does indeed blend beauty and cruelty as two sides of the same proverbial coin) ups the ante not only by giving spectator/participants full control of how the show proceeds, but also in its taking on of the aftereffects of the still ongoing War on Drugs--which has rather become the Afghanistan of the current admin's other ongoing wars.
Street Limbo Blues, as the pr reads, "deals with the fallout of the war on drugs, specifically youth, it's most common casualty," and treats addiction as what it is: an illness rather than a crime. Each performance is one-on-one, with the spectator playing out a role in relationship to the actor assigned to her, and there is no set audience: the action occurs, in Café Pick Me Up, Doc Holidays, and around Tompkins Square Park, without any indication that this is, indeed, a play. For about an hour to anyone around who cared to notice, I was Dana, hanging out with my best friend Max "Coop" Cooper--played with twitchy brilliance by Anthony Marks--and dealing with his withdrawal from crystal meth. One can choose to remain entirely passive during the performance, or even to refuse to leave the café--though that would result in a much-abbreviated night. And one can go back several nights, experiencing a sort of choose-your-own adventure with other characters and other choices as to how one interacts with them.
Coop met me at the café to catch me up on his--and my--life (who knew I was a rocking bowler?) before taking me to Doc Holidays next door to pay off his dealer, where, really, Coop's anxiety was more than infectious. I may never be able to go to Doc's again without feeling a quiver of apprehension. Having handled that, we wandered through Tompkins, meeting up with some of Coop's and Dana's friends--Sonny (Jason Natale), who partied with us at the pawnshop last New Year's Eve, and Trish (Catherine Gasta), who sold me some "hot" rings recently which got the cops on my back. Call me a prude, or, at the least, inexperienced, I didn't know how to play the role of the addict, so I went for recovering, letting Coop know that I'd been off meth for the past two weeks (why I hadn't called him) and was willing to get him through the first few days of withdrawal. I took it as a compliment that Coop didn't end the show by leaving me to get high but instead brought us back to Café Pick Me Up and chose a somewhat more prosaic exit: he had to use the bathroom.
The actors are working hard throughout the show, in no small part, I'm sure, to make it easier on the spectator, and I left with an unexpected affection for Coop, and for Dana. It's always a risk to engage an audience member directly, and too often the result is more a spectacle of good-natured going-along-with-it than a real suspension of disbelief. And though there is trust involved--like, say, trusting that I would be shocked only a bit whilst holding jumper cables at the Public--it isn't one that requires much investment. Cruel Theatre pushes these boundaries and demands, for it to be a successful performance, that I, as Dana and as myself--that whole "not me-not not me" paradox Schechner creates for the actor--not only trust Coop, but that I be invested in our relationship for the brief period we "know" each other. It is a dangerous conceit, but what good--and in the case of Street Limbo Blues, great--theatre isn't a little bit dangerous?
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