Obscene Jester

bearing witness

Over the weekend, I attended two of the more talked-about pieces of the season: Aftermath by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen at New York Theatre Workshop and The Provenance of Beauty by Claudia Rankine through the Foundry Theatre. The two have much in common: both are based on interviews and documentary material, are outright political, and, for better or worse, make a strong plea for the white liberal guilt of the audiences. This brings to the fore some very basic and difficult questions concerning political theatre, and the never-ending complex explicit in its performance: what, exactly, does political theatre do?

Aftermath tells six stories of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, forced into exile in the wake of the U.S. occupation. The tales are expertly told by an amazing company of actors, and well crafted by Blank and Jensen, who are perhaps most famous for their earlier docudrama, The Exonerated. Early on, a pharmacist named Rafiq explains to the audience that the etymology of Fallujah comes from the word to be “split in two,” as the city is divided by the Tigris River into east and west halves. This becomes a beautiful metaphor for a dividing line among a myriad of parties: U.S. versus Iraq, citizens versus Saddam, Sunni versus Shiite, patriotism versus politics, and translators against, well, everyone.

This last divide is the most significant and well thought-out, as the audience’s guide through the stories is a translator, Shahid, played with touching honesty by Fajer Al-Kaisi, and he represents the conflicts being “between worlds.” His obsession with computer games (American, of course) taught him his first English lessons (“Thanks, Leisure Suit Larry!” he quips, and I think I was the only one in the audience to laugh), and his position between the Americans and the Iraqis, even in times of peace, are fraught with misunderstanding, animosity, and violence. It seems all miscommunication can be traced back to miscommunication, and the translator becomes a pariah, reminiscent of Umberto Eco’s wordplay on traduttore-traditore, or “translator-traitor.”

And while the Shahid is a wonderful device and metaphor for Aftermath, it’s a sad reminder that we place so much emphasis on the problems between languages, when the body count in Iraq has become such a desensitized phenomenon, relegated to afterthoughts in the news these days.

 

Closer to home, The Provenance of Beauty examines the history and contemporary issues of gentrification of the South Bronx, via a bus-tour-performance. Going all the way back to the Dutch colonists, but focusing on the past half century, when the Bronx received its reputation as the least desirable real estate in the five boroughs.

The tour is informative and, at times, personal and beautiful, as the tour is narrated by three natives, through radio headphones worn by audience members. And this is the production’s greatest feat: Geoff Abbas, Kell Condon, and Casey Llewellyn have done a magnificent job rigging a run-of-the-mill charter bus into a live video and sound feed theatre space. The intimacy fostered by the headphones make the tour a very individual experience, despite the pseudo-public nature of the environment.

Provenance, however, instead on focusing on the enlightenment of the Bronx experience, the beauty of the aesthetics and history, set up an unfortunate antagonism with gentrification of “SoBro”; I’ve glossed the complications of the process in the past (my NY Times debut!), and a poetic polemic does very little to expose greater issues of the economic divide, cultural nostalgia, and social inequalities that contribute to an ever-changing landscape.

For starters, the performance starts out from and returns the audience to a location in Manhattan, surely a device to ensure the audience comes in the first place, and, perhaps more audaciously, assumes at a number of junctures that each passenger is from Manhattan, bordering on name-calling.

Mostly however, the text holds the audience to a fallacial struggle between “you and me,” which Walter Benn Michaels sums up well in The Trouble with Diversity:

They’re nostalgic, in other words, not exactly for racism but for the distinctive social practices (what Cornell West calls the ‘cultural armor’) that resistance to racism helped create. On the one hand, Jim Crow impoverished and disempowered an entire community; on the other, it solidified that community’s identity as a community. 

So as the bus passes by Baretto Point Park, our tour guide characterizes it pre-urban-renewal as

This was always our park, we chose it because it had been thrown away. Memory upon memory was built in this place as darkness descended and a neighborhood asserted itself where one would least look to find it.

The soft-focus lens disappears however, after Giuliani renovates the shoreline; only then are the fertilizer factory and raw sewage treatment plant that flank and poison the water there are mentioned, even though they existed long before, back in the day. It’s a common and misguided double standard in the discourse on gentrification.

I’m not going to be presumptuous enough to attempt to answer the question I set out at the opening. That would be insane, and I’d love to hear the thoughts of you, brilliant OJ readers, and start a dialogue. Instead, I will say that both these performances are powerful and moving at many points, and well worth attending and beginning a conversation about very important political issues of the times. The assumption of antagonism, though, seems to fall flat, upon deaf ears, though, and bearing witness, raising awareness seems a much more productive and hopeful goal.

cultural engineering

This fall, Japan Society artistic director Yoko Shioya has provided the audience with a twist to the usual JS fare: all artists and companies are from Berlin, focusing, of course, upon Japanese themes and culture.

While a bit strange to imagine, the decision makes sense in a number of ways: the first and obvious factor is that Berlin has become the center of experimental performance in the past decade or so, in many ways out performing our fair New York in quantity, quality, and as always government support.

The second, slightly less apparent reason is embodied in the opening piece of the fall, Heavenly Bento, by the Post Theatre. The simple staging is an artistic examination of the rise of the Sony Corporation, featuring Jun Kim and Alexander Schröder as the engineers that made the company what it is today.

Bento takes place in the round (a bento box, perhaps?), with a simple, white platform, decorated only by projections from above. The emptiness of the opening is brought to life with static, the snow of televisual noise, the decoding of Stein’s “There’s no there there.” I’ve written about the significance of static before in reference to Rinne Goff’s Ruby Sunrise (2005), but in Bento, it seems as though the world of the piece is initially saturated by the static, and the stage is the screen to come, both in how we view the performance and explicitly in the engineering by founders Morita and Ibuka of the Sony Trinitron, which would revolutionize color television worldwide.

It’s hard to imagine that the origins of the company lie in two lone men, desperately trying to think of a product to sell, and even harder to believe they failed in their first attempt: a rice cooker. Not to fear, though! The two men labor, travel the world, and think creatively to bring the world the first pocketable transistor radio. It’s only a few short leaps to Sony becoming one of the big six film distribution companies and getting teenagers around the world addicted to carjacking in Grand Theft Auto (though video games are sadly outside the purview of this piece).

And here’s where the worlds of Japan and Germany are shown to intersect in a brilliant way: Bento opens, literally in the rubble of post-war Tokyo, with two men faced with the task of rebuilding a government and industry when most of the population doesn’t even have food. One almost feels guilty in this collusion, sitting in a U.S. theatre watching the shared devastation of the two cultures, brought about by the U.S. Oops!

But the parallels remain for better or worse, and we watch as industry and innovation overtake even the U.S., and walk the constant tightrope of maintaining a sense of dignity through cultural pride and the growing need to globalize their product and mentality. It’s even difficult to parse out the performance style of Kim and Schröder—reserved, quiet, meditative—as hopelessly Japanese or hopelessly German in its sensibility. Morita even finds himself stuck in New York, unable to return to his family in Japan, bringing Sony to international stages (and Hollywood!, he’s very excited about Hollywood).

And the problems of capital and industrial exchange are both the biggest promise and stumbling block of Heavenly Bento. The most interesting moments are their interactions with the incredibly simple, synched interaction with the lighting projections, and their personal conversations through business. When the piece gets too biographical it seems either too A&E or an outright commercial for Sony (and indeed, you don’t need to glance at the program to know the piece is largely underwritten by the company). This has the unfortunate side effect of marginalizing dancer Kazue Ikeda and the gustatory treat, both at the very end; it’s as though Post is making a last-gasp gesture to say, “Look! Look! It’s not all history. There’s experimental art-crap or whatever in here, too!”

So Heavenly Bento is both an examination and a product of globalized industry, and, for better or worse, culture and arts. And perhaps it’s just my opinion, but many times, corporate performance makes for bad performance. But it does set a tone of uncanny and powerful resonance for the “Japan Transatlantic” season.

i'm not sure this is a derridean confusion of signs

Dear Driver of the white van on Bedford Ave in Greenpoint:

Big, red, octagonal. Means stop. 

Just sayin'.

Thanks for the bruises,

sharkskin girl

PS to readers: Please, please, please, when you're crossing the street, don't trust that the car will actually stop. No matter the signage.

bold words

Hold the presses: Previous White House speechwriter (and by previous, I mean that previous White House of the 'President Who Must Not Be Named') Matt Latimer has just published his book Speech-Less: Tales of a White House Survivor, a few-holds-barred memoir about writing speeches for Bush during his last twenty-two months in office. The book, an excerpt of which appears in October's GQ, apparently comprises the period in recent, recent history during which Bush, like so many Americans, actually, was desperately trying to understand the epic economy collapse--and to find the words to describe it without sending his constituency running across the Canadian border. Again. 

As Latimer stated during this afternoon's interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Bush allegedly subscribed to--and these are my words here--a rather pedantic Yalie methodology of speechwriting, leading his writers to construct such informative sentences (not necessarily meant to be read aloud) as "oil comes from pipes" for a speech Bush was to present in Alaska. The book also includes the prez's casually offered commentary, including this sure to become a long-lasting sound byte about Hillary Rodham Clinton: "Wait till her fat keister is sitting at this desk"--though Latimer suggests that "keister" wasn't actually the word of choice. 

A context base for all the Bushisms accumulated in the eight years Bush spent in, or at least near, the Oval Office--a sort of politico Silmarillion, if you will--Speech-Less might offer fodder for both Democrats and Republicans alike. Latimer, child of two "baffled liberal" 'rents, might be disillusioned, but he sure is profiting from it. 

Words are power, for sure--unless they're so muddled, that is, that one can't even tell what's being said. Or who's saying it. The notion of speechwriters is something we conveniently ignore--though I was super proud of one of my students last semester who pointed out that no matter how great Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech was, it wasn't entirely Obama's, or at least not his alone. Latimer's book seems almost like that moment you see an email you've sent reprinted--boy don't you wish you'd tagged on one of those "don't pass this on" disclaimers to your signature, huh--and, I have to say, there's something about privacy or whatnot leaving a bitter taste here. That said, however, I'm running off to Barnes and Noble now. 

Oh, and here's a little bit from the ex-prez; perhaps he should take his own, muddled advice:

"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again." 

amoralizing

History has shown that, on the whole, communes don’t work. It didn’t work in 1791 Paris, it didn’t really work in 1968 Berkeley. And, one would imagine, it sure as hell wouldn’t work in the capitalist paradise of New York City. And today, no less!

This is exactly the subject of Derek Ahonen’s new play with The Amoralists, The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side, which has just been extended again and moved into its new home at 80 St. Marks. Ahonen has done a fantastic job with the dying art of exciting and tight playwriting; the piece is hilarious, shocking, and intelligent handling its obscure and charming subject matter.

Like a left-wing Real World, the foursome of Billy, Dear, Dawn, and Wyatt live in an enormous flat on the LES, living for free by the good graces of their landlord, Donovan, whilst running the Pied Pipers vegan bakery in the storefront below. And, to be sure, their ideas are beautiful: social liberation, workers’ and animal rights, freedom from oppressive ISAs (yeah, I’m invoking Althusser—got a problem with that?), all the while trying to spread the utopian vision of letting love rule (yeah, I’m invoking Lenny Kravitz—got a problem with that?). The characters are lovely, sympathetic, and very, very real. No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, the four are a family.

And as Tolstoy has said, every unhappy family is unhappy in their own special ways.

The play takes place over a week, the week that brings this commune to a screeching halt, another tally to join failed communes of the past. And no one is spared: yes, the landlord is greedy and, ultimately underhanded, but the tenants are shown to be exactly the same, perhaps with different goals in mind. But they’re all cut from the same cloth—co-dependent, struggling, and, ultimately, lonely. The struggles that the family goes through on a daily basis fighting cultural hegemony cannot really compete with the basic struggles that all families endure, of loyalty, necessity, and shelter. Can a commune compromise? Especially when, like most communes, it’s doomed to fail?

And while Ahonen’s script is smart, it’s nothing without the tremendous cast—each member gives some of the most powerful and committed work I’ve seen in quite some time. I’d be remiss not to mention James Kautz in particular, who gives a dynamic, exhausting, and non-judgmental portrayal of Billy—addicted to drugs and alcohol, struggling to separate himself from a suburban Iowa childhood, trying to fight the good, political fight. 

At its best, Pied Pipers brings a Chekhovian sensibility to these New Yorkers; it strays a bit in the second and third acts at moments when it becomes more of a Shavian polemic, wordy debates on cultural values. It’s the strong actions, characterizations, and conflicts—a classic trifecta, really—that make the piece stand out among the theatre of recent memory.

on the playground of congress, joe wilson's been denied recess privileges

Apparently Congress, or, more specifically, the House, has just voted to rebuke Republican senator Joe Wilson for shouting "You lie!" during President Obama's speech on health care last week.  I suppose there's something to say about happy and unhappy performatives (akin to Diana Taylor's TDR article on Bush's unhappy performatives from a few year's ago: here for those of you with academic access), or even about the theatrical quality of untoward demonstrations, putting Wilson's outburst in a similar context to those theatregoers who so violently walked out of Mike Daisey's performance Invincible Summer two Aprils ago or what's come to be an almost expected public retort to Neil LaBute plays.

Maureen Dowd offers a particularly racialized reading of Wilson's outburst, writing:

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy! [...]

Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

And, true that: y'all know I have a soft spot for Ms. Dowd. Though—and I don't mean to play Devil's Advocate here, really—while I agree wholeheartedly with Ms. Dowd's reading of race politics in Wilson's outburst, I have to wonder if a little less political reverence might not behoove the contemporary political stage. Perhaps if more Democrats had misbehaved during Bush's first reign, we'd be in a different situation than we are now. Or not—and I remain still a bit giddy whenever I say "President Obama," so that seems to be that.

At the end of the day, though, my only response to this ridiculous, now 'rebuked' Senator: Boy is his face red.

remembering, even what is forgotten

I can see the two twin towers of light that stand in for the absence of the other two towers from my window in Greenpoint. It’s a reminder, these few days out of the year, of something that is never forgotten. It is also a surrogate for a pilgrimage I’ve never been able to make. I never wanted to visit Ground Zero because, in my memory, Ground Zero is less a site than, and forgive the semantic play here (it is not meant to be flippant in the slightest), a sight—an event. Ground Zero is not the ruins of what was there but the moment of seeing towers fall, and even before, seeing bodies falling from them.

September 11 is both an event and, in many ways, a metaphor. It becomes an approach to many things: foreign policy, the extremes of religious fundamentalism and the resultant and just as dangerous xenophobia, the spectacular nature of the image in its constant reproduction (much like the ‘where we were’ narratives that attend so many introductory conversations between New Yorkers), and even to art and to the nature and parameters of performance. I refer to it in all of my classes—not just a small bit because 11 September 2001 was supposed to be my first day of class at NYU with Peggy Phelan, and the event colored the way we talked about all art for the rest of the semester—but more as a vehicle for talking about other things: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s infamous naming of it as “the greatest work of art in the whole of the cosmos” serves as a means of discussing not only the liminal space between art and the real, but art’s innate relationship to the political and to the nature of performance itself. Likewise for Amiri Baraka’s brilliant and brutal spoken word piece Somebody Blew Up America, which launched its own controversy. And Richard Drew’s AP photograph, retroactively titled, by Esquire writer Tom Junod, Falling Man, stands in as well for September 11, becoming both a memorial to and an aestheticization of the real.

The tragedy and trauma that results from September 11 is not only about the act of remembering, but the how and what of remembering as well—and the role, like Drew’s Falling Man, the image plays in it. A recent dispute in the New York Times over the propriety of an AP photograph taken in Afghanistan, brings this, this many years later, to painful light, calling into question not only just how much we’re willing to remember, but how much we’re willing to be reminded of.

David W. Dunlap’s recent post in the New York Times Lens blog, “Behind the Scenes: To Publish or Not?,” details the controversy surrounding Julie Jacobson’s photograph of “Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, 21, of New Portland, Me.,” taken “shortly after he was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade during a Taliban ambush of his squad last month in Dahaneh, Afghanistan.” The image, as Dunlap aptly describes it, is “a scene from which many of us would naturally recoil, or at least avert our eyes,” and it is not in any sense an easy thing to view. Yet, in the discomfort it causes in the moment of looking, not very different at all from the images accompanying Seymour Hirsch’s expose of torture at Abu Ghraib in the New Yorker, it also acts—and I mean that in the very performative, active sense of the word—as an immediate reminder that the consequences of September 11 are still very much real, the fact that we are still at war and 21-year-old men are still dying, no matter how geographically and emotionally distanced we might be from it now.

Yet the publication of this image becomes complicated because it is, nor should be, not only a metaphor for a broader issue for the US and international public to face, but also about one, far too young man. Dunlap writes, citing the AP’s director of photography, Santiago Lyon, that Corporal Bernard’s father, John Bernard, a “retired Marine first sergeant, was shown the picture and told the AP that ‘by distributing this photograph, we would be dishonoring the memory of his son,’ Mr. Lyon said.” While for the AP, “the value of that image was to show the complexity, the sacrifice and the brutality of the war,” according to senior managing editor John Daniszewski, for Mr. Bernard and Corporal Bernard’s family and friends, “This photograph will be the last of this man that his family will ever see,” as stated by Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top American commander in Iraq.

I’ve written before about Peggy Phelan’s reading of the photograph, in that case, Drew’s Falling Man, as a reference not to the death drive but toward life. Falling Man, however, places death in a much more tranquil frame, as aesthetically rendered, though accidentally so, as it was. Jacobson’s photograph as well has been aestheticized within the controversy, discussed and to some degree legitimated through its artistic qualities in Dunlap’s post. And therein lies the danger: the danger of the controversy surrounding the image becoming just that, a controversy about an image rather than what it signifies. A controversy that, yes, is about the immediate event but that also extends, or at least should extend, into the metaphor, into its consequences not just to one man and his family—though that one man, like one event, should never be forgotten—but to a nation still very much, but almost subliminally so, at war.

I read Dunlap’s post the other evening after dinner, having a glass of wine with my partner. We’d been discussing my classes and his upcoming performances and whatnot, and I was idly strolling through the Times. Jacobson’s image caught me in a moment of remembering that I’d forgotten. Caught me in the passivity of distance and brought me back, full on and shockingly so, into a reality I know but do not directly experience. No matter whether one considers photojournalism art or—as Anthony Tommasini phrased it in his critique of Stockhausen post 9/11—“truth,” Jacobson’s image acts, as a reminder, as a reality, and as a critique of the limits of the capacity of our own remembering.