Obscene Jester

retire or die

Being somewhat of a geek and follower of posthuman hoopla, I get excited about all things Philip K. Dick. The literature, the fan culture, the absurd theories, the films, comic books—there is an entire industry based on the improbable life and works of Dick. One realm that has yet to be infiltrated by Dick Culture (and, I would argue, science fiction in general—but that’s another post for another day) is performance. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: performance is always the last one to the party. Partly due to resources, partly due to an implicit conservative undercurrent, sci-fi/fantasy has gone largely unattempted in the theatre. The closest we’ve really come in recent years is Cynthia Hopkins’s The Success of Failure and the I’ll-reserve-my-adjective-till-all-facts-are-in Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark (which, I can say at the very least, has an incredibly silly title). It’s a shame, really, considering theatre has even created some forms of science fiction (see: Capek’s R.U.R.).

So imagine my delight when I discovered the Untitled Theater Company #61 was staging an adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, one of Dick’s more famous stories and basis for the classic film, Blade Runner. The layered, confusing, and hypermoral narrative takes place in the future when AI has become so advanced that special detectives and bounty hunters are employed to detect and “retire” rogue androids who are trying to pose as humans on Earth. (You see? You see? There’s a hazy difference!)

Untitled Theater sets up a fascinating stylization that combines the 50s obsession with futurity and morality (instructional films about proper behavior for men and women, as well as the famous “duck and cover” short play on pod-like film screens before the show begins—kudos to set designer Neal Wilkinson and video designer Jared Mezzocchi for their resourceful and evocative use of space and imagery). Open on our protagonist, Rick Deckard, hunched over a maimed sheep-android, seemingly mourning the loss of the pet he has destroyed: a striking image, which remains as the robot-body parts are left strewn about downstage as a reminder for the piece’s entirety, leaving an expectation of a system and story that is already broken.

The show’s main asset is director Edward Einhorn’s adaptation of the novel. As per most Dick novels, Do Androids Dream is a baroque and intentionally befuddling story. Any attempt to condense and communicate Dick’s intentions (for what those are worth) is a massive undertaking. If you don’t believe me, compare the novel with Blade Runner—there’s a reason beyond marketing that they had to alter the title. But Einhorn boils the novel down to a solid 90 minutes of live experience, and covers most of the thematic and narrative bases.

To continue what I found to be the fixation with 50s noir, Einhorn’s dialogue is spit out by almost every character with the sauciness and confidence of Rosalind Russell, a cadence that became grating quite quickly. While I appreciate the homage to an appropriate genre, the form overpowered the content, and the stylization became overbearing—I would have preferred that the company allow the deft text to speak for itself. For a text so focused on agency, free will, and the definition of “human,” the forced sensibility and physicality merely reminded me of how far robotics and AI must advance before Dick’s dystopian universe may be realized.

murder and decay for the holiday

Phantom Limb is by far one of the coolest puppetry companies I’ve seen—their projects are hip, layered, and inventive. I remember being blown away by their minutes-long Dear Mme a few short years ago at the wonderful Toy Theatre Festival at St. Ann’s.

Their revived piece, The Fortune Teller (originally from 2006) at HERE, was brought back just in time for Halloween, and rightfully so: equal parts Edward Gorey, Clue, and Saw, the piece recounts the gathering of seven local dregs (each representing, of course, a deadly sin) for the unique execution of a will. Each beneficiary is to have his part of the will delivered by a fortune teller (who looks remarkably like Jigsaw). Each meets with a gruesome demise, apropos of his sin. Natch. What does fortune telling have to do with seeing out a will? How did the deceased plan for this series of unfortunate events?

In the end, one doesn’t really care—the form entirely overtakes the content. Erik Sanko’s marionettes are beautiful and creepy, each a fantastic caricature that reveals the dirty, unseemly side. The material of each puppet (wood?) is breaking through whatever décor provided in the way of costume and paint. We can see the decaying insides, in other words, of a sinful individual.

The puppeteer work brilliantly plays between the need for virtuosity and silliness, there are lots of meta jokes for puppet lovers (including a Freudian hatred for others thanks to Punch and Judy and the first puppet-within-a-puppet performance I’ve ever seen), and the Danny Elfman score can only be described as Elfmanesque (what that means is up to you).

I wanted more intellectual and artistic heft from Phantom Limb, but The Fortune Teller hits all the right notes for dark, holiday fun, and I quickly forgive them for their not-so-original sin (I know: my eyes rolled at the pun too. But I had to. You understand), and I am freaking out with anticipation to return to the West Coast to catch The Composer Is Dead.

impossible geographies

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been peeking through your fingers to read the news and watch the reports of the political theatre that was election season. Contests raged over who was the “Average Joe” for office, who was most in touch with the American People, as parties trucked in billions of dollars for respective campaigns. The Right is in top form of ridiculousness, with debates and commercials that read more like sci-fi fantasy novels, with witches and weapons, promising some type of prestidigitatious elimination of the budget through trumping up defense and cutting taxes, while the Left was off-camera, apparently crawling about on the platforms, searching for their spines. And both played brilliantly into the most tragic characteristic of the American populace: a collective memory shorter than that of a below-average fruit fly.

When I teach U.S. Theatre History, one of the major themes we return to again and again is, “Is there an ‘American aesthetic'?” Is it even possible? The U.S. is such a vast and diverse place, one can travel an hour from home and feel like a stranger in his or her own land.

And this is exactly the problem Dan Hoyle presents us with in his newest piece, The Real Americans. Performed for one night only at Joe’s Pub after a run in San Francisco, the piece is a docudrama of Hoyle’s road trip around the Middle in search of who and what is shaping the American character. Performing the folks he interviewed, what Richard Schechner termed “Acting as Incorporation” for Anna Deavere Smith, we are brought face to face with a cadre of citizens from Texas, Alabama, Wisconsin, as well as Hoyle’s home base in San Francisco.

Both sharkskin girl and I were astounded by the power of Hoyle’s previous piece, Tings Dey Happen, similarly styled from Hoyle’s investigations in the tumultuous Niger Delta. The Real Americans, however, seems to hit Hoyle harder, as the setting is a community, no matter how vast, that Hoyle belongs to. That he wants to belong to. As a result, there are some marked contrasts between the two pieces: most notably is the centrality of Hoyle himself. In Tings we never really heard from “Dan Hoyle”; he is only alluded to by the characters with whom he interacts, much like Isherwood’s “I am a camera.” The Real Americans is explicitly grounded in Hoyle’s ego—and not in a bad way. He presents us with his misgivings, rationales, and hopes for the project, and keeps the audience updated, as though we were his diary, throughout. The opening scene is Dan playing himself and four friends formulating the project in a familiar urban-project-planning space: Sunday Brunch, which sets off Hoyle’s emblematic first dilemma concerning a phenomenon that is “so pretentious, but so tasty.” The city, his friends, his lifestyle are Sunday Brunch.

And we are brought along on Hoyle’s encounters throughout the South and Midwest, we witness the interviews, we are placed in the thick of the Heartland that many of us cosmopolitanites complain about, but refuse to confront. There is the Texan minister attempting to convince Dan of creationism, a young man being shipped off to Iraq, an Alabaman dope dealer, a proud redneck, a New York-via-Dominican Republic Afghanistan vet, and a Kentucky mechanic whose drawl is so thick and jargon-filled, the audience is treated to supertitles.

The worst thing I can say about this show is that there are no real surprises: each character befits his or her respective stereotype to a T. Even the closeted fundamentalist can be sniffed out from a mile away. This can lead to tedium and frustration, at least from my perspective. But perhaps this was the wisest move on Hoyle’s part: most importantly, it reflects his experience, his tedium and frustration on a journey that began as a romanticized attempt to connect with “real Americans,” a project doomed to fail. But it also keeps the audience at a distance as well, with no shot at sugarcoating, moralizing, or romanticizing the experience. Hoyle constantly waxes reflexive and foregrounds his white liberal guilt, his dependence upon and skepticism of privilege. The audience laughs in recognition and, hopefully, with a small amount of discomfort. All of this is tempered, importantly, by the fact that Hoyle is a truly generous and talented performer.

A moonshine-induced phantasmagoria featuring Barack Obama ennobles a defeated Hoyle to forge ahead (using a disturbing Donner Party analogy), but perhaps the most profound moment of the piece is a phone conversation between Hoyle and a San Francisco friend, who excuses herself from brunch to tell Hoyle that her sister in Tennessee has been knocked up by a local. The sister was full of smarts and promise, but was never able to break away from Small Town America. The friend cries into the phone, an American caught between identities, politics, histories, and desire for a unified self.

I feel as though many of us understand this sentiment—this dissonance within—of a world from which we came and the one we live in now. Even more of a dilemma is the world we want to create. Hoyle can’t come up with an answer. He has little narrative other than geography, and that constraint is the heart of this ultimately dissatisfying piece. Hoyle cannot give us a message, a sense of relief, or even an inadvertent air of superiority. Instead, we’re forced to think about what Whitman meant when he claimed that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It seems those atoms were destroyed in a Big Bang long ago. Or on the Sixth Day, depending on whom you ask.

sad song

I was introduced to Henryk Gorecki only last year thanks to Robert LePage, who featured Gorecki's Symphony No. 3 prominently in Lipsynch. It was one of the most beautiful pieces of music I had ever heard.

Gorecki was a brilliant composer, emblematic of a twentieth-century struggle between experimentation and memory.

If you've never heard the Third Symphony, do yourself a favor and listen. It's haunting; I find myself forced to stop everything when I hear it. It's the kind of music that makes you want to escape into the ether of the music.

Henryk Gorecki will be missed.

dead again

In “Prophylaxis and Virulence,” Jean Baudrillard writes that disease may be an evolutionary symptom of society’s growing concern with sanitation, that our “bodies are less protected by own antibodies, more in need of outside protection.” In an age when surgery masks are a fashion accessory and hand sanitizer is more commonly available than tap water, we have demonized infection, illness, and, by extension, death. What was once a domestic and normalized process in the 19th century has become othered, relegated to the opinions of experts and put out of sight in ICUs, nursing homes, and funeral parlors.

The amazing exhibit, “Memento Mori: The Birth and Resurrection of Postmortem Photography,” now on view at the Merchant’s House Museum in the Village, brings together an astounding collection of early photographs, daguerreotypes, and silver prints, mostly from the late-19th century from the Burns Archive, of death photography, mixing in ruminations and installations by contemporary artists.

The artifacts themselves are astounding and unnerving: the morbid fascination that accompanies a visitor’s reaction is enough to make one think: parents cradling month-old cadavers in Sunday best, old men posed as though they were reading the paper (Why a newspaper? Is it a talisman of some sort? Did he love reading the paper on a daily basis?). My personal favorite is of a young boy, no older than five, standing over the miniature casket of a baby sibling, his gaze focused somewhere to the left, as though looking for assurance in his discomfort. Or perhaps that’s just my projection on to this young man, who himself is long since dead for sure. (One fact that struck me was the idea that death wasn’t as “decayed” as it is today; often, people died from simple sicknesses like the flu, or at least at a younger age, unlike today when medical science has epically extended the quantity, but certainly not the quality, of life. Death was swift and polite in the 19th century; it is ravenous and relentless in the 21st. Ergo, subjects were much more "photogenic" in these memnto mori.)

The variety of ephemera is also striking: not simply reduced to photographs, there are death announcements (a striking contrast to a birth announcement), poems, charms, frames. Much like any business, there were numerous options available to the consumer, the grieving. There’s something incredibly seductive in this selection: it displays a striking desire to be close to death, to capture it, to keep it close, not only as a reminder of lost loved ones, but also as a reminder to ourselves that death is, to sound cliché, a part of life. Today, we try to keep death as far away, as foreign, and in a way mysterious as possible, which is exactly the impulse that makes “Memento Mori” seem so grotesque on the surface.

But the brilliance of this exhibit catapults the phenomenon into the present, and several artists have been asked to react to the exhibit and install pieces within the museum itself (the Merchant’s House is a beautifully preserved home from the 19th century). Hal Hirshorn used archaic photography methods to recreate a death photograph of the Tredwell patriarch (the family never commissioned one in reality), and leaves the setup of the room as it would have been at the time of his death, not just visually (indeed, the bed you see is the actual bed in which Tredwell died), but sonically and fragrantly. Meanwhile, Marian St. Laurent created a casket and photographed herself in a sort of proto-memento mori, who laments the loss of power and communication in photographic symbology, thanks to the phantasmagorical possibilities available to anyone with a digital camera and a computer. Another photographer, Sandy Puc’, discusses her modern incarnation of memento mori, “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.”

The synthesis of the historical and contemporary examinations of memento mori invoke the wealth of meaning, memory, and emotion we invest in objects. The relation to death in the 19th century provides a strong contrast with an age in which maybe, maybe, we can look at photos of the deceased from when they lived, preferring to maintain a pastness as method for coping with or denying the present. I certainly don’t wish to conclude with a judgment call about social standards between eras; if anything, we are tied together by an insatiable desire to imbue these images with our fears and desires. The photograph, even when untouched (unsanitized?), sets off infinite permutations of meaning and symbolism.