Before The Jo Strømgren Kompani’s The Society begins, the cast is already established onstage: all in suits and ties, one sits in a chair, head in hands, another stands guard beside a coffee grinder, while the third compulsively cleans various coffee cups and saucers (the one set piece is an open cupboard with 84 cups and saucers. That’s right, I counted). It’s clear from the outset that there is going to be severe neurosis, conflict, and caffeine.
And that’s indeed what we get. Speaking in a francophilic gibberish, the three men prepare some coffee, meticulously at that. So much so that, at the sound of the final bubble over of the percolator, the seated gentleman is sent into an orgiastic reverie—the first of many fantasy-dance sequences in the piece.
But a perfectly good cup of coffee is ruined when a tea bag has infiltrated their space, and the three are sent spiraling into an And Then There Were None, the-killer-could-be-any-of-us-type paranoia. What brought the foreign object in to soil the perfect Society? The result is an unraveling into the absurd, complete with song and dance, martial arts sequences, and electrocution. What seems a simple misunderstanding turns into a Communist conspiracy to overthrow the Caffeinated Cads. And, for the most part, the piece is an amazing allegory for contemporary political positioning and xenophobia. With God on our side, we will protect the integrity of our caffeine nation! We will find the tea-terrorists if we have to search to the four corners of the Earth!
The three performers (John Fjelnseth Brungot, Trond Fausa Aurvag, and Bartek Kaminski) are incredibly adept physical performers and comedians, if not exactly dancers, and carry the simple premise with remarkable (non-sensical) verbal and physical dexterity. And it’s the sense of placelessness, with lack of setting, affiliation, and language, which makes The Society so successful. The absurd lends itself to a vacuum of locale (see Beckett, Ionesco, and comedians like Bill Irwin or Hamish McColl and Sean Foley).
But when the revolution comes, the piece becomes an incredibly counterproductive force, both politically and aesthetically. The new Tea Regime is headed by the most heinous of Chinese stereotypes, including Emo Phillips-ish wigs, clothespins holding eyelids back, and a gibberish of their own, namely: “Peeng-pong, peeng-pong!” The threat of a Chinese-backed tea coup d’état is hilarious, but the company’s shift from farcical satire to uncomfortably specific personhood is a comedic coitus interruptus, and instead of laughing at the plausibility and hilarity of political absurdity, we are reminded of stagnant political discourse that keeps it this way.
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