Review: #9, All Medium, No Message?

“#9” played through June 7 at 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan; (212) 279-4200.

Hannah (Hanna Cheek), like many women, is not comfortable with the image of her body, or she was once, but then along came the internet; David (David Ryan Smith), after a chain of dramatically spotty text message reports, has just lost his father in a faraway natural disaster; Matt (Matt Dellapina), immersing himself in online encyclopedias, will soon be a father; and Kevin (Kevin Townley) is looking for love, on facebook. In a digital culture, human tragedies and processes must somehow span the gap between emotion and the binarizing logic of the web. Though we suppose that mourning and romance are only easier with a cable internet connection, “#9,” under the direction of Mr. Tom Ridgely, renders for us a different image.

It is the predilection of the analog generation, the “digital immigrants,” to claim that “digital natives” are moving too fast; it is likewise the “digital natives” who presume that “digital immigrants” are impaired or moving too slow. Generational disputes such as this one are not new to history, having materialized before as suspicion between modernist and postmodernist, traditionalist and progressive, loyalist and patriot. Never before, however, has the disagreement turned on so distinct a boundary: technology. Perhaps because “#9″ is set in the gap between reality and the devices of technology it can at time be bizarre. Often it is incomprehensible. This could be, as Fredric Jameson once suggested about modern and postmodern, because humanity still lacks the “perceptual apparatus” required to understand the odd space, the hyperspace, on the other side of the gap. Or, perhaps, the play is just not very good.

The borderland of “#9″ is a gap. We could call this gap “Echoland,” a cyber space in “#9″ where straw bodies and information float, detached from reality –or where a few scenes float, detached from theatrical convention. I am not sure which. In the Echoland, emotions are streamlined and concentrated on web pages in “about me” paragraphs and buttons: “like this,” “friend me.” But the ease of cyber existence is soon found to be misleading when human things intervene and the psychical realities of each character lag somehow behind hyper reality.

When David’s father dies in a storm that hits his island home, the internet is shown to be a mourning inhibitor. After asking a group of his “friends” to donate their status at a facebook memorial service, David soon encrypts his father online in a facebook profile of his own. As our memories of those we’ve lost eventually fade during the process of normal mourning, the facebook zombie that David creates seems to produce a “new unfamiliar pain” for which he is unprepared. Similarly, for Matt, the expectant father, a web search denudes his image of fatherhood—an effect achieved by a musical-postmodern web crawl through various online encyclopedias. Kevin mistakes online dating statistics and palm reading for authentic destiny and searches the web for his soul mate. Relatedly, I suppose, Kevin meets Marshall McLuhan somewhere between sleep and the internet. From Mr. McLuhan, he receives advice on which we are led to ponder. Consider this: if “radio is the extension of the aural, high-fidelity photography of the visual” what to us is the internet? Mr. McLuhan tells Kevin that “the medium is the message,” before vanishes into a mirror.

What is the internet? Some among the digital immigrants may be hoping that it is a passing fad. Us natives know, it’s no fad. But it’s definitely not the rival universe that “#9″ suggests it is. “#9″ manages to entertain, despite the lack of structure and, in some places, sense or apparent meaning. I feel cheated because I did not know that the audience was invited to text message the performers with content. Had I known, I doubt my experience would have changed much. I give “#9″ a 7–I couldn’t resist.

Review: “The Dishwashers,” Looking Away at the Soapy Underbelly of American Progress

“The Dishwashers” continues through June 7 at 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan; (212) 279-4200.

Dressler (Tim Donoghue) occupies a particular place in the American psyche, an absence, a toiling mystery in the damp basement of our minds. What is Dressler? “A communist”? “A guy without dreams”?  A steward or a victim of fate? According to Dressler, he’s a dishwasher. A dishwasher is, however, according to Dressler something more than a guy who washes dishes.

When Emmett (Jay Stratton)  begins his job in the basement of an upscale restaurant he is dejected, only able to remember that he used to eat “up there,” off of the dishes he now cleans. Only aggravating his gloom, Dressler, the head dishwasher, tells him that not only must he aspire to the grand title of Dishwasher but he’s “new guy” until he earns his own name. Emmett, who we are led to assume is a bottomed out broker, is most of the play beside himself with angst. “It’s not that I think that I belong up there,” he tells Dressler later, “but I know that I don’t belong down here.” Indeed, as Emmett spends most of the play mustering his waning aspiration and staving off a settling fatalism, Dressler tells him that that is exactly what’s holding him back, “Aspiration is what’s holding me back?” Emmett bursts superciliously. “Don’t get too big for your britches,” Dressler tells Emmett, whose uniform belongs to the dwarf dishwasher that came before. His grubby britches, ironically, fit Emmett like bicycle shorts. Emmett responds to this kind of thing, often, with an appalled look that grows wearisome as the play drags on.

What is a dishwasher? If Dressler is any example, a dishwasher is “the foundation” of American dining, an essential piece of the puzzle. A dishwasher is also the protector of fortune, like the classical fates. When Dressler notices among the dirty dishes a lost speech, most likely that of an unfortunate orator in a wedding party, he warns the newest “new guy” to leave it there in the bus bin: it is not a dishwasher’s place to alter destiny.

Dishwashers are guardians and perpetuators of their own destiny. Contrary to Emmett’s notions, a dishwasher is not an unfortunate cast away chosen by fate but, according to Dressler, something to aspire to, a title to be earned. A Dishwasher is sustained by knowing the vital role that washing dishes plays in the great drama of cosmos. This great drama, Dressler constantly insists, is nothing at all like the tragedy in which Emmett thinks he stars.

The politics of pleasure are infused throughout “The Dishwashers;” the joy of humble speculation is constantly at odds with material pleasure; higher order thinking heavy handedly juxtaposed with the ethos of extravagance; and destiny is demolished for Dressler’s perverse version of self-determination. I was happy when this play was over.

At the play’s end we are faced with a clear disjunction between pleasure as a negative function of dejection and the pleasure of self hypnosis. Dressler does not see a pile of dishes but an Olympic stadium where judges score the thoroughness, speed, and finesse of his dishwashing. Emmett, as do most audience members, simply sees a pile of dishes and perhaps the terrible hand of fate smacking him for the short comings of his past life. Dressler’s reverence for the forces of the universe, staring up at eternity with dewy eyes from a garbage heap makes us uncomfortable. Like Emmett, we flee from this scene to a secular view of causality which puts human action and determination before fate. This work ethic is the persistent ethos that has under girded American progress since all men were posited equal. That a “dishwasher” like Dressler must jettison this American ethos in order to continue his patriotic toiling in the dingy basement of democracy is perhaps the greatest irony, among the many exhausting ironies, in Morris Panych’s “The Dishwashers.”

SAM

Review: “A Play On Words”, Language, Politics and Borders

They who well consider the history of similar divisions and confederacies will find abundant reason to apprehend that those in contemplation would in no other sense be neighbors than as they would be borderers; that they would neither love nor trust one another, but on the contrary would be a prey to discord, jealousy, and mutual injuries; in short, that they would place us exactly in the situations in which some nations doubtless wish to see us, viz., formidable only to each other. (Federalist 5)

What do you call it when two friends, only neighbors, really “borderers,” meet together in a backyard to argue for hours about whether semantic arguments are futile, despite the obvious fact that by way of their arguing, an argument about semantics is what they’ve had? And if semantic arguments are useful, if Rusty (Mark Boyett) is right, what does either of these “friends” stand to gain? Some rhetoric from Max (Brian Dykstra, the playwright) who accuses Rusty of over philosophizing, goes something like: you would argue to the death—to the death […] I don’t know how you even get out of your own way in the morning long enough to have breakfast! Indeed, beneath the quick firing and hilarious debate a question persists: why so passionate about words?

The scene itself is not so foreign to us. Rusty and Max could be any two know-it-alls in any suburban backyard insisting on any number of ridiculous counterfactuals and factoids which evoke in us questions such as, “did the Nazi’s really have a stealth fighter jet?”, “is Walt Disney’s head really frozen?”, “how many continents are there really?”,“are hot dogs made from horses?” (no, no, seven, still, and perhaps, but I still wouldn’t eat them either way because they are full to the bun (debatably) with carcinogens and (not so debatably) with fat). Similarly, Max and Rusty spar about whether interjections like “what’s the story” transmit more meaning than more obvious interjections like “hey.” Rusty, at one point, constructs the amusing “entomology” of the word “hang” as it appears in the phrase “I don’t give a hang,” a possible reference, he claims, to the long ago lost practice of hanging moose heads and similar wall hangings on the walls of friends and acquaintances. Actually, the OED traces this particular usage of “hang” to the mid to late 19th century, approximately 1861 when it became a synonym for “damn.” To “not give a hang” is essentially to “not give a damn,” though the evolution from damn to hang is still not entirely clear. Perhaps the particular syntactic use of “hang” as “damn” evolved from semantically similar expressions which grew up in the 16th century and used “hanged” in anger or impatience to mean cursed or damned as in, “I’ll be hanged,” or, “Hangyd be he that this toun yelde, To Crystene men, whyl he may leve!” (Coer de L. 4414 in OED).

When internet browsing is not convenient, a rarefying situation these days, we know the feeling of heated debate over seemingly pointless subjects. But why do we go so far when internet browsers are out of reach? All that is at stake, after all, is the meaning of a word. Isn’t it?

A tribute to the importance of words, Max has undertaken the project of brainstorming and inscribing two diametrically and politically offensive slogans onto either side of a piece of cardboard. Enlisting Rusty in his project, he explains that the cardboard slogans are supposed to antagonize to anger, or violence, the two bordering rallies of democrats and republicans. Rusty agrees with Max on the sign’s violent effect, though on the meaning of the violence the two activists diverge.

Though Rusty and Max seem to have no problem with language as they compose two perfectly provocative political phrases for the sign, one gem being “abort Christian fetuses,” neither can seem to agree with the other on the sign’s actual function. Is the sign an unapparent symbol for unity and for the dissolution of political differences? Could it be a nihilistic tribute to the epistemic failure of language and human understanding, a single sign that literally signifies a contradiction between two opposing messages? With this in mind, Rusty applauds Max for the “extreme neutral position” that his sign represents. Max frowns on Rusty’s reading and insists instead that the sign may literally be a sign to which both crowds will be violently drawn for the purpose of beating its holder and everyone else in the bordering rally to a red and blue pulp. Max suggests that in some sense the meaning will follow in the aftermath of the extremist political gesture.

There is sovereignty to lose in an argument about words. But such arguments are not always as simple as those over the meaning of all “men”, or “natural rights.” In an absolute monarchy, the power to make decisions was owned by one person, the monarch. Decision and sovereignty are, in such a situation, inseparable. However, in a constitutional democracy the monarch, in this case the elected executive, is beholden to a set of constitutional tenets. Some theorists think of this document to be kind of like a key, ground away by the opinions of the people until it fits. When a situation arises that over reaches the language of the document, this is called the exception. In a constitutional democracy with a congress installed, discussion becomes the decider.  To iterate, when discussion is synonymous with decision, interpretation then becomes a sovereign act.

Some political theorists have argued that, despite our American belief to the contrary, the interpretation and the creation of law is not a reflection of the will of the people.

Our belief is one that evokes in us the romantic image of the pure democracy, of churning crowds all coalescing into multifarious interests for the ultimate purpose of influencing the decision through the numbers and majority of their opinions. But the true nature of American politics is increasingly positivist, that is, America is a republic managed by empirical kinds of observation that are independent of metaphysics. The new liberal conditions of interpretation demand in this way a separation of politics from decision, a heavier reliance on empirical evidence and the arbitration of science to corroborate in the decisions of the state. The enlightenment myth which predicates the infallibility of empirical science, in this account, supplants the traditional political gesturing of politicians and the  political conscience of the people.

The notion that science slowly assumes the role of the decider is only one view of American politics, though it seems to work very well with this play. When Max and Rusty’s seemingly endless argument is finally decided by the admission of a newspaper, it is not only the present but all debates seem to end.

Max leaving the stage, in a nihilistic huff after having based one of his assumptions on an editorial mistake, marks the passing of the day of the political rally. “Fuck it,” Max says. Literally, the day of direct action is passed and the new liberal democracy is proven the victor. “Hey,” Rusty interjects and waits as Max disappears from the stage. His interjection is pregnant with meaning, with the lonliness of the discussionless silence. It is a moment reminiscent of Beckett’s Hamm beckoning after his Clov—uncertain.

“A Play on Words” is currently playing with a collection of other American plays, off broadway at 59 East 59th Street, New York, NY.

Review: Sizwe Banzi is Dead

“Sizwe Banzi Is Dead” played at BAM through April 19, 2008

Sizwe Banzi at birth, Robert at death. Robert is Sizwe Banzi, that is, until he he had the wrong stamp in his identity passbook and was prohibited from staying in Port Elizabeth. He is given a choice: return to the hometown that strangles him economically thus physically or stay. Sizwe Banzi reluctantly chooses to stay.

Set in “apartheid-era” South Africa, “Sizwe Banzi” is about a government that mandated its black inhabitants to carry with them an assigned identity. The passbook confined a person to a specified region, an assigned sense of identity. In a sense, the play seems to argue, blacks living at that time were dead at birth in as much as living often entailed killing one’s own individual identity.

The play debuted on October 8, 1972 in Cape Town, South Africa. It was not well received by the South African government. In 1976, the government arrested the original cast for treason and sentenced them to solitary confinement. They were released after several weeks as a result of a series protests. The New York Times reported on the April 2008 performance at the BAM, which featured both members of the original cast, Kani (Styles) and Ntshona (Robert), that: “Perhaps because the play does not possess the political urgency it once did, the performances have an inviting warmth that draws fully on the comic flavorings of the characters.” I agree, there was quite a bit of warmth on stage as Styles breached the 4rth wall to drag up and interrogate members of the audience, though with the proper historical primer, I think the urgency can be returned. The present day Robert, says the Times as they feed on the caricatured figure, is a “smiling black man carrying a pipe, a walking stick, and a newspaper.” Yet, without knowing anything about Apartheid South Africa, the serious nature of Sizwe’s “death” can seem pretty somber with the application of a little imagination and empathy. Perhaps though, empathy was unavailable to the reviewer. Though many have declared that the politics and tragedies of American race politics have also lost their “political urgency” there are large populations of Americans who might disagree, though they are probably not in positions that would allow them to expound their opinions. The politics of identity and racism is a present day problem. Let the New York Times look to the prisons. Perhaps it is only the media that finds the problems of race and discrimination to be less urgent.

To quote Styles, “You must understand one thing…There is nothing we can leave behind when we die, except the memory of ourselves.”Some of us must be constantly rebuilding and reimagining those memories. That’s a lot of work, just to be remembered.

Maisie

Review: Paradise Park

“Paradise Park” Ran until April 6 at the Signature Theater’s Peter Norton Space, 555 West 42nd Street, Clinton; (212) 244-7529, signaturetheatre.org.

I’m back from a long stint of analysis and memo writing in the less exciting world of municipal and state politics, phew. What a bore. At any rate, I did not write this as I had planned – punctually, that is – but I saw a play called Paradise Park. Let’s see if I can recall it:

It was an interesting harmony of mediocre dramatic performance and acting. The play, largely an a-synchronous reflection on postmodern themes is disorganized without a cause. The theme park of this play, our mixed up simulacrum-filled world, is staffed by an up and coming homosexual Indian immigrant who’s just trying to get paid. He spends the play in a goofy mouse costume, more or less his “park” uniform, and falls in love with a white closeted elderly man who mediates his sexuality through a talking dummy. Most unfortunate, our meek minotaur is glad to have the dummy with which to spoon. Puke, this is not worth the ticket unless you are some kind of masochist. Of course if you go to see a play these days you are either a masochist, an elderly person or a fop. So of course I went and I was not at all disappointed – though neither was I moved. “Paradise Park” is a not-disorienting, disordered peregrination through an outdated and hyperbolic conception of post modernity and the changing postmodern. Early in the first act, Nancy (Veanne Cox) proposes excavation:

The thing is:
I think we should go back to where we were
because, if you think about it,
the thing is, right now, we are in the present,
and before we were in the present,
we were in the past
so if we want to get oriented
we should go back to the past!

Moments like Nancy’s above make one think now here’s a real thinking play and you brace yourself for a great dramatic feat like “The Dining Room” by A. R. Gurney performed recently by The Keen Company at Theater Row. Yet, after an hour of “Paradise Park” it begins to seem like the playwright, Charles Mee, was simply trying to squeeze in as many dramatized postmodern thought experiments as possible. The New York Times reviewer, I see, called this a “frustrating” lack of “cogent structure.” I would call it a frustrating lack of talent or professional courtesy. The scenes are cross stitched together by the mere identity of its spastic-actants and the pallid side plots that float among them. The playwright succeeds and his audience is moved to experience a postmodern confusion, or perhaps just confusion. There is a tasteful thought experiment/scene, wherein Darling (Vanessa Aspillaga) addresses her terrified father through the rear view mirror of the family car. Her heartfelt confession about reality is a bit over blown – like the play as a whole, but I don’t think this symmetry is intentional – though the idea that her father must keep one eye on the road having only one eye left to divide between his wife and daughter is cleverly performed. The scene, however, like every other side show in Mee’s performance, comes out of nowhere and lacks even the grace and style of actual side shows. Mee frequently makes an unqualified use of technology.

As he has tried to tackle the tough questions he seems only to have fondled the least relevant of them. “Paradise Park” is a joyride through the various politics of identity: moral, sexual and racial. I think he unfortunately drops the ball with the latter and simply ruins the former two.  Mee has built a silly merry go round of a play and has called it cultural commentary. Off hand, I’d say it’s not so safe to ride. Hopefully, you’ll see it anyway. In a nutshell, the thoughts are good, the dramatic performance smelly. This play would fill the funnies section of any paper, though nothing here would qualify a laugh. Mee needs to work harder on the whole picture. I would really like to see this shake n’ bake assembly of themes and provocative situations integrated into a meaningful whole. The depth is decent, but unity and finesse make a lasting work.  If ever you are presented with the opportunity, proceed at your own risk.

See the New York Times “Paradise Park” review

Sincerely,

Sam