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Speed
Freaks [film]
Unconscious
Motives of the Motion Picture Industry |
Each year, Mr. Foreman, a titan of the American avant-garde, invents remarkably specific interior landscapes in plays that come as close to capturing the geography of dreams as theater can. His most recent offering, which opened last night on the pocket-size stage at St. Mark's Church, is resonantly entitled "Permanent Brain Damage." Brain damage is Mr. Foreman's equivalent of original sin, an empirical handicap with which everyone is born. Here, while the work's bearded, Rasputinish central figure (DJ Mendel) growls and paces like a caged animal, a cryptic voice coolly articulates delirious, stinging thoughts like, "What I believe certainly is nothing I call believable because I'm ravished by all contradictory possibilities. Mr. Mendel's character is jaded in ways Cole Porter could never have imagined. "What gives this man that emotional kick?" asks the unseen voice. And with such stimulants as getting spanked, being zipped into a body bag and having steak served on his bald pate are all provided (by a supporting ensemble that suggests the Romanovs freshly arrived from their graves), none of these seem to be quite the answer. The real kick, in Mr. Foreman's world, comes from finding clear beguiling forms of showmanship that express philosophical confusion. Knowledge may be an illusion and even physical sensations untrustworthy. But this director is able to cast such concerns in the purely theatrical terms of the music hall, with jolting sight gags, precisely choreographed chases and pratfalls and even a little song and dance (in this instance, a particularly dissonant version of "The Sunny Side of the Street"). The traditional Foreman touches are all here: space-dividing strings, garlands of scrambled alphabets, clear plastic walls that separate the stage from the audience and subversively variable lighting that makes you wonder if your eyes are failing. Eye charts, appropriately, are dominant motifs (along with ineffable eggs, checkered windmill blades and metronomes that exasperatingly keep their own irrelevant time). Like most eye charts, they are tantalizing, precisely arranged configurations of letters and numbers that seem to bear no relation to each other, which is rather what Mr. Foreman's productions are like. Here, of course, the charts are useless as diagnostic aids. And when the show pauses to catalogue the parts of the body, they are described with words like vulnerable, deceitful, incompetent and defenseless. There's a poignant, self-flagellating harshness here, as there is in the central character's repeated attempts to make himself disappear. He never succeeds in doing so. "No magic!" proclaims the show's invisible narrator. "That's the magic." Which is a good way of summarizing Mr. Foreman's singular talent: all that theatrical hocus-pocus may finally signify nothing, but that doesn't mean that the man who creates it isn't a first-class magician.
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"Mental
Stealth" Whatever else you may think of the mind-body dilemma, it has certainly provided a rich vein for our more daring theater artists to work. We may wish that our spiritual and visceral components were better integrated, but we have to admit that, on stage at any rate, their disjunction is always exciting. Some artists send us spinning out into the cosmos, while others roll us in the muck; the most consistently intriguing, maybe, are those who tease us with the connection between the two, the notion that there's a metaphysics in muck and a carnality in the cosmos, with poor humankind always stuck trying to fit the two together in an unsquareable circle. Richard Foreman's productions of his own plays have been Morris-dancing around that circle since well before I began reviewing, which isn't a short time ago. Astonishingly, in all these years, Foreman has never lost faith in the visceral theater of the mind–or do I mean his cerebral theater of gut impulses?–in which it's the ideas that do the dancing, take the pratfalls, and whisper behind the hero's back. Others can never perceive things with the Permanent Brain Damage that's the minatory title of Foreman's latest piece, a fact he's acknowledged, in effect, by removing the parenthetically seductive subtitle (Risk It! Risk It!), that accompanied it in the early ads and press releases. Instead, the danger for critics and loyal followers is that the ongoing parade of Foreman's pieces, after so many years, might lull one into regarding them all as a single undifferentiated dance that's no more than mildly diverting. Permanent Brain Damage torpedoes that prospect violently, bringing you up sharp against the notion that Foreman's cerebro-physical gyrations, for all their playfulness, come from a tragic vision of the breach that can never be healed. Funny and wacky throughout in the traditional Foreman vein, Permanent Brain Damage is at the same time unremittingly cruel and painful, a continuous series of punishments visited on a man in a white suit (D. J. Mendel) who is Foreman's current stand-in for his attempts at an integrated consciousness–and by that token, for mine and for yours, hypocrite lecteur. Plainly, the eternally divided self has for Foreman the same degree of tragic pain that the unwisely divided kingdom had for Shakespeare: Permanent Brain Damage is as close as a theater of mind made flesh can get to King Lear. Taking a cue from this grandeur, the costumes suggest a European court circa 1910, one of Foreman's favorite periods for transformable kitsch imagery. While Mendel cowers or stalks the stage, a lonely and perplexed figure in white, the others, largely in black with touches of red, surround him with ominously false obsequiousness or cluster in a corner to mock him openly: a prime ministerish figure in a red sash (Robert Cucuzza); a sterner one in a red skullcap (Stephen Jordan); a woman in a chef's hat bursting with sinister cheer (Cradeaux Alexander). Unlike other recent Foreman pieces, this one keeps both characterization and on-stage speech to a minimum, most of the text is spoken on tape by Foreman himself. While the tableaux are often courtly, the behavior is in the bumptious Foreman tradition (much as one might say, "the caged pope has the traditional Bacon scream"), with an emphasis on slapstick violence that's been fairly rare in Foreman's work since the days of Blvd. de Paris and Pain(t). The evening begins–after the tape tells us, "Nothing to be afraid of, really"–with the courtiers breaking an egg in a pan directly over Mendel's shaven dome, a typically Foreman ganglion of clotted, visual puns (egghead, brain-pan). Adjusting, the taped voice says, "Well, maybe there are things to be afraid of after all." And so there are: By the evening's end, Mendel has been punched, stuffed in a sack, knocked down, bashed over his head with a picture frame, jeered and pointed at, ignored, and openly shunned as an outcast. A dainty chime sounds when he does or says something cosmically right; far more often, a brassy gong reverberates when he makes a wrong move. His really bad choices summon a sonic hullabaloo, a mass flight of the supporting cast, and the descent of a gilt and papier-mâché head that looks like a cross between a Toltec idol and a a Christmas tree ornament. When the courtiers put on red robes over their dark clothing, Mendel dons one; trying to fit in; when they see this, they begin a whirling movement; when he starts to whirl too, they stop and glare at him. Seeing this and other sequences, it's impossible not to think of conditions more historical than cerebral, of groups stigmatized for their "difference": Jews in Europe, gays in the U.S., intellectuals in the theater. A lot of the background taped babble that accompanies the actor seems to be in Hebrew, including a maddeningly slow fox-trot wailed by a female close-harmony duo, which recurs over and over, an atmospheric, key to the piece. Never spelled out, this adumbration of social realities runs alongside the piece like an analog track of unheard commentary. Inside the script, the crime that gets the man in the white suit so brutalized is his pursuit of a happiness humans can't aspire to, a state in which all possibilities, physical and mental, are savorable at the same time. Because thought counters impulse, and thoughts themselves are graspable only in succession, this state can never exist; one thing always distracts us from another. "The world is so full of a number of things that I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings," James Thurber once wrote, quoting Robert Louis Stevenson, and added sagely, "and you know how happy kings are." Unhappy, restless, confused, always knocked down by the world's seeming lack of possibility and always buoyed up again by the surprise of the actual, Foreman's mind-king is the Thurber man as tragic hero, a figure of grandeur in his buffoonish but obstinately lucid integrity. Unmistakably, he's a figure of Foreman's own endlessly joyous and frustrating aesthetic quest, quixotically tilting at the windmills of his mind–which, in this piece can be seen whirling ceaselessly on the upstage shelves, another metaphor, made into troubling and evanescent reality. With less to speak then usual, the cast can chiefly be praised for carrying out Foreman's directions with the right mixture of grimness and glee; Mendel, taking their punishments with graceful deadpan patience, deserves not so much an acting award as a bronze star for bravery under fire. |
