Desert of the Real

This Place is a Desert
January 10, 2008

I’m going to begin the entry with a bit of a reversal to my normal review strategy. I usually give a brief summary of a piece, describe what I like about the piece, and then take a more critical stance at the end. It’s what some people who teach English Comp might call the “whites of your eyes” paper—the paper that delays the thesis until the end, when you’re close enough to see the whites of its eyes.

So I’ll begin with what I found technically troubling about the piece, just to get it out of the way. I saw Desert with several of my colleagues, and while I think I like this piece better than they, I still thought the performance had some serious issues. Acting, for one. Even if the acting was meant to be melodramatic, which I think it was, there were some serious inconsistencies with the acting. Ok, there’s one. The second was the business of the stage—there was just so much going on that it was impossible to take everything in. Intentional? Sure. Effective? Sure. Slightly overwhelming? Definitely.

Ultimately, in light of these criticisms, the piece for me was a success—at the very least at the theoretical level. The early reference to the philosophy of technology is a key to making sense of the performance: one of the main characters is having an affair with a married man, Marcello, and the woman is reading Virilio, a French philosopher who has created a body of work critiquing the ideology and effect of technology upon our lives and our perspective. The woman paraphrases at one point from her book “Images don’t speak, images don’t remember—therefore, we don’t remember.” Which, by the way, is a classic Aristotle logical structure. Here is the crux of the matter: humans created and cultivated technology as a help, a tool, a resource: and now we are the product (and, some might say, the victim), at this point in history, of our technologies. We are subject to the power of the image that we have created. In another sense, it boils down to pure Aristotelian spectacle: that which isn’t drama only serves to entertain and numb.

So images govern our memory and erase our recollections. Just take a walk down Times Square and there is the tyranny of the image. Well, ok, it’s pleasurable to be in Times Square at some kind of primal level, but I am getting off the point. Desert succeeds in outlining a theory about technology that I respond to. With the video screen bank across the top of the stage, jutting out over the performers, and blinking between angles, shots and it’s obvious that this was meant to underscore how the image has become supreme in our culture. The image rules, man, and there’s nothing we can do with our Frankenstein at this point but smile, nod and glaze over.

But bringing up Times Square may be more than just the childlike awe of a first time visitor to New York. There is the pleasure of the image, as I mentioned above, but there is also the flip side, the dark side of the force of the image. Times Square makes one feel uncomfortable, at some level. This discomfort is certainly different in each person, but I am certain that it is always present. So what I’m trying to float here is that the intention of the over-sized video screens in Desert is to effect a kind of disassociation from the normal theater experience, and from our baseline level of comfort. Effective.

And then there is the guy who is running the mobile camera. He is a really interesting character to me, because he is the guy behind the camera. At first, he isn’t really a character, just a tech guy, but as the piece progresses, he becomes increasingly involved—not as a speaking character who interacts with the others, but as the one who controls the camera; and to some extent, he controls the angles of the recorders. What this all means is that as the piece progresses, the videoman becomes more active, moving the cameras, bringing us closer or farther from the action. He is, in essence, drawing us into the action and making the audience a part of the narrative. The observer becomes implicated in the proceedings. In other words, the cameraman is a surrogate for our complicity in the performance. Another piece of the discomfort of the audience.

Ok, enough of the theoretical crap. What’s working here? It’s a story about excess and passion and about what happens when love fails to persevere and overcome the bumps and the extremes in our lives. This happens to everyone, regardless of nationality, race, gender, sexuality or political stance. What more does one person need?

Scott McEachern
UTR Press Corp
PICA
scott@pica.org