Regurgitogaphy

Regurgitogaphy
Thursday, January 10, 2008

The best thing about this performance was the wit and the humor of Brazilian writer and actor Michel Melamed and his incredibly dexterous wordplay. He nimbly navigated an astounding amount of pop culture ground, weaving us into and out of a kind of associational landscape. One of the best moments, not to ruin this piece for any one, is when he brings out a bean bag he names John, and proceeds to abuse “John”, kicking it and throwing it around, imbuing the thing with a character, before finally sinking down into “John’s” cushiony center and, well, performing what appears to be a masturbation scene. At any rate, “John” doesn’t seem to be any worse for wear and Brazilian dismisses the chair with a quick throw offstage.

The central element of the piece, the point, I guess of the creation of the piece, is the machine that supposedly picks up audience reactions and conducts these reactions directly through electrical cables into leads attached to the actor’s wrists and legs. When audience laughs, applauds, cheers, or even, apparently, coughs loudly, this is transferred to the actor in the form of electrical shocks.

While I am open to new forms of performance and enjoy, respect and admire experimental theater, I was at odds with myself over this audience meter and its effectiveness—both as a realistic machine (and its mechanism is never really revealed), and as it affected the audience. In other words, I became concerned that the machine was merely a gimmick: a circus trick, or sleight of hand, an illusion that wouldn’t withstand a deeper investigation into how the piece worked as a whole.

Well, of course the smart writer thought of this and about three quarters through the show, the actor stops the progression (in what I’m sure was a planned stoppage) and brings a volunteer up on stage, hooks her up to the leads (which in another life serve as jumper cables for someone’s car) and then directs someone in the booth to give her a short blast of the electricity. The charge comes, she shrieks, and the audience applauds, our skepticism allayed.

All of this said, there is a final observation that I’d like to muse upon, and this is a consideration of the stage setup and how much what we were looking at looked a little like the image of the hooded torture victim from Abu Gharib that emerged in the media a couple of years ago. The actor wore black, he kept his arms out from his body, and his legs splayed. He wore his hair long and it shrouded his face. Was all of this intentional? I don’t know. The piece was not overtly political, other than the fact that there was language describing certain idiocies of Bush and other politicians. So if not a political piece, then what do we make of the visual reference to torture? If planned, then the piece needs to clear up its message, so to speak. If unintentional, then this is a problem that shoots out the heart of the piece and something that needs to be fixed.

Scott McEachern
UTR Press Corps
PICA
scott@pica.org