Superfluities Redux

Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland (England, Japan & New York): A Richard Foreman Theater Machine. Written, directed, designed and scored by Richard Foreman. Managing director: Shannon Sindelar. Technical director: Peter Ksander. Stage manager: Brendan Regimbal. Sound engineer: Travis Just. With Joel Israel (Man in Striped Suit), Caitlin McDonough Thayer (Girl in Sailor Hat), Fulya Peker (Girl with Black Hair), Caitlin Rucker (Girl with the Golden Dress), Sarah Dahlen (Girl with the Tiara), and Richard Foreman, Kate Manheim and André Malraux (Voices on Tape). A production of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark's Church, 131 East 10th Street. Running time: 62 minutes, no intermission. Reviewed at the 17 January performance. 17 January-13 April 2008. Ticket and schedule information at OvationTix.

Two grand pianos and a graceless hummingbird provide new challenges to Richard Foreman's characters

Fishing for reality?
Caitlin Rucker, Joel Israel, Fulya Peker, Sarah Dahlen and Caitlin McDonough Thayer in
Deep Trance Behavior in Potatoland
(Photo: Paula Court)

UPDATE: I was remiss, I realise, in not congratulating Foreman's fine performers in Deep Trance Behavior in the original post this morning -- they're central to much of the comedy and emotional tenderness of the evening. Deep Trance Behavior frees the Foreman performer more than I've seen in recent years. So here's to the generously comic bravado and clumsily masculinist fustian of Joel Israel, Caitlin McDonough Thayer's whispered sweetness, the dark and sexy vampishness of Fulya Peker, Caitlin Rucker's glamorous awareness, and Sarah Dahlen's fetching and flirtatious skepticism. As Foreman moves ahead, his casts grow younger and more energetic. But their worlds are one.

The piano, like the two diminutive grand pianos that dominate the stage in Richard Foreman's latest play, is among musical instruments one of the most complicated and mysterious -- mysterious because most mechanical. Anyone familiar with the actions the machine must make through the disciplined, trained hand of the performer to produce a sound knows that the piano's "action" (the proper name for that mechanism) is made up, like the human hand with its bone, muscles, nerves, flesh and blood, of dozens of parts, wood, felt and steel; what's more, unlike those of the flute or the violin, the mechanism is usually invisible to both performer and audience. The mechanism, like the mechanism of consciousness, can be explained in its physical and physiological existence. But what of the sounds it makes, the dying away of the note once attacked, or the dying away of the perception once recognised? What's left after it dies? We're not in the realm of science now, but of art and philosophy.

We're also in Richard Foreman's realm. For the 40th anniversary production of his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Foreman continues to be fascinated by digital media (a new kind of machine, all ones and zeroes to be processed by elaborate technical equipment), and so are his characters. The very first sequence of the play is a Girl in a Golden Dress (Caitlin Rucker) walking to center stage, facing the audience and elaborately swallowing a pill -- the trancelike state follows (though, according to the controlling consciousness of the play, sounding as usual through a tape, this is an odd pill: "Imagine a pill named O-X taken every day for a period of a year. And just once each day in the twenty-four hours of its effectiveness, it links the perceived data of a specific ordinary moment to universal truth"). The live performers seem to be urged to join the two-dimensional, flat characters on the screen behind them. Production intern Anna Friedlaender wrote on the production blog for the show:

In Foreman's current aesthetic, the tension between the two-dimensional surface of the projected image and the three-dimensional experience of the body is stretched to the breaking point, not irrelevant to his obsession with what he called "pancake people" in earlier plays. And in the subtitle to this new play, he introduces the consciousness of travel, of the cameras and cellphones we take with us as we fly from country to country, around the world, in those airplanes that so mystified Proust (who was also memorably mystified by telephones and revolving doors). "You understand me immediately," says a Japanese woman in the video, but we can't really understand her; she's not there, available for questioning. (And she, in her body now, doesn't see us; we're watching a digital shadow, an illusory nothingness.) Like the five performers, we may take her at her word, tranquillized by our own pills -- or, we can recognise that her image and sounds, as inviting as they are, aren't even the light captured by the photographic mechanism or the sound captured by an analog recording device, but only ones and zeroes. The digital video mechanism doesn't capture people; it doesn't capture light or sound either, but only numbers (and, therefore, the mysticism attached to numerology).

The mistake is in thinking that this simulacrum is reality itself, but without the mechanism to decode these numbers (like the mechanism we use to perceive the world in its three dimensions), they remain meaningless data. Deep Trance Behavior suggests that, as these videos and sounds are memoirs of experience, they're a far more fragile media of memory -- they're an illusory world, and our immersion in it invites us to lose our own three-dimensional existence in those ones and zeroes. The lie behind these memoirs, of course, is that they're not permanent. As a record of the past, they grant the illusion of immortality for those who believe they're captured within the two-dimensional screen; and they dull us to what is possible for us, experientially, as three-dimensional, knowing beings in this comic world. We can see characters on the screen, hear them -- but we cannot touch them, and they can't feel our touch.

The irrational desire for an impossible immortality, the Spanish philosopher Unamuno believed, defined the human being as a tragic figure. The illusory immortality of the screen blinds us to the very real mortality of our own bodies. In Deep Trance Behavior there is, for the first time in my memory of Foreman's work, a representation of death on-stage, and even a melodramatically wailing mourner. More to the point is the tableau that ends the play: as a curtain opens in the video, finally allowing metaphorical entrance to that two-dimensional realm, it's too late for the characters on stage, who are in various states of ... rest? Or something else? Foreman would have it as a state of relaxation -- "The actors are simply resting" is the last legend of the play, which we read over the fallen, motionless bodies of the performers onstage. This may be true, but it also calls into consciousness the possibility that they might also be dead, and that we may be prone ourselves to make that mistake were we not reminded of the metaphorical form of the theatre itself.

In watching a Richard Foreman play, we are invited to become aware of our own machinery of consciousness -- to recognise the two-dimensionality of the screened world, whether it's Japanese or English, as an invitation to escape our own three-dimensional, fleshed, very mortal bodies; and to recognise the tricks that these numbers play on our senses. And in this is a form of hope (Foreman is a comic, not a tragic, dramatist -- and there's enormous comedy in Deep Trance Behavior, not to mention the showmanlike flourishes for which he's known; Foreman's always had a lot of Belasco in him). The irony of mortality can be a comic irony as well as a tragic one. It's for us to decide, and recognise, as the play's own musing consciousness says: