problems of the text
by Douglas Messerli
Elevator Repair Service Arguendo / Los Angeles, Redcat Theater (the Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall / the performance I saw was on opening night, November 6, 2014
The Elevator
Repair Service theater company—although described in the program as creating
“original works for live theater with an ongoing ensemble”—clearly prefers to
use extant texts, as in last year’s “reading” of The Great Gatsby, presented as
Gatz, and in their 2008 production of
The Sound and the Fury, works which
they perform in ways that decontextualize the originals and presumably refresh
their meanings or transform our previous interpretations. Of course, significant auteur-based directors such as
Peter Sellars have been doing this for years, rethinking and reinventing the standard
repertoire of plays, operas, and other compositions in productions that
sometimes radically re-reposition the original intentions and meanings of the
chosen texts. And more recently, writers such as Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa
Place have done something similar in their “literary” publications, such as—in
Goldsmith’s case—reprinting an entire issue of The New York Times in a one read-through version published in a single volume, which
helps to create the sense of varying articles serving like chapters in a long, postmodern-like
fiction, or gathering months of weather reports and related radio commentary as
if they might be read as a kind of journal or diary of cultural events—or in
the case of Place—presenting court documents so that they read as a kind of
soap-opera or melodrama about various encounters between women and men.
In the work I saw last night at The Walt
Disney Concert Hall’s Redcat Theater (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater),
Arguendo, uses court documents from
the case of Barnes v. Glen Theatre, a
1991 Supreme Court hearing about nude dancing in the state of Indiana. Applying
the actual words, as well as hems, haws, hacks, and sometimes incoherent
interruptions of the Supreme Court justices of that term—William H. Rehnquist,
Byron R. White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra
Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, and David H. Souter, plus the
legal arguments of Mr. Uhl (for the Petitioner) and Mr. Ennis (for the
Respondent)—the company has great fun imagining the internal thinking of the
various speakers as they throw out various contradicting and sometimes
shockingly unpredictable comments (particularly given what we know of the
general viewpoints of individuals such as Scalia, Kennedy, Rehnquist and others
today) for “arguendos” sake, “for the sake of argument.”
Recognizing this fine point of
distinction, the company often moves the judges and other figures across the
stage as if they were all in a grand ballet. Similarly, the lawyer for the nude
bookstore, Mr. Ennis (Mike Iveson) gradually moves from partial undress (the
male equivalent of pasties and g-string) to complete nudity—permissible within
a stage play such as Arguendo, while,
given the final court decision, apparently still not permissible, in Indiana at
least, in a room full of men positioned behind a shared pane of glass (the
concept of a “shared pane of glass” is of utter importance in this manner,
since a dancer performing nude before a single customer behind a piece of glass
would be permitted).
What the justices are doing in their arguendo may be quite ridiculous on the
surface, but if one truly contemplates the substance of those law-based arguments,
we realize that the whole matter exists in a kind self-created maze of
impenetrable realities that the law, because of its limited language, is simply
unable to engage. In short, the language the justices are using cannot properly
focus on the very issues wherein such seemingly trivial things truly do matter.
And, in satirizing of what has already been utterly trivialized, the actors and
the plays creators gradually reveal themselves as being as highly unoriginal as
the justices had been, locked away in their thousands of pages of case law.
An original writer, on the other hand,
might be able to explore the primary text in a way that offers a kind of
amelioration between these two extremes, considering what may be perceived of
as value while simultaneously questioning and challenging the meanings and
logic of those very codes of behavior. The original writer might even have
found another route into this serious issue of personal rights which our state
and nation often feel compelled to delimit. Given the extremes in which our
country has been willing to go in order to delimit those freedoms, as Edward
Snowden and others have revealed in the past few years, perhaps a wink and a
nod, a giggle and wiggle are simply not enough. Both my theater-going
companion, Deborah Meadows, and I, accordingly, walked away a bit saddened by
what I am certain others saw as a joyously raucous attack.
by Douglas Messerli
Elevator Repair Service Arguendo / Los Angeles, Redcat Theater (the Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall / the performance I saw was on opening night, November 6, 2014
Much of this makes for quite spritely
fun, as the justices, all played by three office-chair-bound actors, who, like
their arguments, shift and roll across space at the same time that director
John Collins and video designer Ben Rubin roll vast pages of previous decisions
across the back wall and floor like so much literary confetti. The often
nonplussed lawyers attempt to present their cases against the backdrop of the court
justices, often quite hilariously, querying and challenging former lower-court
decisions, while simultaneously attempting to determine, in minute detail, just
what constitutes a message in a nude dance and how such “messages” differ from
similar expressions in higher art forms such as opera or theatrical
productions. Scalia, in particular, seems nearly obsessed with the nudity in
Richard Strauss’ Salome.
At the very crux of several of the
arguments is a seeming inability of previous courts to be able to comprehend
that expression through dance (what all describe as “performance dance,” as if
all dance might not be performative) may be as significant as expression
through language or through musical performance. Somehow dance has not been
given the same leniency in relationship with First Amendment rights, we perceive,
as other forms of art, and, therefore, “nude” dancing is not seen as a
statement of significance in the same way that Henry Miller might speak about
nudity or a rock band might comment on such behavior in their songs and lyrics.
All of this wild deconstruction of court
documents, in the hands of the Elevator Repair Service, provides for a kind of
heady amusement—at least for a while. But over the short duration of this
performance, it suddenly dawns on us that, despite the absurd nit-picking
differentiations between the desire for expression and the message we perceive
is that a far more serious issue about the very difference between actor and responder,
between community notions of morality and personal expression and the
significance of those values, without the possibility that this theatrical
group might be able to pause for a moment to explore them. At the heart of
these questions also lie profound issues concerning what is natural, or even
concerning what nature is itself. Finally, we can only ask, why does nudity
(and thousands of other things relating to our bodies) so frighten us? Why are
so many the audience even giggling even as I menatally noted this, at Mike
Iveson’s rather unattractive—certainly not sexually alluring—nude body?
In short, in watching this otherwise
humorous bagatelle, I graudally came to perceive the real problem was what
might be described as a kind of elevation of unoriginality. Given the nature of the preconceived text one
can only work to reveal what one sees as its already pre-existent truths—the
role often taken on by conservative pedants, who represent such texts as sacred
fact—or by more liberaral commentators such as the this theater company to
challenge and mock such texts, exposing their flaws of logic through humor.
Los Angeles,
November 7, 2014
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