Late Carnage

by Alex Aguirre

Leonie Bell’s Im Dunkeln sieht man besser (translation: you can see better in the dark) is the dream play you’ve been waiting for. Even though the piece is primarily in English (there are some intermittent splashes of German), the whole piece feels like a foreign film without the subtitles. This is a play of making moments that have no business fitting together… fitting together.  

Leonie Bell herself leads a team of murderous cheerleaders into a Dionysian blood orgy as the play transitions into a gloomy yet somehow still endearing second act. The carnage leaves us with the protruding head of one of the underworld safari rangers poking out of a Gothic buffet, which was a thing of macabre beauty. The eery displacement of reality was accomplished with poise and humor. The word dreamlike gets thrown around a lot when describing plays and films that are even the slightest bit abstract, and that always upsets me because waking life itself is pretty abstract. You can take me seriously then, when I say that this piece does dream logic justice. The Lynchian WTF factor is pinging on all levels but it does so in that way art can do, with threads that are connected aesthetically rather than with  expected narrative relation.

Speaking of carnivorous explorations of late capital, I also saw Meat by Zara Roy at the Tank this month  and found its dive into these themes apt and compelling. Meat is about a lonely meatpacker who finds love with a woman several decades his senior. He doesn’t hold onto that love for long though, because the system has trapped him and robbed him of his agency. Meat is a well-written portrait of the worker trapped in the bone-crushing jaws of capital, just as Im Dunkeln sieht man besser is a collage of the distortion of logic that grows like a fungus in the corners. 

Im Dunkeln sieht man besser images by Walter Wlodarczyk