Show Response: The Dastardly Thornes v. The Town of Goldhaven

by Allyson Dwyer

My adorable father doesn't understand streaming, can't really share YouTube videos, but he loves to DVR stuff for me. Recently he recorded a program about Shakespearean times narrated by Leonard Nemoy and the experience of being a groundling. Despite the medieval filth and heckling, I found myself so curious about a world where entertainment, "media," aka our little treats were still a novelty, and thus its occasion demanded not just your attention but your entire being. 

In Ben Holbrook & Nate Weida's hysterical, transformative musical The Dastardly Thornes v. The Town of Goldhaven, the lines between stage and spectator are blurred beyond recognition. For a few hours, I may have very well been a groundling of Goldhaven, Arizona, where the entertainment was the spectacle of justice. Amped up by a very justice-loving Mayor Baron Goldenteef (Leon Schwendener, who made me laugh til I cried), this is a kangaroo court blown up 500% to the point that you're observing every crack, every thorny bizarre bug, in the facade of American Exceptionalism.

Benjamin Viertel's direction is that of someone who has created a curtain without there ever being a proscenium. Like a frog in a slow boiling pot, you begin to understand. I'm not just observing, I'm melting into this story. The actors (a stunning brilliant ensemble of animated characters) are not acting for me, in fact, I think they're stuck between me and the town. These people live in this space, and they'll be cracking jokes and singing these songs long after I've left. The most brilliant device that ties this all together is the inclusion of Steakhouse (Gio Naarendorp, the gem at the center of an already stacked cast), a self-made man gone corporate with his string of Steakhouses and canned baked beans. Steakhouse takes not so much a seat as a throne with the audience, and from there heckles the performance, I mean trial. His voice becomes ours, as we are all the almighty consumer, ready to dole out judgements as needed, second by second. This is a beer-in-hand show. Justice will be served. 

I will always laugh at a fart joke, I will always laugh at the word beans. But don't be fooled, the humor is both high-brow and low-brow. Every ingredient, all eleven herbs and spices, are mixed in and out Ben Holbrook's intricate script for maximum brain massaging. Total sublimation, and a demand from the viewer that they be engaged in a way that cannot happen anywhere else but in that room. Go, go with friends, go with the need for a (beautiful, harmonic) country folk song in your heart. Go and be a groundling, phoneless and ready to howl and laugh with those around you, in real time, like a very good dream.

The Dastardly Thornes v. The Town of Goldhaven is running at The Brick Theater until August 12th.

Photo credit: Ben Holbrook

Show Response: This House is Not a Home

by Patrick Denney

An artfully noodling dance sequence performed in a pair of viral red boots. Two Dimes Square denizens feeding off each other in a vape-fueled Meisner exercise that ends in violent scuffle. A Times Square gingerbread man thrashes across the stage, accompanied by a relentless torrent of harsh noise and crackling voiceover. The performance artist Crackhead Barney sparks an N-word-fueled back-and-forth between herself and an ASL interpreter. And, of course, a full-sized bouncy castle, blown up in real time. Comedy club crowd work careens into the fraught dynamics of interracial relationships. Consensual joy comes up against thrumming, cultivated discomfort. If, per Nicole Kidman’s dictum, heartbreak is supposed to feel good in a place like this, what if it just doesn’t? The actions of Nile Harris’s This House is Not a Home feels almost like scrolling through the hyper-niche TikTok feed of a performance studies grad student. Some moments whiz by with the high-speed passivity of the swipe. Others linger, stuck fast, layer upon layer of rich data seeping into the viewer, altering the increasingly complex algorithms of our brains. This House beautifully stages these blunt force logics of online life and the death-by-a-thousand-cuts demise that these economies of attention can inflict on the real-world bodies. Borne out of the memories and material legacy of Harris’s late friend and collaborator Trevor Bazile, an artist and filmmaker known for his beguiling and befuddling online output and the clout-fueled, shock-stock New People’s Cinema Club. Bazile’s sudden death in October 2021 in a sense spawned the performance. The bouncy house at the heart of the dramatic action was acquired by Bazile for NPCC with funds reportedly from controversial tech titan Peter Thiel. Harris plumbs the tension ardently online strain of afro-pessimism, and fundamental flaws of combining capital and art.

The sputtering combustion engine of Harris’s piece is a dramaturgy of failure. Failure to produce prefab artistic deliverables. Failure to create a legible lingua franca of Black joy for largely white institutional funders. Failure to grieve in a way that sprouts the proper form of feathers and flies away. “I’m Smiling, you just can’t see it,” Harris reminds us throughout the piece. As performance scholars Margaret Werry and Róisín O'Gorman remind us, failure “points beyond, by marking the limit of what is possible at a particular time and place. It historicizes, denaturalizes, helps us reflexively see the orders in which we are embedded. (If we look).” Indeed, the titular house of the piece can be seen as a laboratory for Black failure. After inflation, dancer Malcom X. Bett’s enters the castle, careening around the inflatable structure, puzzling through the recurring mantras of the piece. He flies. He jukes. Every time the house holds him. As Betts’ thoughts spin out, the space allows the ideas to bounce and ricochet alongside him. They almost become atoms, with each barreling collision creating the possibility of new elements— or perhaps blow up the world. Rather than a bang, though, the scene ends with a carefully calculated whimper. The Dimes Square girls spring to life and intervene into Bett’s kinetic reverie. They come charging into the castle, whipping out their phones, inevitably trilling “WorldStar” again and again. Almost immediately, the walls come down and air seeps out. Collected air simply can not hold the weight of appropriation. The flopping skeleton of the house consumes the performers as they continue to shout and writhe from inside. 

WorldStar.

WorldStar.

WorldStar

Learn more about Nile Harris here or here.

Show Response: Girl Mode

by Allyson Dwyer

Kate McGee is living in 3023, knowing that the secret of our reality is that it's virtual and by design, always has been. She has crafted a game that is actually a moving poem, a textured movie. Have you ever wondered what it's like to embody a smash cut? Is this how Princess Zelda experiences Hyrule? I have always hated my body, always longed to experience an ethereal existence, fed no doubt by a digital addiction. Still, I was hesitant on VR, because all I was shown were video games, products, objectives. Then on an unsuspecting weekday, Kate placed the portal on my eyes, and I was in a stunning chiachurso world, looking down at my digital hands and a digital desk. I turned on the lamp, picked up a sheet of paper, and like a spell her words gave shape to things I always felt and my soul knew. The unreality of existing, a disassociation that untangles the soul across space and time, the loneliness and growth of that singular experience. My hands pulled the triggers that performed the tasks, but I was not there, I was back at SohoRep. But also, I was there, still there.

Girl Mode contains objectives, but unlike a typical video game, there is no accruing, no scoring, no boss battles. You are tasked only with living through days that bleed into one another, chasing a floating flower down a twinkling road through familiar rooms, snowy forest paths, the liminal space of the desk we dream upon. The simple act of pouring tea is an accomplishment, the weight of digitized liquid falling from my hands into the cup as I poured tea for the first time as a pixelated soul. The emotions are the objective, and in feeling them I have felt more alive this month than all year - the difference between 20 minutes of expression stretching the medium, and 200+ hours of a Nintendo product where what I accomplished will remain inside the SD card, leaving no trace of importance in my life. I'd like to go back into Kate's world, where I felt immediate intimacy with its creator and the digital crooks and nannies of my mind-palace, where I wanted to linger, where theater felt virtually realized and I felt realized, virtually.

I am looking forward to the next iteration of Kate's project, and now for a VR future built by tender artistic adventurous souls.