Cirque du Soulless
By Kevin Byrne
Abacus Black Strikes NOW!:
The Rampant Justice of Abacus Black
By Mark Doskow, Normandy Sherwood, and James Stanley
The National Theater of the United States of America
(closed)
We're traveling to the City of Gold, everybody. A place of guarded
safety and like-minded thinkers who share our belief in the divine
righteousness of the human spirit. That is, unless we are consumed
by zombies along the way.
At least, that's the story behind the newest
theater piece by the National Theater of the United States of
America, Abacus Black Strikes NOW!: The Rampant Justice of
Abacus Black. Recently performed at PS 122, the play is high-octane
buffoonery as silly as it is sophisticated. It mashes together
(with varying degrees of success) different theatrical traditions
to tell an elaborate tale combining national mythology and pseudo-religious
apocrypha. Abacus Black is equal parts magic show, medicine
show, freak show, and revival meeting; and the play references
these traditions as a way of enveloping the audience in its seductive
worldview and selling them back a funhouse-mirror reflection of
their own complacency. It wasn't until the show was over that
I realized how much I had been laughing at myself.
Officially formed in 2000, the NTUSA has
emerged as one of the most oddball theater collectives in New
York, and Abacus Black is a good example of their evolving
aesthetic experimentation. "Through immersion in intoxicating
theatrical universes," their mission statement explains, "we strive
for complicity with our audience, promoting an infinity of possibilities
and perceptions." The company's several productions to date, presented
in locations as varied as vacant delis and abandoned shoe stores,
foreground the physical act of artistic production in the telling
of fractured narratives. The script of Abacus Black is
credited to NTUSA members Mark Doskow, Normandy Sherwood, and
James Stanley, but the company typically develops its concepts
and texts as a group. Their democratic, rhizomatic approach is
at the heart of Abacus Black's unfocused but abundant
energy and intentionally confounded message.
Detailing the plot to Abacus Black
is like trying to describe a fever dream. As one of the performers
reminds the audience at the top of the show, the undead roam the
very streets outside the theater and the company is trying to
persuade us to join their pilgrimage to the promised land. They
have a latter-day Moses as guide: Abacus Black, a six-hundred-year-old
living relic and former crusader whom they keep in a small cage
and to whom they pay obsequious homage throughout the action.
Black has the knowledge they seek but he won't share it with anyone,
even his followers. The performers offer up personal testimonies
about dancing angels and shining golden daggers, explaining what
brought them to Black and acting out his biography with the help
of cardboard puppets and play-within-a-play metatheatrics.
We see Black's medieval childhood in Europe,
where he receives a vision of a City of Gold located in the new
world. An unknown amount of time passes, and after crossing the
ocean Black travels through the American desert with a crazed
Daniel Boone-like character in a ratty coon-skin cap. Black has
a messiah complex that allows him to rewrite Old Testament verses
and believe unquestioningly in the City of Gold, and when his
rustic guide begins doubting their cause, he is beheaded. The
anachronistic coupling of medieval knight with Natty Bumppo is
indicative of the show's narrative gallimaufry, where trials of
faith--religious epiphanies, journeys in the desert, moments of
confusion regarding divine intervention--are joined with American
self-reliance and frontiersmanship. The layering of the two histories
is chaotic but not careless: the manifest destiny of expansion
and domination applies to both medieval Europeans and American
homesteaders. During this middle section of the piece, the pace
slows considerably. The desert saga is depicted through a series
of short vignettes about the pair's deteriorating partnership.
After the Cain-like slaying of his fellow
traveler, Black's story jumps in time to the present. It's never
explained how the company captured Black but they recite to the
caged crusader the virtues of the City of Gold: high golden walls
for protection against hordes of brain-eaters and room inside
for the living faithful. One performer wanders onstage after being
infected by a ghoul and proceeds to "turn" the rest of the company.
After one member is bitten on the arm, she croons a sultry torch
song about her newfound sunny outlook on an undead life--an inspired
moment. The play ends with the cast preaching about adaptation
and slurping brain juice while inviting the audience to join their
journey to the "electronical" golden city. This technological
touch, the fact that they now believe the City of Gold to be wired
for electronic security and surveillance, adds a sense of modern
American paranoia to the literal and figurative mecca.
Theatrically speaking, the NTUSA has done
its homework. Their carney-inflected style gestures toward numerous
traditions of popular theater. In the play's opening moments,
for instance, after a brief horror-show prologue, the cast bursts
on and erects a diminutive proscenium stage decorated like a circus
sideshow while heavy metal music blares. The costumes, a mixture
of gothic black and rose red, suggests "carnival mortician." The
elaborate dress and precise choreography contrast with the cast's
complete lack of expression or emotion, though they are not yet
zombies. They are already intent on proselytizing and this ersatz
fervor covers the play like a shroud.
The show's excellent fakery and layered
referentiality mask a jumbled political message. The search for
security is elevated to a cultic need for purity, and the devoted
are obviously blinded by and to their own fanaticism. There is
a desperation not only to their quest but also to what their goal
represents: a gated community that physicalizes their Manichean
designation of good us and bad them. Here, Abacus Black
owes a debt to George Romero's tetralogy of zombie films with
their class-based criticism of American excess. With so much political
flotsam scattered in a sea of theatrical flimflammery, I was also
reminded of Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater and
his 2004 production King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe!
Foreman's titular figure was a clear satirical version of George
Bush, whereas Black has no direct analogy. He is a mummified cipher
in a monkey cage; and by whispering "electronical" in capitulation
to the prevailing (brain loving) ideology, he quietly sums up
the performance.
With Abacus Black, as in earlier
NTUSA works, the characters are themselves performers and their
efforts at either jocularity or pathos are rendered comical by
the extremes of the acting style and dress. You laugh both at
their zealotry and at yourself laughing. Their striving for peace
and security is very human--and ironical given their willingness
to relinquish part of their humanity to achieve these things.
In the end, I found the play giddy and troubling. The performers
implore the audience to join their caravan, but the show itself
seems to ask how much of our lives in recent days have been governed
by a similar need for safety in the face of real or invented terrors.
What is given up or taken in this process? Adaptation, compromise,
and rhetorical obfuscation are needed to get to the City of Gold,
everybody packs their own bags, and finds what companions they
can for the trip.
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