Having Your Cage
By Martin Harries
bobrauschenbergamerica
By Charles Mee
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St., Brooklyn
Box office: (718) 636-4100
In Robert Rauschenberg's assemblage "Monogram,"
a long-haired Angora goat stands on a collage of painted panels. A tire
hangs around the goat's neck. Remembering the goat that may lurk in
the etymology of "tragedy," critics have suggested that "Monogram" is
Rauschenberg's enigmatic image of the tragic, and that the tire is the
load the scapegoat carries. The news from BAM? Enough of that.
The SITI Company's production of bobrauschenbergamerica
cheekily revises "Monogram": a stuffed deer on a moving platform has
a frilly pink and sequined child's tutu around its neck. This revision
of one of Rauschenberg's most famous images stands as a telling condensation
of the "Rauschenberg" one encounters in this misguided production. The
disorienting power of Rauschenberg's early work — very much alive, for
instance, during the massive Guggenheim retrospective of 1997-98 — disappears
in the SITI Company's celebration of clichéd, apparently ebullient,
tiresome Americana. For the off-kilter and sometimes brutal power of
Rauschenberg's early combines — for instance, such central works as
"Bed" and "Monogram" itself — bobrauschenbergamerica trades
an utterly unsurprising series of vignettes. This is not collage on
stage, but a variety show, Anne Bogart and Charles Mee's Laugh In
-- in short, the perky postmodernism that the world has been waiting
for.
And perky is the word. The production's Will
to Cheerfulness is positively exhausting. The actors eat fried chicken
cheerfully; they caper cheerfully to Earth, Wind and Fire's "September";
they square dance cheerfully; they cheerfully appropriate Pilobolus
and throw themselves headlong across wet plastic. (Pilobolus does it
with water; here we're to believe the actors belly-flop across the fixings
for a martini, complete with olives.) Even one of the few somber sequences
— a story of a young man's murder of his sister, her husband, and their
child — comes framed in cheerful gags about a Domino's pizza delivery.
The great wonder of the evening is how the actors, all skilled, all
appealing, many at work on this piece since its opening in 2001, can
keep smiling.
They keep smiling, I would guess, because they
don't know what else to do. The production exists in some limbo between
Method and downtown performance. I suspect the actors have heard of
John Cage and Merce Cunningham, but the acting style throughout has
learned more from the Actor's Studio than from the theatrical experiments
and Happenings pursued by Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg himself.
(The simultaneous booking of Cunningham in BAM's Opera House and bobrauschenbergamerica
in the Harvey looks like a programmer's lark.) The opening tableau,
with a huge white drop-cloth and a folding ladder, evokes the beginning
of a classy production of Our Town, and in its dedication to
a received version of small-town Americana it owes more to Wilder's
play than to Rauschenberg or to any other source in the visual arts.
And Our Town is a much fiercer work.
One could argue -- and I would guess that Mee,
Bogart, and the Company might argue -- that Our Town, Rauschenberg,
Cunningham, Cage, the Method, Domino's, and Earth, Wind, and Fire are
part of the cultural past that the piece scavenges, a set of performance
styles, pop cultural flotsam and jetsam that have contributed to the
theatrical combine that is bobrauschenbergamerica. To this
list of important materials I would add a slide show of "Bob's" life
and the fragments of writings by Rauschenberg, Cage, Walt Whitman, and
others that the play appropriates. About two-thirds through the piece,
indeed, one of the actors (Barney O'Hanlon) delivers something like
a theoretical account of what has brought the play's pieces together,
emphasizing freedom, pretending that we have been seeing an evening
structured by chance:
We don't often get to do a show like this
where we can just put on whatever we like
figure OK what the hell
lets just do whatever we feel like
and hope you'll enjoy it.
(I quote the text from www.charlesmee.org.) While
O'Hanlon speaks, there are smashes and the sounds of fake accidents
in the background. The subject of the speech is assemblage, improvisation,
chance; its mode is rehearsal, repetition, discipline with a happy face.
Fake accidents, in this production, are what passes for collage.
The play stages a yard sale, and that seems close
to the production's sense of the assemblage aesthetic. Here are record
albums, let's hold them up, and smile broadly (the first record of the
Eurythmics, and the first record of the Go-Go's!); here is a pitchfork,
let's pose for our campy rendition of "American Gothic"; here
is a television, let's steal it. The question that links this yard sale
scene to Rauschenberg is that of what becomes of objects in art. The
actors here treat these objects in the spirit of acting exercises, and
the scene feels like a series of fossilized improvisations: once, one
imagines, these actors had twenty seconds to figure out how to build
a story around an object, and now that frozen moment is part of a production.
The objects in Rauschenberg's combines are not, in the same way, invitations
to narrative. SITI's relentless narrativization of everything is the
most telling sign of the difficulty of translating something like Rauschenberg's
aesthetic into stage practice.
It may simply be that collage is not a form that
works on stage. In what sense can one speak of these performances as
analogous to the juxtapositions of objects in Rauschenberg's work? Is
there a "Monogram" here? The title, bobrauschenbergamerica,
suggests a kind of logo or trademark, a synthesis of the names of the
artist and the nation. But it is as though this production had mistaken
the familiar or, worse, the clichéd, for the real thing. The all-too-familiar
American characters — Bob's Mom in her apron, Phil the Trucker's Girl
in her flouncy bikini, Phil the Trucker himself with his paunch and
pork-chop sideburns and Harley Davidson T-shirt — suggest that this
is an assemblage of human objects we are ready to buy because we have
seen them before.
And we are ready to buy. The audience around
me was thoroughly entertained. Maybe this will be the future of America's
theatrical "avant-garde": we will have our Cage, and eat it too.