The Madness of King Rufus
By Jonathan Kalb
King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe
By Richard Foreman
Ontological Theatre at St. Mark's
131 E. 10th St.
Box office: (212) 533-4650
When Thomas Jefferson opined that no president
could ever do irrevocable harm to America's democracy in only four years,
he had clearly not counted on George W. Bush. By the same token, when
Richard Foreman conceived his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre as a manic,
carnivalesque projection of his mental interior, he had clearly not
counted on the ability of a real-life warmongering cowboy-poseur like
Bush to threaten his creative repose. In an atypically self-justifying
program note to King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe, his latest
Ontological-Hysteric Theatre production, Foreman says the work is atypically
political: "the pressure of the real world is such that I feel the need
to respond to what's happening." Actually, the piece is no more or less
political than half a dozen others he has done over the years responding
with exquisite subtlety and complexity to public issues from Watergate
to the end of Communism to Monicagate. Something in the nature of this
particular political moment, however--its virulence, its doublespeak,
its trivializations--has compelled Foreman to reach further than he
has before towards a certain overtness that jangles a bit with his idiom.
The title character of King Cowboy Rufus--a
rotund and ridiculously pretentious fop played with marvelous egomaniacal
relish by Jay Smith--is an old-world English gentleman who dreams of
becoming a "real American cowboy hero." He is variously described as
a man to whom "words don't come easily," "a man who works like a horse
and then--sleeps like a big, fat, dirty log," and "a man who claims
he has no desire to leave his own neighborhood." In case you don't get
the cryptic Bush references, the cluttered saloon-cum-French-cabaret
set is festooned with portraits and names of American presidents, as
well as the usual bric-a-brac from Foreman's personal collective unconscious:
checkerboards, striped strings, antique dolls, torn newspapers, Hebrew
letters, dartboards.
In some of his maddening plays, Foreman does
provide a fairly lucid story arc for his central character--or at least
a more discernible one than he gives here. This, however, is one of
those works that seems to loop around on itself like a helix of absurd
and outrageous activities. Rufus buys an abandoned tobacco factory in
the hopes of a "dalliance with [its] unhealthy yet strangely attractive
female employees"; declares that he has "no imagination" and complains
when forced to use what he has; poses with babies who look like fat
larvae popping out of black cocoons; shoots pistols for no reason; eats
"crow pie"; has his head sliced open by foils who say he is "hard to
penetrate"; and suffers innumerable other bouts of humiliation, self-doubt,
bewilderment and frenzy. Near the end, as a sort of afterthought, he
mentions that he'd like to rule the universe.
His foils are a brooding, occasionally snappish
"coquette" named Suzie Sitwell (played with lugubrious seductiveness
by Juliana Francis in a beige silk dress) and a poetry-mangling, poker-faced
aristocrat from Crete named Baron Herman De Voto (T. Ryder Smith, sporting
a thick Brooklyn accent, fuzzy pink slippers and a chalkboard with indecipherable
writing over a blue business suit). The chief function of these others--along
with a chorus of kilt-clad young men and fishnet-clad cigarette girls--is
apparently to keep Rufus off balance in his quest for theatrical self-confidence
and hence sexual and political power.
From just this sketchy description, it should
be clear that King Cowboy Rufus is a bona fide labyrinthine
Ontological-Hysteric Theatre work, not some simplified reversion to
political didacticism or, worse, Cartesian logic. All the Bush references
are really false limbs, because no Foreman character is ever consistently
or straightforwardly allegorical--including those he has occasionally
named after historical figures like Friedrich Nietzsche and George Bataille.
Foreman's characters are always personifications of the phases of his
mental anguish. That's what he means when he says he does theater not
just in a different style but for different reasons from other people.
Thus, if he sticks to his general working method,
he can't be didactic because, advocacy aside, he's not even asking (as
most playwrights are) to be seen as a font of anything (sagacious precepts,
moving homilies, clever quips). His plays are vessels for anguished
reverie, meticulously guided disorientation--his own and ours. If specific
worldly associations distract in any way from this larger attempt to
disorient, it's because they are indeed less interesting than the more
freewheeling process of distraction he's famous for. Like all regular
Foreman-goers, I'm used to taking fantastic mental side trips during
his plays. This time, however, I found that those trips took me farther
afield (I was stuck for long intervals on Iraq, terrorism and the Patriot
Act, for instance) and often kept me from the marvelous serendipitous
returns to his imagistic smorgasbord that I've come to cherish.
Perhaps sensing this danger of distraction from
distraction, Foreman has enlisted his actors to draw us repeatedly back
into his world. There is no plexiglass in front of the stage for this
show, for instance, and Rufus enters the audience several times along
a red carpet up the center aisle, scattering enough spittle and perspiration
to rouse a slumbering Republican: "Look at . . . me--way up here, from
the vantage point of honest to God, ordinary Human Beings, just like
you and you and you--and me. Join me? YIP YIP YIP! GET ALONG LITTLE
DOGGIES." On top of this, asides and other confidences to the audience
are more explicit than they have been in many years, particularly from
the Baron.
All of this really amounts to adjustment rather
than radical departure for Foreman, though, whose whole career could
be described as an exploration of the extent to which interiority can
be invaded by external events before it loses its brilliance and mystery.
As he once wrote apropos Symphony of Rats, another play about
the President of the United States (originally done with The Wooster
Group, in 1988): "The real politics of America have to do with the conflict
between people who can sustain ambiguity in their lives, and people
who are terrified by ambiguity and fight to reduce every issue to clearly
defined choices, either black or white, and so become conservative reactionaries.
All my plays engage exactly this issue--how to sustain ambiguity in
your conscious life without allowing it to plunge you into feelings
of loss and confusion." To me, these explorations have almost always
been splendidly audacious, inspiringly weird, and consummately political,
even at their most hermetic. Perhaps this time a need to join the political
fray cost Foreman a measure of the disorienting concentration that he
knows so well.