Who am I? or, The Hidden Properties
of Objects
By Caridad Svich
My Arm
By Tim Crouch
59E59 Theaters
59 E. 59th St.
Box office: (212) 279-4200
Tim Crouch is a British actor, writer and educator
whose work explores the borders between education and visual art. He
co-founded Public Parts Theatre and devised eight productions there
with Julia Collins, including an adaptation of Ford Madox Ford's The
Good Soldier. His play for young audiences Shopping for Shoes
was commissioned by the Royal National Theatre's Education Department.
My Arm, a solo show and his first adult play, is an extraordinary
demonstration of the theatrical power of inanimate objects. It is currently
running at 59 East 59th Street as part of the "Brits Off Broadway 2004"
series.
Originally presented at the Edinburgh Festival
Fringe in 2003 at the Traverse Theatre (with previous preview showings
at the Hayward Gallery, the ICA and BAC in Britain, and at the Zipper
Theatre in New York), this play is a welcome antidote to the brash,
overproduced fare on so many U.S. stages. The story My Arm
tells is deceptively simple: at age ten, a boy decides to live with
one arm above his head for the rest of his life. His adult self reflects
upon the effect this willful and rather pointless act has had on him
and those around him over the subsequent thirty years. Abetted by film
sequences commissioned from British artist Christian Dorley-Brown, and
inanimate objects supplied by the audience at the start of the show,
Crouch tells a 60-minute story of defiance, difference, vapidity, and
essential loneliness.
Examining how modern art absorbs and consumes
the individual, My Arm is a delightful and moving fictionalized
confession. Fabricating the story of the stubborn boy who grows up to
be used by the contemporary art world and its voguish obsession with
"freakishness" and celebrity, Crouch shows us that this strange, sad
boy is ultimately redeemed by art and not crucified by it. Spinning
his tale with wit, whimsy, and deliberate playfulness, Crouch captivates
his audience--as writer and performer--with his directness and seemingly
improvisational style.
Similar in effect to the work of the London-based
company Improbable Theatre, whose The Hanging Man played at
BAM this season, and whose 70 Hill Lane was also in part a
confessional piece, My Arm invites the audience to share a
casual, communal experience. The body here is both witness and witnessed,
as the young self seen as an action doll figure lives the story told
by the adult human actor who manipulates it. The rebellious futility
of the young boy's initial act -- a rebellion against suburban conformity
and homogeneity -- is seen as the necessary un-necessary mark, or social
marking, of an artist. But lest the story seem too high-minded, Crouch
anchors it in the multiple reactions to the boy's act by his family,
pet, psychiatrists, and the doyennes of a vampirish art world (all played
by objects the audience has given him).
Animating these everyday objects, Crouch finds
expression in the expressionless and gives meaning to the material things
that carry so much of our emotional investment, whether we realize it
or not. Not unlike Todd Haynes's early film Superstar: The Karen
Carpenter Story, which was through-animated with Barbie dolls,
My Arm asks us to recognize as an audience how the life of
a play, and thus of a story, is often contained in the silent objects
that inhabit its world. By asking his audience to empty their pockets
and purses, and offer up, as it were, the cast for the evening's performance,
Crouch also asks us to examine the stories our pockets contain. By becoming
lost artifacts in Crouch's ambling story of loss and redemption, our
daily, seemingly insignificant objects are given new emotive meaning,
and in a rather spry way Crouch also asks us to reflect upon the meaning
we impart to our daily casual interactions with others.
Using silence with rare eloquence, Crouch's evocative
study of the uses and abuses of the self for the sake of art, and of
how one boy is educated to his own nature, touches raw nerves in its
audiences. The iconic objects meet the odd, iconic story head-on and
with disarming grace. Crouch lets us be inside and outside the story
at the same time. His storyteller's ability to keep us engaged, surprised,
and even at times drifting along with him is delightful. Keeping himself,
the presentation of the work, and the material honest, despite the fact
that it's obviously a hyperbolic fiction, he reminds us of the beauty,
elegance and simplicity of a well-told theatrical tale. My Arm
is cousin to Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife. It shares with
Wright's play a delicate and distinct obsession with the spirit world
of material things, and with the question of how one can make art out
of one's life, unwittingly or not. Disguised as a tall tale told small,
My Arm is a quietly small tale told with a big heart. It has
a refreshing lack of sentimentality but is braced with the tempered
acknowledgment of sentiment: the power of feeling, and the importance
of human connection. Embracing "fakery," Crouch forges a stage self
worthy of our anguish, laughter, and concern. He already plans a follow-up,
teasingly titled An Oak Tree, 1973.