Hoi Polloi's "All Hands"

Hoi Polloi’s latest piece, All Hands, is an allegorical description of societies in terms of religious cults. Now premiering at the Incubator Arts Project, All Hands, presents an intelligent critique of human interactions. But, like many smart plays, it gets too smart for its own good and lags in the middle due to an excess of examples.

Conceived and directed by Alec Duffy, and written by Robert Quillen Camp, All Hands uses a fictional, nameless religious cult to demonstrate the ways in which societies operate in terms of inclusion and, more dramatically, exclusion. The space was set up with tennis-court seating, with the audience on either side of the playing space. At the bottom of each steep wall of seats were a bench and four wooden chairs. Here the performers not in the immediate action sat during the opening scene. The effect was to incorporate the audience spatially with the performers, making us all part of the cult. This association disintegrated somewhat before reintegrating in the second sequence. A stranger comes to their door, soaked from the rain, needing a place to dry off. She doesn’t speak much English, and she obviously has nowhere to turn, because she submits to initiation into the cult in order to be allowed to stay. The audience found the initiation pretty funny – the antics of the cult were strange and silly to us. This continued until another character, part of the cult, entered and told the stranger that “This is fake. This is a play.”

So far we have theater described as a cult. Hoi Polloi went on to give examples of other social groups in the context of the cult’s rituals. They gave examples of inclusive groups and actions such as AA, corporations, and Occupy; and examples of exclusive social acts such as a member of the cult spouting violently extreme perversions of things that bore relation to the cult’s beliefs, labor organizing on advice from outside, and human sacrifice. I say that Duffy and Camp may have been too smart for their own good because, while all of these numerous examples are good and bear thinking about, after a while I’d figured out the allegory and was wondering where they were going with it. My attention started to slip until they managed to bring it all together in the end with a tongue-in-cheek explanation of the allegory.

Hoi Polloi’s All Hands plays at the Incubator Arts Project at 131 E. 10^th St. in Manhattan through March 31^st. Tickets are $18, and can be bought at the door or online at incubatorarts.org.