You are in an open field

Playing through May 19^th at HERE, You are in an open field is a fun romp with free-style rapping, game-play as a coping mechanism, and awesome old-school video-game imagery – you know, the kind where you can count the pixels if you aren’t paying attention to the show. Not that that’s an issue: You are in an open field is a Neo-Futurist shout-out to the nerdcore sub-culture that has you toe-tapping along, nerd or not. The subject matter was of secondary importance to me – of greater weight was how that subject matter fit into a visualization of game-play as a coping mechanism.

Robert N. Bellah sets up his book Religion in Human Evolution with a description of Abraham Maslow’s Being and Deficiency cognition, or B- and D-cognition. D-cognition is the anxious world of daily life – afraid of getting hit by kickballs on the playground, feeling hustled on the subway, a sense of artistic malaise. It’s “the recognition of what is lacking and what must be made up for through striving.” (5) B-cognition, on the other hand, is more transcendent: “When we are propelled by B-motives, we relate to the world by participation, not manipulation; we experience a union of subject and object, a wholeness that overcomes all partiality. The B-cognition is an end in itself…and it tends to transcend our ordinary experience of time and space.” One sphere in which B-cognition reigns supreme is game-play, from video-games to free-style rap competitions, from treasure hunts to making forts out of the sofa cushions. Play, then, exists in a clean break from the world of daily concerns. (Huizenga 3) In his ground-breaking Homo Ludens, Huizenga lists a pair of descriptors as to what constitutes play: it is a voluntary activity (7), and it is “a stepping of out ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.” (8) The temporality and separateness of play lends itself to the manufacture of inviolable rules, since “they determine what ‘holds’ in the temporary world circumscribed by play.” (11)

All of this holds within the world of You are in an open field. The different kinds of game-play are figured as escapes from the anxieties of ordinary life, and they all adhere to strict rules. For example, if you can’t follow the rules of a free-styling competition, then you are out and you lose. If somebody calls you on the “no food in the fort” rule, then you respond by trying to establish that it is not, in fact, a legitimate rule. The performance itself is a kind of super-game that encompasses all the other games. It is separate from the anxieties associated with space outside the theater, and it adheres to its own rules. First, the world constructed within the piece must be consistent (and it is). Second, the Neo-Futurists have their own code of rules that define their performance, and so You are in an open field needs to be consistent with those aims (and it is).

The flaw in analyzing game-play, however, is that it tries to reduce B-cognition to D-cognition. (Huizenga 3) The point is that the game is fun, and effectively takes you out of D-cognition. And, except for a few places where they slipped into didacticism, the Neo-Futurists in their You are in an open field did that for me.

If you want to see if they do that for you, you can check them out now through May 19^th at HERE on 6^th Avenue. You can buy tickets at the door or online at http://here.org/shows/detail/898/.

To learn more about the New York Neo-Futurists and their rules, please visit http://www.nyneofuturists.org/site/index.php?/site/whats_the_whatism/

And if you want to read the books that I cite in this review, here’s their full publication info:

Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.

Huizenga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Amazon eBook, 1971.

The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O'Neill Vol. 1: First Plays/Lost Plays

Leave it to the New York Neo-Futurists to be clever! Their copiously-titled current production stages the stage-directions, and only the stage directions, of some of O’Neill’s classic plays. A reader sat dressed in black in the corner and read the stage directions out loud while six performers, dressed in matching gray henleys and black suspenders acted them out. Every cue for motion came directly and unquestioned from the reader, who didn’t hesitate to repeat herself if the performers didn’t perform.

TC&CSDOEOV1FPLP is a full length performance of one of the Neos’ Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (TMLMTBGB) sketches, and, as you might imagine, hilarity ensued. The concept lends itself to wordless physical comedy, and the Neos delivered. While extending any of the TMLMTBGB sketches into a production risks becoming gimmicky, TC&CSDOEOV1FPLP narrowly avoided that trap. To be sure, there’s only so many things you can do to keep acting out one playwright’s stage directions fresh, but the Neos have the stage savvy and the balls to do it. Just when I felt they’d run out of new jokes, they came out of left field with something I hadn’t expected.

On a theoretical note, TC&CSDOEOV1FPLP demonstrates something that I’ve read about as a hallmark of the old avant-garde, and have noticing as an underlying trend in some of the off-off-Broadway plays I’ve seen here in NYC. There’s an interest in deconstructing a classic work of art into its constituent parts, and then staging the part that the primary artist(s) find most intriguing. The practice itself is intriguing to me, and now I’m as curious to stage somebody’s stage directions as I am to stage a film spatially.

Locker No. 417B

On May 12^th I saw my friend Amy Jensen’s new play, Locker No. 4173B, a New York Neo-Futurist production being held at The Monkey on West 26th Street, for which Amy worked as their dramaturg. It’s playing through May 21^st, and is a thoroughly enjoyable and thought provoking production.

An intersection of archaeology and theater, Locker is the result of Neo-Futurists Christopher Borg and Joey Rizzolo buying a foreclosed storage locker in an auction, and trying to reconstitute, from the stuff in their new property, the lives of those who had lost the locker. They brought their findings to the stage in the form of a docudrama.

Locker is fascinating on many levels: it’s a network of interesting stories, Borg, Rizzolo, and Yeauxlanda Kay performed beautifully, and the list only goes on. I would like to focus on just one aspect of this play: the way it humanizes archaeology, or, more specifically, archaeology’s subjects. The subjects of Borg and Rizzolo’s archaeological endeavor are, most likely, still alive. They may not be, however, and this crisis of ignorance of the current whereabouts of the subject is particularly meaningful from a Native perspective, from the perspective of an archaeological subject. Museums and archaeology, in their fixation on the past, often ignore the living members of their subject group. This oversight, at least in the experience of Native people, leads to the myth of the “vanished Indian” and the feeling I sometimes have that people think we all died at Wounded Knee.

If they are alive, and even if they’re dead, what are the moral implications of this invasion into their privacy? Borg and Rizzolo, and therefore the audience, wrestle with this question as well. At one point, Rizzolo says that a paranoid schizophrenic subject of their theatrical study may not be crazy after all: having her life pored over by a group of strangers in a higher social class is just the sort of thing a paranoid schizophrenic would fear. Later in the show, Rizzolo enters from the coat room with an audience member’s purse. He asks her how she would feel about him rifling through her stuff then and there and showing everybody her possessions. They finished the show by asking us to think about all our possessions – from treasures to junk – and which of those things we would want a stranger to study and judge us by.

Locker No. 4173B was simultaneously awkward and needed. I felt awkward going through strangers’ lives without their permission. But isn’t that the point? The dead and the living are never objects: they are people. Locker gracefully exposes a dehumanizing flaw in the archaeological method, a flaw that we living and marginalized subjects of archaeology, and its cousin anthropology, have been aware of for years. That the New York Neo-Futurists are telling this story to the hip, young and mostly white off-off-Broadway crowd is an exciting step in the right direction.