Beyond the Pale Review

Brought to you by guest blogger T.C. Shillingford!

When you get to Germ Books, which is, of course, The Theater, the woman who
you must assume is the director, the creator of the show, is talking to some
skinny kid about the relative hipster populations of Brooklyn and Manhattan
and Philadelphia. She then turns to you and explains that because of the
hurricane, the show will be starting a bit late. About fifteen minutes
late. Fine. The show then starts thirty minutes late, and the extra
waiting around, soaking wet, isn't exactly pleasant, but I'm told people can
tolerate a lot of things when they're getting something for free. Of
course, this show cost $10. Anyway, who doesn't want to see "an audio track
[which] usurps your every day consciousness as it guides you through heaven
and hell in Fishtown. This is an interactive site-specific audio walking
tour for those seeking a non-traditional performance experience." That's
the description from the website, anyway.

The woman explains that the performance makes use of mp3 players, and
reviews the usage of these things, briefly, before distributing them. She
also explains that the performers will not speak or make a sound. The
entire audio experience will be provided by headphones. The audio tracks
are simply sound collages, without the force or grip of *Revolution 9* or
TEXT. Each of the 8 tracks accompanies a performance. This audio is so
bland that the sonic parts of the performance would have been more varied
and more interesting if someone had just recorded what it sounds like when
you're standing under I-95.

Regardless, when you have actors who don't speak, and the only sounds you
hear are abstract nonsense, then the visual becomes strikingly important.
Something must be present to hold the whole work together. And so, we have
the Ringmaster. The Ringmaster is some guy imported from 1998 (cargo
shorts, Oakleys, goatee), wearing a cheap vest from a presumed discarded
three-piece suit, and a cheap tophat, accompanied by a girl in a mask,
holding instructional cards ("Pause the track". "Go to the next track".
And so on). This charlatan, the Ringmaster, has the task of escorting us,
the audience, from performance to performance, as some scenes take place in
the front of the bookstore, and some in the back. To kill time while people
set up, he has the audience, all five of us, draw self portraits, dance, do
jumping-jacks, and pose like toy soldiers. And one point, he and his
assistant gave us trash. Crumpled paper towels. The creation of the
Ringmaster shows a lack of foresight on the part of the creator, I suspect.
The Ringmaster has the appearance of the a buffoon, and no voice, and thus,
he has very, very little authority as he asks his audience to sacrifice its
collective and individual dignity for the cause of Getting the Next Scene
Set Up. We felt like jackasses at the beginning, in the backroom, posing as
little green soldiers, and by the time we came out front, at the end, to do
jumping jacks, with the assumed director loudly laughing at us from behind,
the mild indignity boiled, and I venture that I was not alone in wanting to
pop both her and the Ringmaster in their fool mouths.

All this, though, the walking about, the jumping jacks and the distribution
of garbage, are just the intermission material. We're four paragraphs in,
and we haven't talked about the performance itself yet. According to the Germ
Books Myspace page<http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=245779559&blogID=427049242>,
*Beyond the Pale* deals in the "ritual states of mania in the tradition of
Antonin Artaud and Federico Fellini." Artaud, of course, is responsible for
the Theater of Cruelty, which is a sort of plotless theater that attempts to
grip the audience emotionally, shattering the tension between reality of
fantasy, etc and so on. Basically, it's Shock Theater. Fellini was a
director well known for infusing his movies with wild, Bacchanalian flights
of fancy, the true meaning of which can probably only be known to Fellini
himself. Beyond the Pale is like Fellini and Arnaud in that it uses actors
wearing masks. That's about it.

Actresses, actually, wearing masks. The Ringmaster is the only fella
'round. The girls are all wearing black tank tops and black shorts or
pants. It's like black box theater, only it's black wardrobe theater. In
the first scene, we have two women, in masks (possibly with long noses:
we're 48 hours out from this performance--it's a slow digester--and I've
gotten most of the masks mixed up, I suspect), gyrating on a box. A
soapbox, possibly? Anywhere, I suspect they're supposed to be frightening,
but I'm not remotely certain of that. There are, I believe, two more girls
who are supposed to be afraid of the box ladies. The acting here, the
choreography and the execution, are all so poor that the best any of these
people come off as is Pretending To Be. I mean, at their best, we, the
audience can believe that those girls are Pretending To Be afraid. But they
keep smiling by accident and getting confused and talking to each other in
ways that I suspect are not part of the performance, so I can never suspend
my disbelief long enough to buy into any of their acting. Also during this
scene: some poor girl (drawer of the short straw, I presume) is crawling
around on her belly, wearing a fabulously ugly mask. Sometimes she looks to
the left. At one point during this scene, the director interrupted things
to tell the girls on the box that they had begun their nonsensical gyrations
too soon.

Other scenes involve a girl, in a bathroom, with a grey sheet or blanket
draped over her, and a rope tied loosely around her neck. I assume that the
rope is supposed to be a noose, but that no one bothered to learn to tie a
noose, so they figured any old knot will do. The entire performance is
sort've half-cocked like that. Anyway, assuming that the rope is a
hangman's noose, we guess that this girl in the bathroom is dead, and the
sheet means she's a ghost now (like Halloween in third grade), or that it's
vaguely supposed to represent the executioner's mask, thus implying some
self-responsibility for the apparent death. The first option is more
stupid, and the second is more poorly done. Take your pick. Anyway,
falling from beneath her cloak-blanket is a baby (doll), and a wad of money,
and something else. I can't remember what. If the implication is that
children and money and the third thing will kill you...well, I just don't
see it. Of course, if it's anything else at all, either, I don't see that,
too.

There is also the girl making out with the picture. I'm not quite sure what
the picture is of, but kudos to the actress who was down for licking it.
There is so little exposition on all of these characters that I find myself
wondering, of all things, "Is she supposed to be beautiful?" Not the
actress, who I can see, of course. But am I to believe that the character
is beautiful? Because if she's beautiful, this is tragedy. If she's
hideous, this is comedy. Of course, she's neither beautiful, nor ugly, so
what we've got here is farce. More questions appear, like: is she lonely,
or batshit insane? is she supposed to be naked under that sheet? and would
this scene be more exciting if we were to find out that this is a picture of
her brother?

The final scene is the only one that seems to have any sort of structured
choreography, in which we have a good portion of the cast actually present.
One girl is dressed to represent the sun, another for the moon, and rest are
other things, and they move about, and so on, and so forth. I'd describe it
to you better, but everything in this show was so hopelessly bland and vague
and broken and ill-concieved and ill-executed, that I can scarcely recall
the details. I can neither praise nor condemn the artistic merit of the
work because those who performaned it and those who directed them were
rotten at what they did and failed at their responsibilities as artists.
That is to say, I can't tell you what succeeds and doesn't succeed
artistically, because everything failed on such a basic, mechanical level.
It'd be like me trying to tell you why your car won't start, when all you've
got are parts. The audience might have been better served if the actors
had, instead, spent forty minutes throwing their props at us. Certainly,
there'd be more to talk about. *

Beyond the Pale* is, above all else, an astonishingly boring piece of work.
It's dullness is so vast, so thorough, that it invokes fury and humiliation
from the audience, but, again, if we weren't so bored, we definitely
wouldn't be angry or embarrassed. The only thing I can say about this, to
give it a sliver of hope to anyone who wishes to see it, is that it was
meant to be performed outdoors. We got the indoor version. Maybe it's
better in sunlight. But I doubt it.

--
TC Shillingford

Check out additional performances of this piece here: Beyond the Pale