Liberté, Fraternité, Corbusier! an Interview with Alex Timbers David Savran
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Liberté, Fraternité, Corbusier! An Interview with Alex Timbers David Savran Figure 1. Le Corbusier (Daniel Larlham) investigates the amount of space a man needs to live. Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier, and, More Importantly, Robert Moses. Ohio Theatre, New York City, 2005. (Photo by Joan Marcus) Since World War II, New York theatre has been periodically reinvigorated by a succession of avantgardes whose legendary companies, from the Living Theatre and the Performance Group to Mabou Mines and the Wooster Group, are well known to readers of TDR. By the early 1990s, these artists (and their kin) acquired enough cultural capital to become a con- secrated avantgarde, drawing dedicated and increasingly bourgeois audiences in New York and elsewhere, headlining international festivals, and becoming canonized by academics and the subject of reverential articles and reviews in the New York Times (see Savran 2005). Given the dominance of a cultural system that places a premium on youth and innovation, how- ever, the consecration of middle-age rebels inevitably sparks the appearance of a young neo- avantgarde, one that returns to the seditious and denunciatory strategies of the historical avantgarde (of the early 20th century) while both critiquing and venerating the work of its immediate predecessors. TDR: The Drama Review 54:4 (T208) Winter 2010. ©2010 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 39 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00023 by guest on 29 September 2021 Among the companies that emerged in the ferment of early 21st–century New York, Les Freres Corbusier finds itself in the peculiar position of being consecrated upon arrival. Its second piece, A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant (2003), earned a glowing review from Ben Brantley on the front page of the Arts section of the New York Times in which he labeled it the “gutsiest gimmick” of the theatre season and “a cult-hit blueprint for a young gener- ation” (2003:E6). And while Brantley’s con- tinued championing of this “nerdy-slash-cool troupe” (2006:B7) does not in itself have the Figure 2. An angel (Alison Stacy Klein) shows L. Ron Hubbard power to anoint it the new theatrical sav- the way. A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology ior, his approval does put it in the august Pageant. John Houseman Theater, New York City, 2003. (Photo by company of the Wooster Group, Richard Alex Timbers) Foreman, and Richard Maxwell. Under the artistic direction of Alex Timbers, Les Freres has carved out a niche for itself as a pur- veyor of an especially loopy variety of what many, including Timbers, call post-ironic theatre, an “aggressively visceral theater combining historical revisionism, multimedia excess, found texts, sophomoric humor, and rigorous academic research” (Les Freres Corbusier n.d.). Exploiting these methods and materials, the works that followed the Scientology Pageant include Boozy: The Life, Death, and Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier, and, More Importantly, Robert Moses (2005), a musical about city planning that pits Moses against the rebellious Jane Jacobs and fea- tures appearances by Le Corbusier and Daniel Libeskind, as well as real rabbits in miniature human clothes, masquerading as Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Goebbels; Heddatron (2006), a fan- tasmatic version of Ibsen’s play in which a pregnant Michigan housewife is abducted by robots to the rainforests of Ecuador and forced to enact scenes from Hedda Gabler over and over with her metallic captors; Hell House (2006), a more or less literal staging of Pastor Keenan Roberts’s evangelical Christian haunted house do-it-yourself kit that dramatizes the evils of abortion, homosexuality, drugs, heavy metal, and secular humanism; Dance Dance Revolution (2008), a disco musical set in an Orwellian future in which dancing is illegal; and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (2009), a musical history pageant that uses the genocide-packed life of the seventh pres- ident to consider the virtues and (mainly) the vices of populism, the emblematically American political philosophy that cuts across left and right. Given the anarchic, infantile, wildly theatrical, and hyperliterate nature of Les Freres’s work, it would seem far closer to Dada, Futurism, and Surrealism — or Monty Python — than to the serious, austere, and militant work typical of much of the New York avantgarde. Only Hell House, the group’s most enigmatic piece, can be easily accommodated to the avantgardist tradi- tion. Filling St. Ann’s Warehouse, the piece — “part installation, part performance, part haunted house” (Les Freres Corbusier, Hell House) — allows groups of visitors, with a demon for a guide, David Savran is a specialist in 20th- and 21st-century American theatre, popular culture, and social theory. He is the author of eight books, most recently, Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (University of Michigan Press, 2009), the winner of the 2010 Joe A. Callaway Book Prize. He has served as a judge for the Obie Awards and the Lucille Lortel Awards. He is the editor of the Journal of American Drama and Theatre, is Distinguished Professor of Theatre, and holds the Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. David Savran 40 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00023 by guest on 29 September 2021 to wander through an eight-room labyrinth displaying the horrifying results of un-Christian behavior: a high school cheerleader getting a grisly abortion, a date-rape at a rave, a social out- cast gunning down his classmates, a gay marriage that ends in an AIDS ward, and a coffee klatch of secular humanists set upon by devils. Like the confrontational work of the Living Theatre or the Wooster Group, Hell House deliberately refuses to signal whether it is serious or satirical, leaving spectators to deal directly with the inflammatory material. No matter what their beliefs, they are likely to feel ill at ease, if for no other reason than they know there are millions of peo- ple in the US who really believe that latte-sipping ironists are doomed to an eternity in hell. Although the other Freres pieces are more unambiguously comic, they also have been prob- lematic for critics, who, Timbers recognizes, have a harder time dealing with comedy than a large swath of the theatre-going public, especially comedy that is deliberately silly and juvenile, and that depends more on horseplay, “well-rehearsed amateurism” (Snook 2006), and over-the- top theatricality than wit and verbal ingenuity. Indeed, the prospect of analyzing Les Freres’s work is daunting because I don’t want my analysis to eviscerate and overintellectualize the- atre that so revels in the joys and unpredictability of live performance. For me, the challenge of writing about the thrill of Les Freres’s liveness is linked to the difficulty of analyzing plea- sure, which the company delivers in vast quantities but which inevitably evaporates in the act of description. At the same time, I feel obliged to point out that the off-the-chart pleasure a piece like Heddatron provides for its audience places Les Freres in a sticky position culturally. The avantgarde, after all — of yesteryear and today — was consolidated as a reaction against a com- mercial theatre whose not-so-innocent pleasures have been relished by a bourgeoisie that uses it as relief from the storm and stress of business and family life. And many avantgardists through the years have rebelled against theatre as a commodity by generating performances that resist commodification, delivering unpleasure in the form of dense, arduous, arcane, and often con- frontational experiences. If Les Freres aims to épater la bourgeoisie, it does so in an inordinately user-friendly way, that is, by reimagining and reworking the epitome of theatre-as-commodity in the US: the musical. Given the explosion of Off-Off Broadway musicals since the 1990s, Les Freres is by no means the only small company to be tinkering with the genre. And there is a long history of the avant- garde poaching forms regarded as lowbrow, tawdry, or obscene. But Les Freres is unique in its radical mixing of elements from high culture (like Michel Foucault, Ibsen, and Le Corbusier himself) with middlebrow culture (especially middlebrow music, like disco, bubble-gum pop, Cher, the Spice Girls, and “Total Eclipse of the Heart”). For example, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (written and directed by Alex Timbers) represents a kind of Brechtian musical, with catchy songs (written by Michael Friedman, who is also a member of the Civilians) in the style of Emo, or “emotional hardcore,” a guitar-driven, melodically expressive post-punk with prominent, impassioned, and confessional vocals. The performance feels at times like a cross between a rock concert and a play and looks like what might happen if a bunch of very talented, 20-something slackers got together and decided to do a musical about American populism and the politics of the early republic, using Andrew Jackson as its fulcrum. Jackson, the frontiers- man, is much too interesting, angst-ridden, and charming to hate, despite his genocidal prac- tices, while his antagonists, in fake period costumes, come across as “doily-wearing muffin tops” (Timbers 2009:37). Much of it is directly presentational, with the actors careening between their performer selves and historical personages. As in Brecht, songs interrupt the action while elaborating on the personal feelings of characters and the political context. The contemporary feel of the piece, along with political slogans that sound as if they were spewed out yesterday (“It’s time for us to take this country back!” [Timbers 2009:41]), makes it clear that this piece Les Freres Corbusier about Jackson is also a critique of the modern populism of Ronald Reagan, George W.