FROM DOG TO ANT The Evolution of Lee Breuer’s Animations Arthur J. Sabatini BOOK REVIEWED: Lee Breuer, La Divina Caricatura: A Fiction, Koben- havn & Los Angeles: Green Integer #43, 2003. Outside a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog it’s too dark to read. —Groucho Marx a Divina Caricatura, subtitled A and his comedy abrasive, is not just a Fiction by Lee Breuer, is narrated wild duck. L by and based on the life of a dog, mainly. You might know the dog if In La Divina Caricatura, it becomes you have followed Lee Breuer and clear that while he may have been mak- Mabou Mines’ works for the past thirty ing mayhem with Mabou Mines, he has years. Her name is Rose, a mutt whose also been engendering a substantial tales wag on about her love life and the mytho-theatrical cycle of plays and a fate of her friends, lovers, and incarna- singular approach to acting and per- tions. Rose is not Breuer’s only animal formance that brings together world attraction. He has been walking and theatre traditions and American pop talking with animals for his entire ca- culture. Moreover, his comedie animale reer and features an imaginary menag- descends from a lineup of notable think- erie in the very titles of his plays: The ers, most of whom he merrily misreads. Red Horse Animation, The B. Beaver, “To misunderstand is to transmute,” he The Shaggy Dog Animation, The Warrior claims, and “to transmute is to make Ant, Epidog, and Ecco Porco. Far more from another one’s transmogrified self.” than a zoo story, Breuer’s batty vision is (There is, I suspect, an entire theory of at once biotoonic (biology + cartoons) acting in that mutter.) Unlike Breuer’s and mythopreposterous. It is conceived previous publications, which are mostly within a concoction that mingles Hin- in script form, La Divina Caricatura duesque cosmology and snatches of recombines and annotates his cockeyed sociobiological hypothesizing with nods plots and looney scenes as a narrative. to Dante, Disney, and Nietzsche. But, This allows for a more interiorized per- Breuer, whose language can be explosive spective on his characters and their 52 ᭿ PAJ 77 (2004), pp. 52–60. © 2004 Arthur J. Sabatini Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028104323048250 by guest on 30 September 2021 relationships. The book concludes with lines, varies the layout and typography, a twenty page Summa Dramatica, in and interpolates new material. Unlike which one of Breuer’s characters sum- plays, the novelistic (re)formulation frees marizes his approach to performance him to indulge in literary, authorial and matters of the spirit. Overall, then, spiels, and insider asides. On the page, Là Divina Caricatura offers an opportu- Breuer’s punsterism is incessant: “I nity to track Breuer’s mythmaking, in- dreamed I was Computer Literate and quire into his sources, and speculate sent you an Email in my mind . I was about his deeper doings. Pregnant John I’m Happy to Announce we have a Love Litter,” Rose types. That More than two decades ago, Bonnie Breuer opted to metamorphose his the- Marranca identified Breuer’s creativity atre texts into a novel speaks to his sense in terms of a “personal mythology,” of intertextuality and performance, which revolves around love, creativity, narrativity, and processes of cultural and artistic success in the fractured pop transmission and reception. and cultural scenes in America. (see the PAJ title Animations: A Trilogy for Mabou La Divina Caricatura has two long Mines, 1979) Her insightful introduc- Canticas and sixty pages of endnotes tion to the volume compares Breuer to and appendices. Cantica I, John and Spalding Gray and Richard Foreman, Rose, begins with Rose’s “Dear John” among others, in the context of an letter about her emotional dependency “auto-mythopoeic” strain in American and sexual involvement from Venice avant-garde theatre. She also alludes to Beach to Avenue B. (This is The Shaggy the mythmaking practice of “bricolage,” Dog Animation.) John’s infidelities are cited by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and marks tallied along with his breakthrough into Breuer as “the Groucho Marx of the the Downtown Manhattan Art World. American avant-garde.” But what began Rose’s lament comes from her heart and with nascent autobiographical content New Jersey, where she is a patient at the and a sophisticated joker’s take on the- Institute for the Science of Soul (ISS) in atre has, cumulatively, evolved into an Cheesequake, N.J. She is being treated extensive and complex system of thought for Animation Addiction and Anima- and practice. By now, Breuer’s oeuvre tion Abuse. The Animation theme ac- loops together several interconnected counts for the book’s new material. narratives, recurring characters, signa- ture images and motifs, all suffused Rose’s story continues three years later, with an elaborating dramatic (yet comic) in A Prelude to Death in Venice, as she and serious (though comical) metaphysi- imagines/writes/lives in a movie script cal depth drawn from his lifelong re- in which John cracks up while he is searches and personal and professional being scripted into a film version of journeys. Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (as in Venice Beach, California). In perform- La Divina Caricatura derives from The ance, John handles two street corner Shaggy Dog Animation, A Prelude to telephones and engages in rapid bursts Death in Venice, Epidog, and Ecco Porco. of conversation. A Bunraku puppet, To novelize them, Breuer edits out stage crafted as a replica of John, was at- directions and photographs. He rewrites tached to the live actor’s chest, and its SABATINI / From Dog to Ant ᭿ 53 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028104323048250 by guest on 30 September 2021 ventriloquized voice and actions doubled ces on topics ranging from meditation the doubling of voices from off-stage and sex to dieting and “Petamony” actors. For La Divina Caricatura, Breuer claims. One “official” letter concerns replaces playscript formulae with cin- Worker’s Compensation: “The law must ematic shot and camera angle directions provide a definition of Reality. For if a as a frame for the utterances. For audi- Character is proven to be Unreal, all ences, the mise-en-scène with an actor/ Bets, including Worker’s Compensation, puppet, multiple voices, and narration- are off.” Here and elsewhere Breuer’s within-narration is captivating. In a satire smells of Jonathan Swift, whose book, the layering of narrative perspec- Tale of a Tub is a riotous compendium tives—by representing spoken voices, of Prefaces, Introductions and Digres- written notes, movie script lingo, tele- sions. Breuer is also Swiftian in his phone talk, and quotations from Mann’s unhinging of holy leanings, unfettered Venice—amplifies Breuer’s thematic dis- depictions of human bodily functions, course on the invasive mediation and and penchant for animal leavings, lov- animation of consciousness. ing and logic. As John talks on the phone on Man- La Divina Caricatura is written in para- hattan’s First Avenue, Rose is creamed graphs consisting of from six to forty by a garbage truck and winds up among phrases (sans periods). Uttered in Rose’s roving Lost Souls in Bardo. Thirteen first person dogese and an omniscient years later, the saga continues in Cantica mindvoice dotted with old radio tunes, II: Ecco Porco. Rose is befriended by there is a letter writing form of address John’s former lover, Suelee, who is work- for most passages that has the quality of ing on a Master’s thesis on Gender Beckettian rants. With typographic fonts Ontology at Brown (this is An Epidog). aplenty—bolds, italics, and flights of Suelee’s subject is Diogenes and the cursives—the text bounces with Breuer’s Cynics. She is arguing that the Cynics, propulsive rhythmicity, vernacular grit, or the dogs, were Feminists. Amidst ear highjinks, and proclivity for skewer- discussions of Love, Feminism, Specia- ing intellectual sources at the drop of a tion, Animal Rights, and Spirituality, dime. Burroughsian, Jimmy Dean Joyc- Suelee and Rose have an extraordinarily ean, Lacanian—Breuer’s brew dashes erotic and intellectual affair. The novel doo wop hip hop lyricism up against closes with a rapturous prose poem on pomo banter and classical gags. Con- female love, the heavens, and death. sider the following. John is in a crisis, Rose dies again, but she is reborn as a it’s past mid-Saturday night and he is Warrior Ant. standing between two pay phones on 6th St. and Avenue B: “A fiction with documents” might be another subtitle for La Divina Carica- Who am I talking to? (We’re at Љ 1 Љ tura. The paperbound 6 x 4 /2 format- #29) We’re back on the Hotline ted book includes a pastiche of letters, Back to the Damoclean Angle questionnaires, transcriptions of therapy Back to a high Angle Oh just sessions, and mock-medical forms. It some Bitch whose got my contains screeds, recipes, and appendi- Number Can you hear the 54 ᭿ PAJ 77 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028104323048250 by guest on 30 September 2021 Music That’s my Number It’s remarks, his autobiographical project. on the Track “Jack You make She says Breuer is not narcissistic in my Lips Smack Lemon Ice”... relation to his life, but “self-projected.” More directly, Aschenbach’s creative and Breuer’s linguistic lip service is hilarious identity cum sexual crisis in Mann’s for the hip. It is mixed allusively with story appears, in Breuer’s Prelude and La slices of the sacred and scientific, then Divina Caricatura, to underscore John’s shaken and stirred, profusely: “Soul is artistic dysfunction and hopeless aes- Orgasm .