“Comedy, Truth, and, like, Real Shit” Derek Ahonen, the Amoralists, and the Well-Made Play T. Nikki Cesare Figure 1. The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side. Matthew Pilieci, James Kautz, Malcolm Madera, Sarah Lemp, Nick Lawson, Mandy Moore. P.S. 122, New York City, June 2009. (Photo by Larry Cobra) The Amoralists’ Happy in the Poorhouse (2010) begins where The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side (2007) leaves off: James Kautz, sitting on a couch. In Pied Pipers, Kautz played Billy, a 29-year- old “intelligent and passionate anarchist with drug problems” (Ahonen 2009a:3) who, with his equally idealistic and self-destructive roommates Wyatt (Matthew Pilieci), Dawn (Mandy Nicole Moore), and Dear (Sarah Lemp), finds some sort of salvation amid the doomsday socio- economic gentrification and hyperdevelopment on New York City’s Lower East Side. In Poorhouse, he is Paulie “the Pug,” a Mixed Martial Arts, or MMA, fighter from old-school Italian Coney Island, defeated by his own flaccidity in the ring and the bedroom. Paulie’s failure to consummate his eight-month marriage to Mary (again played by Lemp) — ex-wife of Paulie’s best friend Petie “The Pit” (William Apps), who returns from a tour in Afghanistan to claim back Mary — might be emblematic of a culture rendered impotent by its own actions; it might be indicative of the young anarchist from Pied Pipers growing up to engage in an actual rather than conceptual fight; or, it might just be another portrait of a failure as a young man. TDR: The Drama Review 54:4 (T208) Winter 2010. ©2010 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 175 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00031 by guest on 25 September 2021 The notion of the avantgarde is in no small sense predicated on the productive viability of failure. In late-19th-century Paris, Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (En folkefiende, 1882), a play about one man who, unsuccessfully, stakes his convictions against an entire town’s rejec- tion, represented an avantgarde sensibility evidenced through its highly politicized and even anarchist content rather than its form — a content that, dealing with the environmental hazards of a contaminated water supply, is as relative to contemporary inconvenient truths as to those of the 1800s. Distinctly narrative in structure, Enemy of the People offers, as Erin Williams Hyman describes in her astute article “Theatrical Terror: Attentats and Symbolist Spectacle” (2005), “the individualist revolt against political, economic, and moral authority.” Enemy of the People accrues its avantgarde cred not through the explosive deconstruction of conventional theatrical sys- tems but through its main character, “an avantgarde man of ideas who asserts his freedom like a ‘dynamiter’ against the malignant social order” (104; citing Ibsen 1960:67). As Hyman points out, that the Théâtre de l’Œuvre produced Enemy of the People in 1893, just three years before Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi first bellowed his phonetically extravagant Merdre!“ ” (1896) on that same stage and during a period of intense civil uprising in Paris, suggests a ret- rospective trajectory of the avantgarde that is as dependent upon juxtapositional as formal com- position. In each play, one man bears the burden of both political and artistic context; Ibsen’s heroically solitary Dr. Thomas Stockman proposes what Hyman considers “essentially a theory of the avantgarde: that is, that only a few individuals at the forefront of society can ever make new and valuable discoveries” (105). In early-21st-century New York City, there is a different sort of theatrical terror going on. While as extravagant, phonetically and otherwise, as Jarry’s Ubu, full of their own sense of vul- garity (though in a significantly more shapely incarnation than Ubu’s rotund form) and topped off with a healthy dose of the near-hysterical comedic, the New York–based Amoralists may have more in common with Ibsen than Jarry — though they could be the unlikely great-grand- progeny of the two. And, to be clear, though they are not necessarily promoting any sort of “individualist revolt” per se, and though their characters are deliberately on the socioeconomic margins rather than at the forefront of society, they do offer the distinct possibility of a few individuals discovering themselves within that society. What establishes the Amoralists as cohort to the other companies currently redefining avantgarde theatre in New York — Big Art Group, the TEAM, Witness Relocation, and others represented in this issue of TDR — is also what differentiates them. They don’t devise scripts collaboratively — playwright and director Derek Ahonen claims the credit “writer” and the role belongs solely to him; they don’t use theatre as a space to interrogate political issues or to deconstruct the classics — Ahonen avows his adoration of Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, and Clifford Odets (Ahonen 2010a) rather than such usual suspects as Richard Schechner, Liz LeCompte, Anne Bogart, and others known to have deconstructed a text or two. In their three most recent productions, The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side, Happy in the Poorhouse, and Amerissiah (2008),1 the Amoralists instead offer lives lived within the enclaves of New York, and 1. Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side first appeared at the Gene Frankel Theater for a run from 2 to 25 November 2007. It then showed at P.S. 122 in an extended run from 30 July to 23 August 2009, followed by a run at Theatre 80 from 10 September to 5 October 2009. Happy in the Poorhouse ran from 22 April to 26 April 2010 at T. Nikki Cesare, editor of TDR’s Critical Acts section, is Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Graduate Centre for Study of Drama and University College Drama Program. Her work has been published in Performance Research, Theatre Journal, and TDR. She has dramaturged experimental music-theatre productions in New York City, Chicago, and Morelia, Mexico, and directed the 2010 premiere of composers Du Yun and Ken Ueno’s chamber opera Gold Ocean at NYC’s The Flea. Cesare is currently working on a book about the relation between trauma and performance in post-9/11 US, entitled The Aestheticization of Reality: Postmodern Music, Art, and Performance. T. Nikki Cesare T. 176 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00031 by guest on 25 September 2021 they present these lives within the enclaves of New York off-Broadway and experimental the- atre. As Adam Feldman writes in his Time Out New York review of Pied Pipers, “although the play does contain a lot of radical talk, and one quite extravagant nude scene, its dramaturgy is boldly old-fashioned — which may be the most shocking thing about it” (2009). And from the New Yorker: “What this nearly three-hour dose of high-energy Steppenwolf-style realism is doing at the avantgarde haven P.S. 122 is anyone’s guess” (2009). Yet, in not so different a manner from Ibsen in Enemy of the People, the Amoralists present work that is at once immediately relevant to and highly representative of this new rendition of the avantgarde — just faster and louder and funnier. When somebody says “avantgarde,” I ask, what kind of avantgarde? — Derek Ahonen (2010a) That the mise-en-scène of both Pied Pipers and Poorhouse takes place in hotspots of urban devel- opment and the ensuing displacement of ethnic communities in New York City (see Lydersen 1999; Sternbergh 2009; and Zukin 2010) suggests the possibility that Ahonen is making a broader point about urban culture through the feisty personalities and personal lives of NYC locals. And that Ahonen is one of the few playwrights on the downtown scene writing quint- essentially well-made plays suggests a different sort of gentrification on the experimental the- atre landscape as well. These readings, however, are reflective more of critical positions than Ahonen’s perspective, who intends the Amoralists to be less about ideology or politics than the characters he writes. For instance, when the Amoralists remounted Pied Pipers at P.S. 122 in 2009, Ahonen was concerned that the infective exuberance following Barack Obama’s successful presidential run would change audiences’ understanding of Billy and company. He worried that audiences would read the characters’ idealism as concurrent with political developments rather than as still dis- tinct from them: AHONEN: We thought we needed to update it for an “Obama World,” because the first time was the height of the George Bush era. I guess it wasn’t the height of it, but...We were still aware of it, and in November of ’07 it still didn’t seem like Obama would ever be elected. Well, these characters are optimistic, and it felt like they were very aware of their uniqueness. Which is what I thought made them hypocrites in a way and opened up the story a little bit. Made them more than just radical preachers. We were concerned that when we did [the show] again a year and a half later the characters wouldn’t be seen as hypocrites, or anything special. They would be seen as the people who got Obama elected. And we went back and talked about it, and we discovered that these people are so far to the Left that they wouldn’t even have respect for Barack Obama or for any kind of government altogether. Because the system’s the problem, it’s just different faces. And once we realized that, we realized we didn’t need to change anything. (2010a) The contextualization of the Amoralists as avantgarde may be more of a critical position as well.