Richard Foreman performed by the Wooster Group | Symphony of Rats / 2024

the finale of seem

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Foreman Symphony of Rats / performed by the Wooster Group, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte / the performance I attended with Deborah Meadows and James Sherry was on October 22, 2024 at Redcat Theatre in the Walt Disney Music Hall

 

Things are bad for the President of the US (the remarkable performer Ari Fliakos). He’s been having fever dreams after being vaccinated for COVID-19 and his series of different hallucinations which include strange and quite improbable visions embracing a “Tyger Tyger Song,” referencing William Blake’s famous poem, an incident on a Ghost Ship which hints at Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, a brief Rat Opera which improbably calls up Théophile Gautier’s description of his notorious “rat” ballet, a Tornadoville encounter which most certainly takes us into the world of The Wizard of Oz, a wonderfully appropriate short rendition of Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” a brief video excursion into D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, a head-bobbing association to Charlie’ Chaplin’s famous sequence in The Great Dictator wherein a bouncing ball becomes an icon of the globe’s survival, as well as the experiences of the world of golf and a sexual engagement with a woman wherein our President gets to wear a larger than life dildo, presumably a reflection upon Reagan’s notoriously astounding penile appendage*—and these are just a few of Foreman’s and the Wooster Group’s associative allusions to literature, art, and profane pop culture—make it clear to the men of a hyper-hysterical laboratory who attempt to analyze, encourage, and explore the President’s hallucinations, that something is very “wrong.”

     These figures (Niall Cunningham, Jim Fletcher, Andrew Maillet, Tavis Miller, Michaela Murphy, and Guillermo Resto) sing, dance, and encourage the Commander in Chief with sexual come-ons (both homosexual and heterosexual), songs, dances, and analyses that basically seem to only trigger further fevers, until the President no longer knows even if he is still on planet Earth or has truly been transplanted into outer space.

     This play, originally performed in 1988 through a memorable collaborative production with the Wooster Group, called up US leaders, past and present such as Nixon and Reagan, but now, of course, echoes the horrors of a current Presidential nominee. What we have in this production is a highly layered work, whose dramatic devices, video representations, and endless stage machinations ululate and reverberate not only the terrorizing political situations in which the US has repeatedly discovered itself floundering, but speak to something much larger and more significant regarding the differences and similarities of the various theatrical viewpoints that attempt to reiterate those cultural issues.

      In his review of the other day, Los Angeles Times critic Charles McNulty quite brilliantly explained what he perceives as the difference of these two companies, both (along with, I would argue Mabou Mines** and the Theatre of the Ridiculous) have had an enormous effect on US theater in the 1970s through the present. McNulty summarizes it:

 

“Lurking behind Foreman’s madhouse phantasmagorias is the mind of the artist interrogating its own secret chambers. Beneath the layers of the Wooster Group’s postmodern antics, on the other hand, are only more layers of performance. There is no single consciousness beneath the work. Reality itself is a form of theatrical interplay.”

 

      Foreman gave this company full permission to rethink and reimagine his original work, and they took full advantage of his allowances. But the Wooster Group inevitably mirrors the original playwright in the figure of Guillermo Reso, who speaks much like a shaman speaking into a basketball hoop. It’s not he that offers, in which McNulty describes as his Darth Vader proclamations, anything that might “explain” the dreams we are sharing with the stage figures who are attempting themselves to makes sense of the irreality of living, but his empty sagacity layers this wonderful dream with yet other possibilities.

       What we experience in this version of the truly fascinating Symphony of Rats is the very history of the complexity of contemporary American theater. Although the Wooster Group’s production has little patience with the winking nods to gay culture of the 1960s Warhol Factory and Ronald Tavel’s and Charles Ludlam’s The Theatre of the Ridiculous, in its ruminations of OZ and Women in Love, along with Fliakos’s insistent physical touches of the twinkish Cunningham, it clearly permits a homoerotic reading not unlike the thoroughly down-and-out sexually gay version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré in which Fliakos starred in 2009.

          As Helen Shaw recently suggested in The New Yorker there is a kind of gay texturing in this work that refers us back to the 1960s and 1970s allusions of Warhol, Tavel, and Ludlam: “Fliakos wears the kind of dun-colored tank top and many-zippered pants that you’d expect on the engineering mate of an interstellar cargo tug, and when the screens play snippets of video, it’s flotsam like “Ghost Ship” or a YouTube cooking tutorial, or, in one extended sequence of homoerotically tinged violence, a murderous scene from ‘The Suicide Squad.’”

      In short, just as McNulty suggests, in any Wooster Group production there are layers upon layers which reveal the cultural acculturations through which we attempt to explore the strange and dangerous visions of our leaders and the society in general.

      Symphony of Rats is not truly about our presidents, the outrageous monsters who would wish to control us such as Nixon, Reagan, and Trump, but about our own delusions, the feverish dreams and the dangers of the culture in general moving endlessly away from a more normative reality—or at least if not “normative” toward a more meaningfully coherent notion of reality which involves imagination, dream, and the acceptance of something beyond the ordinary.

     A breakdown is perhaps not truly as bad as it appears, but a necessary re-exploration of what our so-called reality is all about. As Anthony Howell quite profoundly commented on Ludlam’s original production:

 

“This idea of breakdown pervaded the entire play, usually couched in terms of Foreman’s longtime dialectic between imagination and reality. After confessing that his “mental Polaroid is broken,” the President engages in a dialogue with one of the video robots, who declares that “getting a handle on reality is what most humans spend most of their time working on,” but that he prefers “the twists and turns of the human imagination.” In Foreman’s ontological analysis, reality is a social con-job; and breakdown, even at the cost of a loss of personal identity, is a moral imperative: “It’s time to relieve yourself of the belief systems you only partially believe in.” By having the President give up sober control and submit himself to imaginative chaos, Foreman (who began working in the ’60s) presents a ’60s idea recycled in ’80s terms: that imagination is the only value that can rescue us from the tyranny of an existence defined and constrained by social convention.”

     What this truly significant production reveals is that it is only through art, especially those divergent possibilities of it, that we might be redeemed from the false visions of horror, leadership, and tornadic terrors that we doomed to encounter. We need “all of it,” the end of categories, the whole kit and caboodle of challenging thinking if we are going to survive.

     In both Richard Foreman’s 1988 work, as in this production, metaphor no longer has meaning. As confusing as reality is, it is, as Stevens made clear in his 1923 poem, precisely what it is: there is no other way to possibly express it except in the chaos of its own vertigo. The “emperor of ice cream” is only a clone with a cone on his head, no other clothing can hide his naked existence.

     I must add that through this fascinating production we finally need to recognize that along with Kate Valk, Ron Vawter, Willem Dafoe, Spaulding Gray, Frances McDormand and so many others to which this company has introduced us, it is time to recognize Ari Fliakos as one of our very greatest of performers.

 

*Just the other day, Trump reiterated is compulsion with penis size in his discussion of golfer Arnold Palmer. I can’t imagine that the original playwright and the current production might have expressed it any better: "This is a guy that was all man," the former president said. "This man was strong and tough, and I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, 'Oh my God, that's unbelievable.'"

**Mabou Mines, I would argue, is also dependent upon collaboration, but simply in a more contained manner. That “collaborative hub” of David Warrilow, Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Philip Glass has general worked in pairs or trios rather than in entire company involvement, but also with equally felicitous effects.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2024

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (October 2024).