The Rich Forum Launches a Hit in "bobrauschenbergamerica"
by L.P. Streitfeld
Square dances, picnics, checkers, Walt Whitman, a tire swing, a tag sale and a chicken doing the moon walk. The playwright of the moment, Charles L. Mee, is shaking up theatre with the celebration of everyday Americana in the Robert Rauchenberg spirit of wide-eyed optimism that revolutionized the national arts scene back in the 1960’s.
The marriage of these two American iconoclasts is the essence of the SITI Company presentation of bobrauschenbergamerica. Stamford’s Rich Forum is hosted the production for its first performances since the play was introduced at the 2001 Human Festival. The week run launched a national tour that will bring the production to Manhattan next spring.
Sept. 11 has certainly added a profound new significance to Ann Bogart’s incisive direction that boldly communicates even more emotion in reflective silences than words. These risky performances are obviously guided by the optimistic spirit of Rauschenberg, who believed collaboration leads to a universality of expression. The multilevel resonance of this play is undoubtedly the result of Mee interacting with the SITI ensemble process.
The playwright has not sacrificed his obsessive investigation of romantic love, the driving force behind his recent trilogy, including the Long Warf hit, "Big Love," last season. Yet, here he seems to have come to some sort of resolution of this dynamic between the opposites by painting eros into the perspective of a broad cultural landscape with other forms of love, such as patriotism and a mother’s devotion to her son.
Mee approaches text in the inclusive manner that Rauschenberg works with the found object. Like the original colonial flag, the play is a multi-disciplinary American quilt, utilizing a collage of vignettes incorporating music, dance, poetry and stand-up comedy to weave an eclectic narrative of memory, spontaneity and hope. In fact, the flag serves as the sole stage set, complete with light bulbs illuminating the stars. Doors and windows in the stripes frame various portraits of our national identity–the bathing beauty, the businessman, the devoted mother, the uptight debutante, the outlaw, the all American boy and the bum. What makes these personalities fresh is the casting in opposition to type. For example, the bathing beauty is ethnic, the businessman is black, the golden boy is gay and the bum speaks fluent Japanese.
Remarkably, the original cast has remained intact and their performances exude a familiarity and vitality that is infectious. Working simultaneously with and against type, they uphold a collaborative spirit represented by the stars on the American flag, no performer outshining the other. Instead, they pull together to present strange yet compelling juxtapositions of objects and characters that succeeded in confounding audience expectations, thereby extending the fun. The happening was perhaps the most resonant expression of the Rauschenberg philosophy of including spectators as participants in artistic creation. Mee pays homage with a hilarious martini cocktail stirred with human bodies that rocked the audience.
The Rauschenberg found object, as a slice of Americana, embraces a discontinuous narrative integrating art with life. Yet, what makes the objective reality in bobrauschenbergamerica so multidimensional is the addition of movement. The departure of the stage set from the static quality of the museum piece is achieved through the characters’ engagement in the emotional power of the object, chiefly the American flag. In this manner, Mee and Bogart’s form of collaborative theater invades the terrain of the visual arts in a new century, just as Rauschenberg’s inventions impacted theater during the sixties cultural revolution. As the text of the play makes clear, art at this time is charged with finding new ways of reflecting a paradigm of an interconnected universe in perpetual motion.
Observations about the cosmos in this theatrical collage bring art together with science in the reverent manner of artist’s early experimentation with technology. A particularly transcendent moment results when the enraptured ensemble gazes at the stars illuminated on the American flag. This brilliant metaphor for the fusion of the eternity of space with the unbounded optimism of the American imagination takes on a whole new meaning since Sept. 11. Opening night, a patron walked out in a furry following the arrival of Bob, the murderous pizza boy, representing the dark side of the American dream. Yet, the power of this plays lies in this balance of light with shadow, which mirrors the struggle of the artist.
The revitalization of an American icon within the context of the 21st century avant-garde happens to be just the tonic that we need right now. Those who take the plunge into bobrauschenbergamerica will be rewarded with an enduring American quality–joy.
