i didn't get it

I'm assuming nobody reads this blog, really. Except for sometimes Irwin and Kayoko, maybe Maha. Which is fine, because I can dare to be honest and stay in the habit of writing down my thoughts.

On Monday night I went to see the opening of John Jesurun's Philoktetes. John is really famous. He was a recipient of one of them Macarthur GENIUS awards, and he is something of a downtown theater icon-legend. The theater was packed with the downtown crowd. Young Jean Lee was there (hadn't seen her since Vienna), Mallory, Brooke O'Harra, the redhead dude from Wooster group, actors, directors, designers, auteurs. Boy there is nothing like a room of theater artists that makes me want to run away screaming. I mean, it's not that I don't like them, I actually do like them quite a bit. But you know. I feel self-conscious in those situations.

The set was simple and elegant. Projection surface covering a large square on the floor, and also a screen suspended at an angle from the sky -- both projection surface displaying (for most of the time) the same moving images of crashing waves/liquid cloudy skies, rustling green forest, etc. Also there was a camera set up upstage center, which could supply live audio and video feed to the suspended screen. Sometimes actors would go up there, and their faces would fill the entire screen. The actors were more than competent -- grounded and limber with the dense text.

So what was my overall experience of the show? I didn't get it. I'm sorry. I don't know why the script jumped around so much from that dry historical tone in one moment, to super colloquial the next ("What does he look like?" "His face is like an aubergine dressed in garlic sauce."); I didn't know why everything was delivered in this deadpan way, and then suddenly, for reasons not easily discernible to me, jolt into a hyper-emotive moment (an attack, a kiss, a shouting match); I don't know what the story was about and why it mattered at all. This style of detached theater seems to be all in vogue this decade, and I feel like an old fuddy-duddy but I have to admit I just don't get it. Like Richard Maxwell's stuff? (Ironic humor at the expense of the characters -- wait make that a triple dose of irony) And the Wooster Group's stuff as well. That accentuated separation between text and intention and movement -- it seems more impotent rather than powerful, in the contexts of their work. Someone enlighten me.