Megalomania, or, the worst plays I've seen in the last 6 months

Megalomania is a psycho-pathological condition characterized by delusional fantasies of wealth, power, or omnipotence - an unchecked id that desires and devours everything around him towards the end of conquering the world. And, as Noam Chomsky puts it, this kind of "pathological person, ... does nothing except try to maximize his own gain" (and yet is the precise kind of behavior expected of corporations read more from the man.) A kind of personality who is unable to acknowledge any other version of reality asides from his own.

Megalomania of course, occurs in varying degrees, and in my humble untrained opinion, tendencies towards it exist as a potential in every human being. The results can be as destructive and violent as Hitler's genocide or Kim Jong-Il's tyrannical reign over North Korea. How are these megalomaniac personalities encouraged, and how is it that they are able to rise to power in this world? Do those with pathological tendencies feed on the innate desire in human beings to be led, to give over our narratives to a higher power? Do the leader and the led both play equally culpable roles in constructing and enforcing this power dynamic?

I remember a number of people I met after I left the International WOW Company, who said to me in reference to the company, "Don't drink the Kool-Aid." I wasn't too surprised to find that there was this general perception of the company as a egocentric vehicle for the singular vision of the company's director. I laughed, then, at the comparison to what we all know about the terrible mass cult suicide by means of cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. But after watching Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple I am having a hard time laughing at all. I hesitate to focus a post on a TV program (consisting mostly of interviews with cult survivors), but this particularly haunting portrayal of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple left a disturbing aftertaste. The details of how it came to be, in and of themselves, were not necessarily surprising. A neglected boy from a poor family in Indianapolis finds solace in the traditions of the black church, and as a young adult begins his own preachings based on ideas of justice and equality. In the 1970s, people from all over the U.S. responded to his call against the materialistic society and came to Ukiah, CA, to join his Temple; he offered people community, family, a place of trust and painted a very palpable possibility of realizing a utopia on earth. Of course, behind the guise of an extremely charismatic peace-loving fighter for justice, he was also manipulating people to sell their worldly possessions and donate everything to his church, carving out strong footholds in politics, forcibly having sex with numerous men and women in his congregation, and generally perpetuating a silent community controlled by fear and shame. When an article in a high-circulation publication threatened to expose him for the hypocritical power-monger that he was, he took his entire congregation into the jungle of Guyana, where he had been preparing a communal settlement called Jonestown. Here, what was supposed to be their socialist utopia, turned into the worst fascistic nightmare. People were not allowed to leave and the sense of panic and dread grew; concerned relatives of cult members created enough of a stir to get Congressman Leo Ryan to go down to Jonestown himself to see what was actually happening -- a visit that would precipitate the tragic deaths of over 900 people, including many families, parents with small children and infants, grandparents, siblings, and spouses. This is what was perhaps most shocking to me -- that people were willing to surrender not only their own lives to the insanity of this man, but the lives of their own children as well. It's one thing, to give up your own life for a cause or surrender your life to another more powerful ego, but to give up the lives of your dearest relatives? Bertolt Brecht portrays a similar climate in which family members turn each other in to forward the Nazi cause in his Fear & Misery of the Third Reich but the reality of this scenario really sunk in until I watched this show.

Tyranny reigns in overt and subtle ways all over the world -- since this is an art blog and not a political one (yes I am drawing a line) I want to talk about another event which deeply disturbed me this week along similar lines.

Megalomania finds a fertile breeding ground in the arts, where quality and expression are so entirely subjective -- and, especially in this country where there is no cultural foundation for an appreciation of theater and the attempt to validate and legitimize work often falls into assessing whether a production is professional and amateur - a ludicrous and arbitrary distinction in the U.S. that comes down to whether the artists in the show are paying the bills with their craft, or whether they still work that temp job by day or wait tables by night. Honestly you cannot tell me that a woman who spends her evenings singing about whoring herself in Miss Saigon is a more legitimate and therefore "professional" artist over a man who temps at CitiGroup during daylight hours and later dons an outrageous red hooded unitard stuffed with many inflatable balls to insult and humiliate his audience relentlessly (I am referring to a genius...) Money speaks little about people's creativity or skills, or power of imagination.

ANYWAY when Irwin stumbled upon this New York Times article, he, being a tech-geek, and me being a pessimistic yet curious theater-goer, we got tickets to what turned out to be a very unfortunate waste of a lot of money and cutting-edge technology. Losing Something, written and directed by Kevin Cunningham, who also happens to be the Artistic Director of the theater 3LD (3-legged dog), showcases one of the most innovative video projection technologies, enabling live performers to interact almost seamlessly with projected images. For example, an older version of a man can emerge from the live actor and dialogue with each other -- the projected man can wander off into the distance and return, a three-dimensionality that is surprising and noteworthy.

However, no amount of dazzling technology could have redeemed this display of total masturbatory self-absorption. Irwin described the script as a cross between Look Who's Talking 3 and someone's pseudo-lit-crit-scrawlings while stoned ouf of his mind. Here is best attempt to describe the piece: a protagonist, a Man, in the wake of 9-11, seems to have lost something (probably his coherent mind) and wanders about spouting pretentious, unending monologues encompassing fantasies of sexual perversion and people falling out of the sky. Projected are numerous topless but otherwise non-descript white girls twined around each other in a jungle of those latex resistance bands that dancers use to stretch out their calves with, who taunt and tease the protagonist in search of a missing acquaintance named Daniel. Images of falling bodies litter the stage from time to time, as does a revolving image of a talking baby-woman. It is unclear what the relationship of this baby-woman is to the Man, but she ends up materializing in the flesh, a full-grown woman in diapers, and topless. The Man stoops down to change her diapers. OK, so she's a baby, and I'll just ignore her jiggling boobs. Then, moments later, this baby-woman pulls down the Man's pants, wrests him to the floor, and fucks him, reverse cowgirl style while he continued to blandly spout off incomprehensible text about god-knows-what. I think this is where the older couple in the front walked out of the theater. It was not long before the next group of people walked out. We made our exit right after the most exciting part of the show for me, when they blinded the audience with white lights so that a performer could get in place -- when the lights restored the Man was talking to his friend Daniel who was suspended in the air (a live projection trick -- the actor is actually on the floor and etc. etc. who cares).

We walked out of the theater with stomach aches, terribly offended by how this could have happened. There was obviously a LOT of money going into actualizing this technically complex show. How was this writer/director allowed to do this -- like he was like: hey I found my journals from post 9-11 and I think they make for a really powerful text. And his girlfriend was like: yeah baby, that's a really great idea, you should do a show with it. I mean who knows. It reminded me of the comparably tedious Tempest (pictured on right) I saw at BAM which used similar technology -- Prospero and Miranda were the only live actors - the rest were projected/3-dimensional -- and also the inconceivably terrible The End of Cinematics also at BAM (pictured below), which was an awfully written and scored "opera" with 6 ginormous screens, live camera feeds and the works. Oh my god and then there was the Still Life with Commentator at BAM which was embarrassing and painful -- especially the lyrics...

So sure, there are a lot of ways a theatrical piece can be bad, but in these cases, I think it's safe to isolate two major contributing factors.
1.) Technology is given higher priority over content/story/drama. No doubt technology is amazing and will enable us to expand what is possible on stage. But technology is only a means, not contents in itself. I know it seems obvious, but it cannot be stressed enough. It's like, don't talk for the sake of talking, talk to me if you've got something to say, bitch.

2.) Brings me back to this week's theme: megalomania. In the cases of Losing Something and The End of Cinematics particularly, it was clear that these people need to be checked! Somehow they have created a situation or environment in which their voice is not questioned and therefore their art has turned into a sprawling self-obsessed goo. While these artists are not colonizing small countries or perpetrating genocide or swindling people out of their life-savings (well I don't know this for a fact, I can only ASSUME this is not the case), they are taking over $30 away from me and asking that I pay attention for an hour or more -- and most importantly, they are telling me, with the amount of money they have access to, that they are playing a role in defining what theater is today. And if their vision of art is shaping our culture... Discussion about the pros and cons of living as an expatriate for life to come.