So, Karen Finley, live. Wow.  

As one of the so-called NEA Four, her name strikes fear in the hearts of right wing censors who have felt it their duty to protect us from Performance Art & the people who perpetrate it. Hence, it is even possible to raise conservative ire simply by mentioning smeared chocolate in conjunction with naked women. By comparison, Yoko Ono, with the somewhat higher cachet of being eternally connected to the martyred John Lennon, only does silly things with rocks & apples & sometimes technically isn’t even performing: she leaves that to the objects & to their observers. There seems to be something intrinsic in this type of activity that just brings some people to a rapid boil.  But no harm done, right?

At the Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s aptly named Thrust Stage, on opening night Finley’s recent one-woman show THE DISTRIBUTION OF EMPATHY rated only a dozen or so walkouts.  (Remember, this is Berkeley.)  I understand from the program notes that this piece had been workshopped in other areas with what seemed to be quite an expanded set of extras.  Billed as a lounge-act, it apparently included audience participation & drinks & maybe even hors-d’oeuvres, which really would have been apropos given that there was a refrigerator onstage. Perhaps with that version containing a sort of built-in cheesiness requisite of lounge-acts, we would have felt a kinship, a sort of Cabaret-esque darkness-on-the-edge-of-the-abyss thing. But no, we got no goodies, no extras except a desultory kiss planted on a guy in the front row. My partner had long since settled into a nap when Finley stripped down to a black lace something-or-other for the second half of the evening. Whipping her tawny Faux Farrah Fawcett locks about, as impulse suited her, grabbing her crotch & confessing private peccadilloes, she finally stunned the audience into silence.  This was not a result of skillful manipulation; it was THE DISTRIBUTION OF BLUDGEONING.

Being able to hear & understand the text of a show is a reasonable expectation on the part of audience members with senses intact.  The fact that this is clearly not something that Finley worries about means that we may as well have been listening to birds.  That’s cool, we could take it that way, however in TDOE, it is her stated objective to address the aftermath of the events of September 11th, which she witnessed.  Were she to be agonizing in a wordless torrent of grief I think we might have been in a position to be moved by her.  Instead, we are asked to take it on faith that she is performing a scripted reaction to this horror, since she has the script onstage & turns pages periodically. Yet she lets herself scream, yelp, growl, mutter & turn her head ceaselessly side to side (reminded me of Lina Lamont in ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ having no idea how to use a microphone, except in this instance, there was no mic). She builds toward repeated anti-climaxes the reasons for which we haven’t a clue.  Here’s where I think food would have helped.  There is just so much frustration an audience can endure & some munchies are darn good at alleviating that, at least temporarily.

At the conclusion, with a solemn poke at our psychic wound, the shadows of the Twin Towers appear on the backdrop which previously ran random silent footage of unexplained images. This I think roused the audience to half-hearted applause, which I joined more out of a sense of female solidarity than anything remotely resembling admiration for the show. In the lobby a trio of gray-haired women huddled together.  “Well, THAT was an AWFUL show!” said one.  The others only nodded.  But wait, it’s Performance Art!  It’s supposed to be awful…isn’t it?   

VIA DOLOROSA,  by David Hare       TheatreFIRST
performed by Simon Vance         director Clive Chafer

Playwright David Hare (The Blue Room, The Judas Kiss, Weatherby, and the screenplay for The Hours) made his first visit to Israel in 1997.  There he interviewed a couple of dozen Israelis and Palestinians holding many different views on the conflicts that are tearing the country apart.  Returned to London, he wrote a one-man show, which he performed himself, based on what he had heard.

The result is a remarkable piece of theater. The voices he brings to the stage take the contentions over who owns the land, who has the right to what, who is responsible for the on-going killings, how people should be treated, out of the realm of abstract political discourse into a search for the emotional core of the implacable hatred that has become the source for daily news stories--devastating military operations paired with suicide bombings.  Hare eschews easy responses and focuses on the emotional underpinnings that push people, from Jewish settlers in the Occupied Territories, to Members of the Knesset, to intellectuals and theater workers both Israeli and Palestinian, to Jewish residents of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to Palestinian residents of Gaza and Ramallah, into positions that remain hostile if untenable—Israelis who insist that no Palestinian can be trusted; Palestinians who claim no Israeli can be trusted.   

Within such a context, it would seem there can be no resolution.  Even the attempts at a solution made by Yitzak Rabin before his assassination at the hands of a right-wing Israeli are so controversial that there seems no agreement over whether they pointed in a positive direction or were the egomaniacal work of a man bent on his own martyrdom.

Yet from this mass of contradictory and despairing testimony, Hare produces something that is not despairing.  This one man piece (to call it a “show” is to minimize it), has been performed by Hare in London and New York for audiences made of up Jews, of Muslims, of political supporters of one side or the other, of the neutral and the uninformed, and, most important, of the mis-informed whose only information comes from the mass media’s highly partisan presentation of the “facts” of the mid-east conflict.  In VIA DOLOROSA it becomes clear that “facts” are pretty slippery, emotionally charged and open to interpretation.  That such diverse audiences have seen and responded to Hare’s piece suggest that perhaps it is possible for people to step back from the emotionally supercharged debate over Israel/Palestine and see what it will take to bring some kind of peace and security and justice to both groups.

The text itself is brilliantly written, shaped and driven.  The words of Hare himself and of all whose interviews he brings to life are filled with humanity, rage and longing.  It is a text to own, to study, and to explore for the shades of meaning that can only be partially grasped during one 90-minute hearing.  It must have been an especially moving evening to hear David Hare himself deliver these varied voices in a theater.

Performing in the cavernous main room of a large mosque in a somewhat forlorn area of downtown Oakland, the actor is lit from varying angles as well as levels throughout the evening.  The chilling effect of the dimly lit half dome above his head is entirely apropos the subject. (The show will move to a local JCC later.) However, much as this production strives to capture the potential brilliance and power, something is not quite there. It is a very fine piece of theater but due to shortcomings in the delivery and staging it falls short of the emotional punch built into the text.  Simon Vance as David Hare surely has the accent and language and intonations right, but he seems to have only three stances on stage: left foot forward, body turned left; right foot forward, body turned right; feet even slightly apart, body straight ahead.  These three are repeated in steady progression throughout.  Watching Mr. Vance’s feet thus becomes an unavoidable distraction, as his movements turn predictable.

Then there is that blasted chair.  Stage right is a plain table with a wooden chair beside it. When a character is to be “interviewed”, Vance grabs and carries the chair front and center, sits on it, does the interviewee’s monologue, stands up and returns the chair to its place.  Six or seven minutes later, he repeats the whole rigmarole. Since there are 10 or 12 interviews during the course of the evening, one wants finally to shout, “Leave the damn chair alone!”   

Unfortunately, one can only long to have seen David Hare speak his own words, or perhaps to have seen what a truly great monologist like Spaulding Gray or Charlie Varon would make of them.  That said, of course, it remains to be acknowledged as an emotionally powerful evening of theater--one that will continue to be performed not only for its humanity but because this conflict is not going away.

WAITING FOR THE PODIATRIST  by Terry Baum, performed by (for the most part) Terry Baum, at Venue 9, San Francisco

Not recommended.

 For more commentary and articles by Claudine Jones, check the Archives.

 © 2003 Claudine Jones

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