Pushing Forward And Getting Nowhere

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The New York Sun

You can’t throw a whipped-cream pie toward any theater in town lately without hitting a mime or a clown. Billy the Mime offered one of the Fringe Festival’s naughtiest thrills with skits devoted to the likes of Terri Schiavo and John F. Kennedy Jr. A packed Volkswagen’s worth of merrymakers has just set up camp at Williamsburg’s Brick Theatre with the New York Clown Theatre Festival. And Lucas Caleb Rooney is playing a rednosed surrogate God in “Creation: A Clown Show” at Theater Five.

Now, with the Rattlestick Theatre’s “It Goes Without Saying,” Bill Bowers presents something even more shocking than a mime who imitates Karen Carpenter or an omnipotent clown: a mime who talks. And talks. And talks.

Solidly built, with close-cropped hair and sunken eyes (he looks like a hybrid of Burt Lancaster and David Sedaris), Mr. Bowers does not cut the ectomorphic figure common to mimedom. He can stroll in place or wield a nonexistent rope with the best of them, but after more than 30 years of experience, he has learned to do so with a refreshing economy of motion.

The same cannot be said, sadly, for Mr. Bowers’s storytelling skills. With the help of director–co-developer Martha Banta, he tells a fairly conventional story of a homosexual boyhood in Missoula, Mont., followed by the sorts of personal and professional ups and downs familiar to a dozen other young-performer-in-the-big-city narratives. As exquisitely as he executes the time-honored mime skill of “marché sur place” (conveying forward motion through a skating-like series of leg motions), “It Goes Without Saying” pushes forward just as strenuously —and results in just as little momentum.

Some of Mr. Bowers’s jokes land with catty precision: A particularly unpleasant neighborhood family was “kind of like the Clampetts, but dipped in lye,” and his junior high school drama club was described as “gay Head Start.” Along the way, he turns his often unsparing attentions to the likes of Donald Trump, Julie Taymor — his stint in “The Lion King” culminated in 10 days in the hospital with work-related injuries — and even Marcel Marceau.

But many of Mr. Bowers’s broader observations drastically overreach. Growing up poor and gay in 1960s Montana can’t have been easy, but comparing his childhood to the Trail of Tears (which cut its murderous path through the area a century earlier) is a bit much. And the dovetailing of his frequently mute showbiz career with the “Silence = Death” mantra of the 1980s AIDS activism group ACT UP requires a defter setup than Mr. Bowers and Ms. Banta display here.

More crucially, his tale of moving to AIDS-ravaged New York breaks little new ground. And the main differentiating plot point — a harrowing trip to Germany in which Mr. Bowers lacks the language skills to aid Michael, his dying lover — lacks the finely honed details that would allow the audience to connect with his anguish.

However, the culmination of this sequence provides the one scene in which Mr. Bowers’s physical skills genuinely augment the story at hand. Upon returning to New York, the two opt to spend Michael’s remaining few months at home. They devise a ritual in which Michael is ushered from the bed to his wheelchair to the commode and back again, each portion marked off with drill-sergeant precision and punctuated with a kiss. Mr. Bowers silently simulates this procedure, one that grew increasingly necessary as Michael’s motor skills failed him, with a rhythmic, affecting insistence.

The evening concludes with a poetic mime sequence in which Mr. Bowers returns to the Montana of his childhood. Ms. Banta clearly means for this to serve as a fanciful summation of Mr. Bowers’s life, a life that is at once atypical and all too common to many of his peers. But the real gifts of “It Goes Without Saying” come in those gentle, dance-like ministrations. The emotional weight of his dying lover can be read in Mr. Bowers’s strong shoulders, his sad eyes, and his tightly drawn lips. Nothing more needs to be said.

***

Back in March, when the Dada art show currently at the Museum of Modern Art was still in Washington, D.C., I suggested in these pages that MoMA come up with a theatrical analogue to the anarchic “sound poems” that surfaced in Zurich in the early days of the movement and that can be heard in the exhibit. Someone like Mac Wellman or Rinde Eckert, I said, could perform these “poems without words” or even create their own.

Well, the museum has done my idea one better. No less than the Wooster Group brought its intellectually voracious brand of techno-trickery to the museum’s lobby this week for three performances. Judging from Wednesday night’s show, the first of three (the run concludes tomorrow night), “Who’s Your DADA?!” is maybe the most ramshackle, seat-of-the-pants thing the Wooster Group has ever done. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Set at a long, cluttered table, the hour-long piece is structured as a panel discussion — how and why Dada started, what the name means, what the sound poems were like. But at least on opening night it frequently devolved into a shambling, Tower of Babel-esque mash-up of speeches, book excerpts, and digitally manipulated snippets of the poems. Scott Shepherd orchestrated (sort of) the proceedings as a fairly ineffectual moderator; he’d introduce the “panelists,” then cut them off with a bell like the host of an art-historical “Gong Show.”

Nobody was safe from the destabilizing chaos. Not the older actors (including Alvin Epstein) brought on to enact such Dada forefathers as Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp — through a bit of video tomfoolery, these actors were displayed half-naked on a bank of video screens in the back of the room. Not the hapless audience members forced to perch on teeny directors’ stools — a few crashed to the ground in the middle of Wednesday’s performance. Not even Rodin’s iconic 1898 sculpture of Balzac, which looms in the MoMA lobby just behind the table — by the end, the poor fellow had been issued his own name tag.

Director Elizabeth LeCompte didn’t quite figure out what to do with the three cross-dressing supernumeraries in the corner, and the issuing of Acoustiguide-like radios to each audience member never paid off. For the most part, though, this seat-of-the-pants construction of meaning through gobbledygook is exactly what Dada calls for.

Now, if MoMA and the Wooster Group can just find some less precarious seats: Dada may have been designed to pull the underpinnings out from under a complacent populace, but there are limits.

“It Goes Without Saying” until October 8 (224 Waverly Place, between West 11th and Perry streets, 212-868-4444).

“Who’s Your DADA?!” until tomorrow (11 W. 53rd St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-708-9781).


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