http://www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/experimental-theater-the-ride/Content?oid=1478016
by Benjamin Sutton
December 23, 2009
Intended as a savvy deconstruction and updating of film noir
conventions and end-times paranoia, poet and playwright Anne
Waldman's Red Noir instead trades in nostalgic and trite signifiers
of avant-garde theater. From the in-the-round staging, to the
21-person ensemble's recurring chants of "Anarchy!" and the torturous
final half-hour of participatory interpretive dance, Waldman and
director Judith Malina go through a decades-old checklist of Things
Experimental Theater Does. Most of the audience-members dancing and
chanting at the performance I attended looked like Living Theatre
regulars in their 60s, which made me wonder if this wasn't intended
as a trip down memory lane for previous generations of Downtown
performers. This regressive exercise in experimental theater is
especially painful to sit, chant and dance through because it's
loosely structured around a clumsy and poorly executed pastiche of
activist performance shoe-horned into a reinterpretation of the
oddball 1955 film noir Kiss Me Deadly. Here, the P.I. doubles as the
femme fatale, Ruby (Sheila Dabney), pursuing Jelly (Anthony Sisco), a
limping, eye patch-wearing thug who, in turn, chases Bolt (Eno Edet),
who has entrusted a briefcase to Ruby's double, Beatrice (Vinie
Burrows), who spends most of the play with a young girl (Camilla de
Araujo) reading passages from Frederick Douglass's autobiography.
Red Noir might sound like a spectacular mindfuck, but its dated,
half-baked attempts at subverting traditional performance never
amount to anything moving, enlightening or enjoyable. The evening's
best moment comes before the show begins, when the audience enters
the performance space, a dramatic, raw basement theater with bare
concrete pillars, a stylized skyline backdrop and a great deal more
character than the ensuing play. What the performance does get
across, though, is how a vital and storied experimental theater
company can become a parody of its former self. Members of the
ensembleimagine a Greek chorus dressed like a bike gangpace the
perimeter of the space throughout the show, shouting about chemicals,
radiation, animal rights, war in the Middle East, environmental
degradation, poverty and every other modern crisis. The intent,
presumably, is to create a sense of imminent cultural ruin, but these
gestures seem disingenuous and tokenistic, done more out of habit
than a sense of urgency. Waldman name-checks all the issues taken up
by activist theater in the last half-century as if laying out her
radical bona fides, and to avoid doing anything actually radical.
(Adam Rapp's short play, Classic Kitchen Timer, currently in the
Flea's Great Recession series, takes a similarly confrontational
approach, but is infinitely more thoughtful and effective.)
Even in those few periods when the noir plot has room to develop
there isn't much worth following. The core cast does more shouting
than anything, as if yelling and overacting were the only way to
wrest our attention from the noisy mass. Burrows, Sisco and Edet in
particular have undeniable stage presence, but it's squandered in the
elaborate mess of non-sequiturs and banalities they're made to speak.
Sisco gets the play's one truly funny line when, in response to an
accusation that he's a soulless corporate henchman, he yells: "Blah,
blah, blah!" In a play where even the most serious accusations are
empty threats, the only radical response is to call bullshit.
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