APPARENT APPEARANCES
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Take Hubert Santete, the most successful work of the evening. The aptly named title character is, simply, a man without a head. This disability is amusing by itself, but Hoyer goes beyond the obvious by placing him in a context and portraying him as an anonymous bureaucrat who is suddenly called upon to read an address at a corporate meeting. Santete gradually becomes aware that something is amiss–his spectacles fall down his back when he tries to put them on, and the glass of water he attempts to drink showers over his tie and coat. Upon divining his condition, he begins to retreat in embarrassment, but he’s halted by a voice seemingly coming from nowhere that tells him to continue: “Don’t worry. They won’t even notice.” Santete resumes his place at the podium, and the voice (a recorded voice-over) proceeds to deliver the address, a morale raiser directed to the “head-hunting committee” that criticizes the members for behaving as if they hadn’t a brain in their heads, reminds them to use their heads, exhorts them to hold their heads high and so on. When Santete finishes his address, to thunderous applause from an unseen audience, he expresses gratitude to the voice for its assistance. It points out to him that his experience has given him a notebook full of ideas, and says, “Remember where the ideas came from.” Whereupon Santete places his list of ideas atop his collar and goes on his way, satisfied that he has as good a head on his shoulders as anyone.
This is a more multileveled story than it might appear at first. Santete’s headlessness could be taken to mean that he is naive or stupid–both qualities contained in the term “empty-headed”–or that he lacks personality, that he is “faceless.” It could indicate that he is a conformist and his address hypocritical in its promotion of originality (“Are there any stones you’ve let unturned? Have you let your two cents collect interest? We want your two cents worth!”). Or that he is nothing more than a “stuffed shirt.” Or that he is a mere “figurehead,” as in Ionesco’s The Leader. What of the voice that comes to his aid? Is it the voice of God, inspiration, his muse, his genius, his conscience, or only “that little voice that dwells within all of us” and pulls us through rough times? While Hoyer’s parable is not a story in the sense that it parallels any literal text, it is nevertheless a complete play, with a beginning, a middle, and a surprisingly upbeat ending. This differs from the classical single-action “white mime,” not only in its use of props, costumes, and spoken accompaniment, but in its stringing together of multiple actions. to create a coherent linear narrative.
