AQUI NO SE RINDE
Edgar Road Theatre Company
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The play opens with a revolutionary-sounding folk song, sung offstage, counterpointed by the percussion of footfalls in a lub dub, heartbeat tempo. Then an actor enters, hunched under black cloth, carrying ten feet of gutter pipe with a huge gourd stuck in the front end. The shape looks vaguely like a long-necked bird or a brontosaurus, and it takes its time checking out the audience. Then another bird/reptile/whatever enters and the ruckus is on. After something that looks like a mating dance and a decapitation, the actors assume human roles that mutate and coalesce into a number of two-character scenes. Well, they’re human and not quite human. What dialogue there is–in Spanish, English, and mostly French–is mixed with grunting, screeching, trilling, and pure babble. Clearly, language is discarded here in favor of a more primal, physical communication.
For example, in one scene, Isabelle Lamouline plays a woman screaming incomprehensible shit at some unseen offender. Nearby is Alain Mebirouk; he appears to be some sort of street person having delirium tremens and is detached enough to be unaware of the woman’s problem. And suddenly I notice that her gestures and his spasms are so similar, and synchronous, that this is a dance–a dance of rage and delirium.
In comparison, How I Got That Story is a far more conventional play. Yet it also makes do with two actors, and certainly no scenery worth mentioning. One actor (Randy McPherson) plays a reporter fresh from Dubuque covering the war in Ambo Land (a pseudonym for Vietnam). The second actor (Peter Rybolt) plays “The Historical Event,” which consists of 21 roles ranging from a foulmouthed American field lieutenant to an Ambonese nun. But the most striking similarity to Aqui No Se Rinde is the way How I Got That Story introduces the audience to scenes of war and madness through the eyes of an outsider, the reporter. And, fresh from my experience with the Theatre de Banlieue, I was relieved to get these reports not only in English, but from an ingenuous Iowan’s viewpoint.
The line that keeps coming back to me, offering eerie commentary on both plays in this Clark Street double feature, is “We are a spectacle to you. Your standpoint is aesthetic.” Whether we see it in the theater, on the evening news, in a topical movie, or between the covers of Time magazine, for most of us, this is our only understanding of war. But this understanding is still not serious enough. To close, I’ll risk another quote, this time from Andre Malraux’ Man’s Fate: “The theater is not serious; the bullfight is serious.”
