THE MYSTERIES AND WHAT’S SO FUNNY?
Because The Mysteries is so fast, it covers a lot of ground. Looking back over it you seem to see a broad plain crammed with events and people and about a million jokes. Yet it’s only 90 minutes and has a cast of just 13, though some of them play multiple roles. Writer and director Gordon has managed to create a work both wide ranging and focused, more or less splitting The Mysteries between two worlds: the sophisticated, dispassionate, and supremely intelligent world of Marcel Duchamp and the chaotic, angry, severely limited world of Sam and Rose–a married couple, the children of Jewish immigrants, who are stand-ins for Gordon’s own parents. Both implicitly and explicitly, the show examines the mysteries of creation, and whether artistic creation and procreation are at odds.
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Valda Setterfield, Gordon’s wife and artistic partner for many years, is wonderfully dry as Duchamp, a model of self-possession as she strolls about the stage delivering his witty, cultured, intelligent reflections on art. Yet the tailored suit the artist wears–designed, like the elaborate cartoonish set, by Red Grooms–is transparent, so we can see the boxer shorts, the garters holding up the black socks, in short all the lowly underpinnings of elegance. The design may be a variation on a joke in the piece about wearing your underwear outside your clothes, but certainly the effect is leveling. And though you get the impression Gordon adores Duchamp, seeing him as a kind of model, he also makes fun of his own reverence: at one point a character says, “Hey, Duchamp, how ’bout a movie tonight?” and the artist loftily replies, “No, I must stay here and complete my final work.”
There’s an element of bravura in The Mysteries, as if Gordon were madly undercutting himself at every turn, venerating and exposing the theater at once, just as he venerates and exposes his own family and Duchamp–who’s infuriatingly perfect. The flamboyantly artificial set and costumes add to the work’s air of self-consciousness.
