CAN’T TAKE JOHNNY TO THE FUNERAL
What makes a hunk of pink plastic a baby? I don’t know, and if Can’t Take Johnny to the Funeral is any indication, neither does Goat Island.
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Johnny opens with an extended section of choreographed roughhousing. In the Wellington Avenue Church gymnasium, spectators were seated on risers on four sides of a 19-foot-square area, with lights pointed from all sides into the center, producing the effect of a boxing ring. The four performers, in mossy green shirts and black pants, line up and enter the ring, then proceed to jump rhythmically, tumble to the floor, toss each other around, hop on one foot, fall against each other, circle an arm or leg against the floor, walk on tiptoe, swipe the floor and clap, lie on top of each other, pivot and whirl into a full-length belly flop. Meanwhile they groan, grunt; their breath is forced out in big whooshes. They finish this section soaked in sweat.
Their movements recall no recognizable activities, with a few exceptions. Christopher performs a sequence that has the effect of a machine part being ratcheted around: she plants her feet wide, and holding one finger out and her arm horizontal, she repeatedly makes a cutting motion across her neck, gradually changing the torque of her upper body so that she seems to move slowly in a circle. In another sequence, the performers pair up and one of each pair lies on his back and groans and writhes rhythmically while the other hangs on for dear life to one of his thighs. I thought of wrestling, football tackles, a lawn mower that won’t start. Or perhaps one person was in the throes of a nightmare, and the other was his succor or succubus.
But, it was only when Johnny was over that I was able to piece it together into some minimally cohesive form. (I still don’t get what it means to be an American in Johnny.) And though piecing it together later did provide some intellectual satisfaction, at the time I was listening to the individual texts they had no emotional resonance. In fact in their brevity and apparent unrelatedness they seemed pretentious.
