CARNIVAL SHOES
About a year ago, someone Tirabassi loves got deeply involved in a new-age cult and, judging by Tirabassi’s account, suffered a nervous breakdown. Tirabassi helped reclaim this beloved someone, which meant not only healing but deprogramming her. In the process, Tirabassi got a close-up look at the human-potential movement with its Werner Erhards and its L. Ron Hubbards, and came to think of it as an evil, soul-snatching scam. That view provided the angry spark for Carnival Shoes.
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Events themselves provided the plot. Carnival Shoes is an only lightly veiled, if heavily partisan, chronicle of the Beloved Someone’s actual journey through human-potential hell. Named Lena Bella and played by Tirabassi herself, she feels bereft over the death of her father, frustrated by the impenetrability of her lover. So she follows a friend’s advice and signs up for an expensive, intensive, est-oid program called “Neva”–one of those you’ll-pee-when-we-say-it’s-time-to-pee affairs, where she’s hectored into achieving a standard-issue enlightenment.
That image and others–like the one where Lena signals her descent into the Neva netherworld by donning a pair of RayBans and joining a snaky conga line–provide more than visual fun. They offer narrative landmarks. Which become absolutely essential when a script’s as incoherent and uncommunicative as this one. Unable to dissociate herself from her subject, unwilling to expose her Beloved Someone–and herself–to the very audience she’s trying to reach, Tirabassi resorts to speaking in code. She has characters utter an incomprehensible and irrelevant poetic gibberish. She denies us basic information about who her characters are. I would have been completely lost with regard to Rosa if I hadnt known some of the autobiographical facts behind the play. And I still have no idea what that guy with the curly black hair is supposed to be doing.
