OPEN SYZYGY–SOME MADRAS PARABLES
This is a shame. A big shame. One of those big, fat, rotten decline of civilization/coarsening of human values shames you see all the time in the arts these days. Because immediacy really is a crucial part of the pleasure and point of theater. I love the movies, but I feel a genuine sense of privilege in spending time with performers–real, live, particular performers–whose talents and sensibilities, energies and sweaty bodies are physically present to me in a small space at a certain moment.
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You can see the bodies fight it out both metaphorically and physically in the Jules Feifferish “You Think You’re Better Than Me,” with its classic cartoon depiction of a bad mood made worse by solace–and in “Make Me a Phrenologist”: a surreal rank-out, where boxing antagonists try to poeticize each other into submission. In “Get In!” Magnus simply grabs O’Reilly and holds on, saying, “I wanna be one person!” while he tries to argue the virtues of living separate existences and visiting from time to time.
O’Reilly, meanwhile, offers the masterpiece of the evening in his three-part “Welfare Mouth”: a witty, scary, marvelously subtle narrative that–very coolly, in the O’Reilly manner–compounds small ironies into an unexpectedly powerful image of art and love in a world that, again, won’t. Half eulogy, half satire, “Welfare Mouth” is a particular necessity for anyone who ever encountered Beau’s father, James–an elemental spirit of Chicago theater, who died last May of emphysema.
