CAVALCADES IN LEARNING
Chris Sullivan is one of the most skilled performers I’ve ever seen, exploring a richly imagined universe of grotesque characters in a wholly idiosyncratic and disarmingly sincere performance style. Sullivan simply tells stories–or more accurately, tells stories about himself telling stories–but the anecdotes that he creates are packed with a psychological resonance, giving his seemingly inconsequential work unexpected profundity.
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The onstage Sullivan, then, is an impostor of himself. Indeed, he is introduced in just this light. The piece begins with Sullivan “disguised” in a fake nose, crouched like a rodent on the front of the stage, explaining in an egregiously self-conscious character voice that Chris Sullivan has had a terrible accident, and his part will be played by an impostor. He then exits, and we overhear an “argument” between him and the “real” Chris Sullivan, who wants very much to perform his own piece. Sullivan then appears as himself, dressed in the struggling artist’s mandatory black suit and sporting crutches. He prays to God to be healed, tosses the crutches away triumphantly, crashes to the floor, and then reenters a moment later, again hobbling on the crutches and praying to be healed.
Sullivan makes himself out to be a pathetic loser in almost every scene. Nothing really works for him, including the technical support for his performance. To dim the lights, he must constantly run over to two rheostats mounted on the wall. To produce a lighting “effect,” he uses a red floodlight mounted in an aluminum clamp-on lamp. The look is totally cheesy.
