LINE
Fathomless Performance Concepts
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The problem with watching the experimental drama that emerged off-Broadway 20 to 25 years ago is that much of it now seems incredibly dated. Sideburns and dashikis may be back in vogue, but it’s difficult to endure an acid-flashback sequence without sniggering a bit. To alleviate this problem, Wallflower Productions and director David Gips have given Israel Horovitz’s absurd 1967 antiestablishment rant, Line, what they call “a twist for the 90’s,” replacing outdated lines about hi-fis and eight-track tapes with references to CDs and digital audiotape. Ironically, despite a crisp, well-executed production, Gips’s reworking seems even more mired in the hippy-dippy 60s than Horovitz’s original.
Line, a one-act that gets revived about once a year in this town, metaphorically treats the ridiculous competition and social Darwinism engendered by the forces of capitalism. Five strangers argue, fight, and connive to get to the front of a line, although no one seems to know exactly where the line leads or what advantage they will attain once they get there. Fleming claims squatter’s rights to the first position; a mope of the first order, he embodies a first-come, first-served social philosophy. Dolan, a smooth operator, relies on guile; he’ll lay back and wait for the others to duke it out before he makes his move. The hapless, bullied Arnall depends on the pity and goodwill of others to get to the front, while his wife, the seductive Molly, will fuck anyone who stands in her way. Stephen, a hostile New York intellectual who feels a sense of kinship with boy genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, endeavors to reach the front of the line solely to show the others what fools they are. In a fit of rage toward the end of the play, Stephen gobbles down the rope they’d all been standing behind, but when absolute chaos ensues, he coughs it up, understanding the political role it plays in keeping people in order.
A Fathomless TV Christmas takes us into the living room of a drunk Santa Claus and flips back and forth between the TV programs he’s watching. On one channel is “Another Goddam Christmas Carol,” featuring a blind ghost of Christmas present, a drooling Tiny Tim with cerebral palsy, and a clerk named Bob Crotchitch, whose kindly family turns to murder, and perhaps cannibalism, when Ebenezer Scrooge, a miser with a penchant for beating up on Streetwise vendors, arrives on their doorstep on Christmas. Another channel’s “Labor in Bethlehem” lampoons the birth of Christ by introducing tap-dancing wise men, an unconvincing Jewish vaudevillian as Herod, and some Beavis and Butthead-style humor courtesy of a couple of pot-smoking shepherds. A late-night talk show features sometimes fathomless but mostly endless monologues by a disgruntled, cigar-chomping elf and a British army veteran. There’s even a subsophomoric TV commercial for Christmas feminine douches in eggnog and milk-and-cookies flavor.
