To the editors:
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Justin Hayford’s review of Le Theatre de Banlieue’s performance of La Nik a Wet [March 9] raises once again–and glaringly–the spectre of the Reader’s nearly complete lack of support for performance art, experimental theatre, and experimental music in Chicago. Hayford’s lack of historical perspective, his mistaken and superficial association of Le Theatre de Banlieue’s work with Beckett’s, and, perhaps worst of all, his ersatz nineteenth-century attitude to “musicality” are evidence of a surprising ignorance on his part. Those of us who saw the work–and it certainly wasn’t free of faults–were not being mindlessly duped by “charlatans,” but were experiencing a piece that was obviously linguistically non-narrative (as opposed to Beckett’s works in which narrative is imperative even as it turns in on itself) and musically wide-ranging–lyrical, abrupt, loud, intimate, pseudo-romantic, forceful, playful, and mournful (sometimes simultaneously).
Chicago
