GOAT ISLAND
In life and art there are experiences for which we lack a context or frame of reference. But just by asking “What’s that?” and “What’s he/she saying?” we create a name for something that hitherto had no name–and in naming things we brand them, give them form, and make them real. Language puts experience into a context.
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Goat Island’s 1989 We Got a Date, directed by Lin Hixson, seems to raise many questions that are answered, if obscurely, in the asking. The work addresses the way in which memory and experience work together to create the people we become. The older we get, the more we frame our past to suit who we feel we must be. According to psychologist Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, people seek to rationalize unfavorable life experiences in order to live with their own mistakes and with circumstances beyond their control.
There is no discernible story in We Got a Date. Everyone seems caught in a pivotal moment that each performer struggles to actualize in his or her own way. One performer recounts an incident concerning a dachshund, another a rather strange “date” more like a barroom pick-up; Goulish acts as Roy Cohn, interrogated first regarding the exact number of communist subversives in the U.S., then on the question of his sexual orientation, then on the question of the disease that consumes him. The stories overlap and return throughout. Denial and ambivalence abound as performers ask questions, answer the questions, change roles, and ask again.
