To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The performance was, in Hayford’s words, “at first glance entirely meaningless and empty.” No second glance was possible because there was nothing else to see. This was a stultifyingly banal, abysmally performed, and conceptually vapid exercise in quintessential boredom. It gave new meaning to the term “excruciatingly dull.” It recalls the tag line for Dan Aykroyd’s Leonard Pinth Garnell character on Saturday Night Live: “And now for some truly bad performance art.”
One patently incomprehensible misstatement in the review will serve as an example. During the interminable dinner-under-the-tarp sequence, Hayford avers to the “fascinating . . . visual beauty” of the occasional wrinkles on the tarp. This is absurd. No one was watching the tarp because there was nothing to watch. I was watching the audience who were looking at anything in the room besides the tarp: their shoes, the pipes on the ceiling, their watches, other people’s shoes, the walls, the rest of the audience. It was like a flatulent cocktail party guest whom everyone was desperately trying to ignore.
