THE COLLAGE PROJECT
The program offers the first clue as to how much this work has been pondered, analyzed, and processed: every cover has its own individual collage, and the thick program includes a quote from James Joyce, program notes by three different writers, a poem by Marc Smith, a xeroxed collage centerfold, and an earnest description of all this as “a collection of one-act plays within a context of related works.”
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Nine visual artists have displayed their works in the theater space itself. But we’re given little opportunity to look at these, to discover their relationship to Helgeson’s ideas. Moreover, the works are often hung above eye level and between rows of seats, so that one would have to literally crawl over the audience to see them (no one did). Only the neon sculpture plays a role on the stage, or has any discernible correlation with the script.
But the zenith of reactionaryism is reached when the boy, after learning of the girl’s abortion, screams out, “You killed our baby!” Helgeson, having chosen to tell this story, might have done better to keep writing, instead of putting the final period on the boy’s broken heart. There might have been a greater moment, a truer emotion, a little further down the line.
