THE SHOW HOST
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Marcelo Ginero (John Carlos Seda), the general manger of a Venezuelan television station, has just been kidnapped by Carlos (Henry Godinez), a television fan with an ax to grind. At first it seems that Carlos is simply very unhappy with the final episode of his favorite soap, “Tear Apart My Life.” Holding Ginero hostage in a chicken coop outfitted with a half dozen television sets, Carlos forces him to play out a happier ending, one that Carlos believes will influence his own unhappy love life. It soon becomes evident that Carlos is more than just a little deranged, though it’s not clear whether his fixation with TV is the cause or the symptom. At any rate TV has sucked him in and made him a believer. It’s his gospel, and any attempt by Ginero to discredit that gospel leads to spastic fumblings with the gun Carlos keeps in his pocket. “I’ll kill you like a cockroach,” he drawls in the corn-pone tones of a TV gunslinger. Because television is Carlos’s only frame of reference, he is a truly dangerous person despite his nebbishy exterior and the little-boy honesty that almost makes him appealing.
Ginero, riddled with ulcers and as much a prisoner of television in his way as Carlos, tries to explain that TV is simply a business, that the soul craves a deeper religion. Eventually, though, he finds himself pulled into the TV scenarios that initially Carlos had had to force on him. Soon he’s playing by Carlos’s rules, and in earnest. No one has to explain these rules to him, or to the audience. Anyone with a TV knows them by heart. Hero/villain, mother/child, game-show host/contestant–all these roles require strictly regulated behavior, no deviations allowed.
Jeff Dorchen’s one-man performance piece delivers, as promised, the birth of a Frenchman. Sardin is born of American parents (a neat trick), torn from the womb of his dying mother and brought up to be the guardian of civilization through the dark times–because he is, after all, French. We first see him in whiteface, sitting before a lighted scrim, drinking a glass of water he’s poured from a crystal pitcher in which two goldfish swim. Take your pick of any incomprehensible French film, this image might have been plucked from it.
