THE SPY THREW HIS VOICE: A PLAGIARISM IN TWO ACTS
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Their latest work launches their new Andersonville space, a sprawling, art-filled warren that’s situated over a funeral home (appropriate, considering that smoking is permitted throughout, though so far not in the auditorium). Oobleck’s cerebral concoction The Spy Threw His Voice: A Plagiarism in Two Acts is both an indulgently clever meditation on the ownership of art and an original reflection on the subject of plagiarism. Created by David Isaacson and the company, it dramatizes a nightmare that plagues two literary survivors of the cold war, Vaclav Havel and William F. Buckley Jr., who are both terrified that they’ve lost creative control of their work.
Symbolically presiding over this “espionage thriller for the 90s” are quotation marks that hang on either side of the stage. Between them lies a huge depiction of an open book. On one page is written the opening scene from Havel’s anti-institutional satire The Memorandum; on the other, the first page of Buckley’s ill-fated cold-war spy thriller Stained Glass. (The unauthorized excerpts from these plays constitute Isaacson’s announced plagiarism.) Neither play is new, yet The Spy Threw His Voice has both being rehearsed for 1991 productions at Louisville’s Humana Festival of New Plays, with the playwrights present to oversee the progress. (Consistent with Oobleck’s own artistic policy, neither play seems to have a director.)
Of course the sprawl doesn’t matter to the Ooblecks–it’s the Hegelian interplay of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that counts, the dramatic pursuit of contradictions whose resolution will lead to a higher complexity. Yet they seem obsessed with spinning paradoxes and inebriated with cryptic metaphors, such as the voice that’s thrown and the voice that throws. There’s too obvious a confusion of the tendentious with the profound and the intricate with the enlightened. The result is a show that would be much less forgettable if it didn’t spread itself so thin trying to explore an ill-defined theme from every possible philosophic angle.
