THE POPE IS NOT A EUNUCH
I mean, it’s your basic recipe for disaster, isn’t it? Here be the Ooblecks: a group of extraordinarily literate, highly politicized young theatricals from Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a notion of ensemble so pure it would scare most actors half to death. They build their shows collectively, nonhierarchically, developing scripts as a group and working without benefit of a “director” in the conventional sense of the word–forming instead a sort of directorate of the whole.
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These Ooblecks come to Chicago and put on a few productions with names like Godzilla Vs. Lent and Cud, to which various critics respond with names like “offbeat” and “audacious.” The critics are impressed with the funky ambience of the Oobleck home base behind Cabaret Voltaire; they like the heady, anarchic storm of jokes, allusions, subversions, and cracked associations Oobleck unleashes, bringing folks like Martin Heidegger and Mitzi Gaynor into the same sudden universe.
Telling Oobleck to get a director is like saying, I really love what you’re doing–now get rid of it. A complete negation masquerading as praise. Oobleck’s whole aesthetic–not to mention its whole ethic–depends on the absence of a conventional, authoritarian, organizing presence. These folks are after something bigger than a clean show. They’re true utopians, trying to build a method consistent with their communal message. Trying to make a practice that will encompass, reinforce, and structure what they preach. The rough spots in their shows are a natural, healthy byproduct of that practice. Or of the striving toward it, anyway. Eliminate the rough spots by means that contradict the practice–by means of a director, for instance; by means of a unity derived not from group coherence, but from somebody’s enforced vision–and, I guarantee you, you’ll also be eliminating the source of their genius.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jennifer Girard.
