BOBRAUSCHENBERGAMERICA: A ROMP TheSpyAnts Ensemble at The Ford

BOBRAUSCHENBERGAMERICA: A ROMP
TheSpyAnts Ensemble at The Ford

Clare Elfman
Literary Editor

Los Angeles, California – My bad. I did not do my research. So please, before you see this interesting kaleidoscope of a performance, do yours. I come from old school. A play speaks for itself. Linear. The last act leaves you with something concrete: a message, an emotion, a something. Charles Mee, with this — I guess you’d call this his homage to Rauschenberg — is non-linear, and if you are a careless reviewer who never has studied or appreciated the style of Rauschenberg nor read the text of the inserts in the black folder given at the box office, you will spend the first 30 minutes of this almost two-hour, no-intermission piece rather perplexed, asking what the merde is happening onstage?

I sat for that long in confusion, watching what, to me, looked like a mish-mash of unconnected bits and pieces of action, until finally one character did a monologue that moved me. I recognized that I was not giving the piece its due. I had not done my work as well as the company onstage was madly and non-linearly cavorting to present theirs.

If I had become more familiar with Rauschenberg’s collages, his combination of bits and pieces, thises and thats, unrelated stuff that, once assembled, create a whole, I would simply have known to sit back and let the action sweep over me.  This concept of unrelated bits of action Mee has created to mirror the artist’s style of collage,  so that, as the “play” progressed, a man professes love for a woman, she offers love to an unlikely character, a girl roller-skates by, a guy pushes a bathtub onstage…do I remember a goat? A guy in a chicken suit walks by, a mother shows old snaps (projections) of her artist son but the commentary does not match the pics… And what else? Suddenly the cast breaks into a Broadway chorus or they start to folk dance, or there is a murder, and I’m hanging there thinking, “What the f…” until a pizza guy enters and delivers an entrancing monologue of the three people he killed and another guy does a remarkable Walt Whitman piece, and it becomes quite something else.

So the piece is a non-linear version of Rauschenberg’s style, and to enjoy it, you simply have to let go and stop looking for logic. If I walk through a gallery, my own tastes have been so long developing that, unlike you and you and you and you, I love Matisse colors and Kirschner’s angular faces and Freud’s explicit nakedness and Bacon’s anguished etcetera etcetera, and you like something different. I love Theater of the Absurd because, when you finish with the absurdity, you have a message as clear as if you’d just picked yourself up from your stone bench in an ancient Greek theater. Once I saw a Kelly exhibit — a dirty old rug with an old teddy bear under it — and I asked, “What? What?” Okay, that’s me. Someone else saw it and was moved to tears. In a San Francisco museum, I saw a yellow canvas. Just yellow. What?? And the lecturer explained that it was the “yellowness” that made it so great.

Art is in the eye of the beholder, and if you (I) just let go of traditional notions and sit back and simply experience this one and then come out and hash over what you just saw…you’ve had a great evening of …an homage to Rauschenberg and a bit of a romp.

TheSpyAnts ensemble who performed this interesting piece are: Rollergirl, Breeze Braunschweig, Eric Bunton, Adam Dornbusch, Jennifer Etienne Eckert, Brett Hren, Mari Marks, John Charles Meyer who does a wonderful pizza boy, Danny Parker-Lopes, Mark Slater, Maria Tomas — a great bunch doing their wild thing.

So come prepared, just let go, and afterward decide if this left you with the same “feeling” as does a collage by Rauschenberg.
Interesting and challenging evening.

Ford (inside) until February 28th.