Let’s simplify and take all the phrases critics could use for Field of Flesh—surrealist, experimental, avant garde, etc.—and put them under the umbrella term “weird theater.” You know, it’s the challenging stuff, cerebral and jarring, Beckett and Pinter, departures from our usual definitions of performance. People in the know can attest weird theater is the correct category for Field of Flesh, created and directed by Derek Spencer. It's a rather disjointed interactive show about a dinner from hell being performed this month at the artists’ space Leisure in Humboldt Park.
Weird is sticky, though, because it demands true novelty. Original weirdness is antithetical to comparison. Pastiche or allusion in weird theater is a copout, a breach of the genre’s promise to present something totally unlike anything you’ve seen before. This is the criterion where a thrilling experience like Field of Flesh loses its edge: although it's fun and aims for uniqueness, one is annoyed at how often it borrows from other artists.
The evening begins in the foyer where creator/director Derek Spencer gathers the small audience (my show had about a dozen people) and tells them they are to join a party. But since it would be rude to enter without a gift, we will each bring an object. Spencer hands me an orange water bottle; others get sticks or American flags or other trinkets. We enter a room framed by dramatic white curtains and centered around a long dinner table.
On the table with I-Spy-level detail you see a cornucopia of grisly items, including a grotesque meat slab, a big bowl of pills; and platters of fake fruit, matches, and tattered old paperbacks. Gillian Butcher, set and props, in many ways owns the show, creating the perfect eerie environment for this existential circus.
The objects’ purposes are revealed immediately, as the seven players (all of them astir with bourgeois frustrations) approach us in some way related to what we hold. In this interactive experience, I discover quickly, audience members as well as actors are assigned characters. The woman with a stick becomes the family dog. The guy with the tiny flag is the town mayor.
An attention-seeking disturbed adolescent named Junior (Elijah Valter), approaches me as if I were a social media fitness influencer for whom he has more than a mild crush. He leads me to the table, offering along the way an awkward apology about past Instagram messages.
Providing audience members personalities and pasts at random is perhaps the coolest component of the performance. It’s very disorienting to enter a room with a reputation and life one knows nothing about. It creates the unsettled feeling Spencer, no doubt, has a talent for conjuring.
The characters, it seems, each represent some form of 21st century decay. Bootsie (Mackenzie Jones) is a self-help obsessed, repressed mother barely keeping it together. During a toast she cries that all people who don’t try to improve themselves “hate themselves.” Kit Kat (Carmia Imani) is a leftwing radical youth espousing angry polemics and raps. Are these characters family? It’s unclear.
Structurally Field of Flesh is a series of monologues, or toasts, delivered between periods of unstructured interaction between the audience and actors. The unstructured time, at least from my end of the table, is uneven and uncertain. Junior, who is more or less my assigned guy, tells me how he doesn’t trust another character, though those forebodings go nowhere.
At one point I’m pushed to a corner where old man Popcorn (Brian Shaw) is dying on a cot. He asks me to read him a Turkish poem that meditates on how people can have different observations about the same event. A little on the nose, I think.
The vignettes lack cohesion, and I sense circumstances would be entirely different had I been seated someplace else. At the opposite end I see people engage with other characters whose stories seem completely unrelated to the ones I’m finding. Variety has its merits, but information without direction makes for a muddled experience. The disjointedness of the performance seems to challenge the audience, “Make of this what you will.” Which could be fun but doesn’t exactly fulfill the artist’s promise to provide an original perspective.
Other audience members, I notice, remain rather reserved and embarrassed for the actors, as do I. One wonders if they too feel a little lost with too much suggested but so little explored.
The toast monologues run a repetitive pattern. Characters start with some kind of self-promotion but devolve into nonsense and randomness. Language unspools from their minds, and before the monologue is over they’ve abandoned grammar and instead sputter cliches and utterances.
Later on everyone tweaks at the same time, writhes on the table, and announce fragments of thoughts one after another:
“There is no return to normal,” declares one character.
“Nobody loves me as much as they love themselves," says another.
“Donald Trump is genuinely funny.”
It’s HAL 9000 losing his circuits, a mental breakdown, but mostly it’s a lot like the work of Samuel Beckett. And here is where the show doesn’t quite succeed as weird theater. Too many times I observe stunts designed to shock me with their originality and think to myself, “Oh, that’s just like .” In the show I see some David Lynch, some Samuel Beckett, some Saul Bellow, some David Foster Wallace. Rather than present original weird work, it replays the hits.
Audiences looking for the thrill of discomfort will get their kicks at Field of Flesh. Its entertainment value is that of a haunted house. Those looking for something new will be disappointed. It spouts derivations from all ends. It reaches for uniqueness, but Field of Flesh's satire, in truth, is skin deep.
Field of Flesh continues at Leisure, 2444 W Division St, thru September 28. Running time is 75 minutes without an intermission. Ticket are $45 with limited-income-accessibility tickets for $20.
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