TRAGEDY
We Americans have turned what a more reflective people might experience as despair into complacency. What might have seemed aimlessness is replaced with the comfort of placelessness. Drive across the country and try not to run into a Taco Bell, Walmart, or 7-Eleven. Try not to hear the same 25 songs on any radio station you pick up. Try not to find the same processed food simulacra on the shelves of every indistinguishable roadside convenience store. Try not to end up in Anywhere, USA. If every place looks, sounds, and tastes alike, we can never be lost.
His meager press materials suggested the piece would be about “sexuality, ethnicity, intimacy, and language.” But describing the seven-day lockup of a straight Englishman and a gay Cuban as being about sexuality, ethnicity, intimacy, and language is like saying Hamlet is about iambic pentameter.
The first day–Labor Day, ironically enough–began unceremoniously, at least for me. Misreading my materials, I showed up at noon only to discover the piece had begun at midnight. I spent a good hour debating whether I should give up on the whole affair, until I realized that missing the first 12 hours of a seven-day event is proportional to missing the first two minutes of Seinfeld. And besides, they’d spent five of those hours asleep. I figured I could catch up.
In the first, Wilson read in an utterly clinical tone a lengthy footnote (everything in this piece was lengthy) from Kiss of the Spiderwoman. Thick with quasi-scientific authority, it explained that homosexuality develops when a child tends to identify with the prescribed role of the opposite-sex parent. While the heterosexual Wilson read, the homosexual Martinez diligently served him tea, never raising an eyebrow at Wilson’s patronizing tone. “You didn’t warm the cup, did you?” Wilson accused. “Look, put two tea bags in the pot–one for me, and one for the pot–and warm the teapot as well. Strictly speaking we shouldn’t be using tea bags at all.”
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Despite Monday’s “try anything” approach, Martinez and Wilson had clearly hit upon a theme, crystallized in the train play. So much of what appeared that first day suggested a deep feeling of isolation, of spiritual aimlessness: Wilson describing the banal landscape of parked cars outside the window of the theater they had agreed not to leave, Martinez casting “HEAR OUR VOICES” and then “HEAR OUR NOISE” on the ceiling. The question they seemed to ask was as troubling and resonant as Heisenberg’s despairing metaphor for the postmodern condition: “If we’re unsure of our destination, and equally unsure of our present location since every “landmark’ looks exactly like every other, how can we ever move forward?”
