IT’S SHIFTING, HANK
Goat Island’s most recent work, It’s Shifting, Hank, begins with the horrifying image of a man taking a deep breath and holding it until an attendant squeezes his chest, forcing the air out. Then the man sucks in another breath with a gasp and holds it till his face turns red. Such images multiply in this nonlinear piece, which weaves together text and movement, suggesting that breathing and not breathing are beyond our control: the four performers repeat the phrase “Tom bring the boat nearer” over and over like a machine-gun mantra until their breath runs out and they can’t say it anymore. A man plunges his head into a basin of water and holds it there until another man pulls it out; yet even if he hadn’t, the man’s breathing was never under his own control–you can’t kill yourself by holding your breath.
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Compounding the feeling of helplessness is the ambiguous nature of the helpers. In this piece they’re often dressed in white lab coats, and their motions are usually more efficient than tender. They delay helping for what seems the longest possible time, they wrap people tightly and confiningly in sheets, they examine children’s heads for lice in motions at once erotic, gentle, and clinical. Ultimately being helped produces feelings of shame and humiliation–an idea that’s reinforced in this piece by repeated images of people covering their genitals, being forced to face the wall, being hauled around on all fours by their belts like dogs dragged from one spot to another by their collars.
It’s a shifting, dreamlike world Goat Island creates, a world without the usual theatrical signposts; as a result we end up relying for certainty on the unchanging physical presences of the performers. They’re our bedrock, our constant. We learn to contrast the big but vague and soft brothers, Greg and Timothy McCain, with the ensemble’s two smaller members, Goulish and Karen Christopher, whose thin lips and set jaws communicate a different kind of strength. We learn to appreciate different ways of spitting, from Timothy McCain’s energetic gushes to Christopher’s drawn-out, thoughtful streams to Greg McCain’s short, efficient spurts. We mark the different ways Christopher and Goulish accomplish the task of crawling backward, over and over, on forearms and toes–the quick, neat way she lifts her feet to move, the swiveling of his hips and dragging motion of his boots–before they both collapse.
