BLAH BLAH FUCKIN BLAH
As if the title of the show weren’t sufficiently problematic, in the program Kosmas explains that after hearing a story about a crazy woman who’d given all her power away, “i went to my teacher, and friend, jim spruill, and asked him to make sense of it for me–this world–and he said, “the kinda anger you’re talking about makes art, crime, or revolution.’ so, i went back to my collaborative playmaking class and started making this piece. on purpose. and in response.”
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I suspect the crux of the problem is revealed in Kosmas’s throwaway line about her class background. It comes across as a kind of confession–a weird assertion with nothing leading up to it and no exploration following it, as if that acknowledgment alone were meant to give the piece and her thoughts some authenticity. It’s as if she were answering some invisible accuser who’s charged her with hidden motives: “Hey, I’m not hiding anything, OK?” Instead of taking on the complexity of all the class and political tension that throwaway line reveals and exploring it with some depth from her real position–as someone with privilege who understands that not everyone’s so lucky–Kosmas unfortunately casts herself as one of the luckless, as someone who can join and lead the masses.
