Bathe Me, Doctor Faustus
By Justin Hayford
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If Doorika ever needed a ghost writer they’d probably channel the spirit of Gertrude Stein: like her, they’re fascinated by rhetorical dissociation. Their performances seem designed to exasperate, with their strings of non sequiturs and their curious gestures repeated again and again, all of them headed nowhere in particular. Often it seems impossible to “see through” Doorika’s stage action to the “meaning” behind it.
True to its own tantalizing, unhelpful genius, Doorika does nothing to narratize or dramatize Stein’s text. The performer who portrays Faust (Ford Wright) displays no hint of the doctor’s tormented soul–mostly he reclines, speaking in an affected, wobbly New England accent. The other actors do just as little to create “full” characters or to form psychologically “real” relationships, for Stein’s text wouldn’t support either choice. Jim Skish portrays no one at all, spending as much time coiling up extension cords or capturing his fellow performers on videotape as he does reciting snippets of text into a microphone, which usually makes him sound like a little girl.
Like Thomas Mann, Stein recasts Faust in a modernist landscape. And Doorika updates Stein’s vision to a postmodern era, in which simulations of simulations represent reality. But rather than decry that lack of “authenticity,” Doorika exploits multivalence and indeterminacy, technologically overhauling live performers in order to create a captivating quasi-mythic event. At one point Wright sits in a chair with his back to the audience reciting a nominally interesting bit of text. But his face is blown up to enormous size on the video screen above him. Replaced by an intangible, numinous image of himself, he becomes in a sense mythic. The camera creates mythopoeia from almost nothing–and in a manner that’s particularly persuasive in our mediated age. Why else would convention strategists place political candidates in front of 20-foot video images of themselves?
