Big-Tooth High-Tech Megatron vs. the Sockpuppet of Procrastination
The postmodern techno-fantasy that technology turns free will and moral agency into obsolete curiosities has already degenerated into an alarmist cliche: we’re envisioned as mindless, grinning drones worshiping the instrument of our own evisceration. Gloomy tomes lament the decline of “reality,” then their authors convene on somber panels to have their words of wisdom entombed in Harper’s. And now that the Internet’s tendrils have penetrated the sanctuary of the suburban American single-family home, we can expect the consternation to increase tenfold.
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But it takes courage and creativity for a theater artist to engage this fantasy onstage; the risk of boring the pants off an audience runs high. Fortunately Danny Thompson, author and star of Big-Tooth High-Tech Megatron vs. the Sockpuppet of Procrastination, has enough of both to keep his audience in their trousers for 45 wildly entertaining minutes. His ingeniously conceived paranoid delusion–part of the Rhinoceros Theater Festival (and offered next weekend, September 1 and 2, at the Lunar Cabaret and the Splinter Group Studio)–reminds us that the human mind, not the computer chip, has the imagination.
Thompson’s technocratic nightmare twists reality by a mere increment. If our cameras can focus themselves and set their own recording levels, why shouldn’t they be able to generate their own images? If our computers can correct spelling and grammar, why shouldn’t they write their own stories? As the play progresses, the computer and the video-Thompson–and even the floor lamp–team up to take over the theater, kick the real Thompson offstage, and bring the house manager on in his place. The house manager, played by Oobleck dynamo David Isaacson, is the perfect obsequious functionary: he informs us in his speech before the play, “I am authorized to tell you to enjoy the show.” He may as well be a computerized hologram, he’s so perfectly suited to this piece generated and controlled by inanimate objects.
By contrast, there’s not an ounce of fun to be had from another Rhinoceros Theater Festival offering, Rigadoon Theater Cartel’s Feerie for Another Time, based on the life and work of French physician, author, and general misanthrope Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Of course, you don’t expect a guy who writes books with titles like Death on the Installment Plan and School for Corpses to put on big floppy shoes and entertain at parties. But by staging Welsh poet Owen Partch’s 1946 play about Celine, Feerie for Another Time, Rigadoon has created the theatrical equivalent of hell week at the Citadel.
