Vivisections From the Blown Mind
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Alonzo D. Lamont Jr.’s Vivisections From the Blown Mind, receiving its Chicago premiere at the Goodman Studio, is the sort of play that looks great on paper. Topical, explosive, and politically correct, this critique of hip hop culture promises a savage behind-the-scenes look at the destructive forces within the rap-music industry that are artistically bankrupting the African American community. But about the only worthwhile things to come out of this hopelessly confused bit of dull, overwritten, oversimplified agitprop are a couple of charismatically idiosyncratic performances. Plus the play may encourage fledgling playwrights–hey, if the Goodman produced this, they might produce anything.
The first problem is the protagonist, a crossover rap artist named Castro whose fusion of hip hop beats and Latin grooves has vaulted him to the top of the pops and a promising Hollywood career. At his press conferences (dressed in outfits designed by Michael Alan Stein that suggest the bastard child of MC Hammer, Nehru, and Tom Jones) he’s a disarming presence, his witty, profanity-laced cracks disguising a complete lack of political consciousness and a selfish obsession with the trappings of wealth. But in private he’s a tortured soul continually poised on the verge of self-destruction. Once a shy English-lit student with a thing for Emily Dickinson, he’s beset by visions chiding him for having sold out his race.
Lamont’s intriguing arguments in this scene might inspire some good postshow conversations, but sometimes his logic seems twisted. Lamont oversimplifies by using a mythical, undefined rap artist to show the decline of artistic values, and he focuses on the worst excesses of the art, all but ignoring the explosion of musical experimentation and political savoir faire in the highest forms of hip hop culture. Castro is a straw man, so skewering him for not having the artistic integrity of the Harlem Renaissance artists, as Lamont does, seems ridiculous.
