Regional Accents

Charles L. Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica, which drew its inspiration from the life and work of artist Robert Rauschenberg, was a presentational piece about picket-fence American eccentrics that, before long, reminded me of how irritating picket-fence American eccentrics can be. Amid snatches of old pop songs and coy references to Rauschenberg‘s found-art assemblages, there was much evocation of suburban chumminess (the barbecue as sacramental rite) and sexual urgency (people screw in a bathtub) in both Mee’s text and Anne Bogart‘s staging. But apart from a gigantic martini that becomes a slip-and-slide for two characters, the production’s visual charm could not sustain Mee‘s wan script. Melanie Marnich’s Quake, artfully directed by Susan V. Booth, was about a young woman‘s Kerouacesque journey across the United States in search of “a big love” -- that elusive connection with authenticity that Americans are so obsessed with. Which means the show hemorrhaged bad, aphoristic poetry and road cliches; Marnich also glommed onto the current infatuation with science lingo by incorporating it into her patois, but all the references to fractals, double helixes and alluvial fans never had anything to do with actual science, much less her story.

I must confess that after being bombarded with all this high-minded, high-concept theater, the only piece I felt genuine affection for was Arthur Kopit’s satirical divertissement, Chad Curtiss, Lost Again, his profane, semipornographic send-up of movie serials. It involved a young boy who receives a secret message from God, only to be hunted down for it for the rest of his life by an evil priest and a merciless warlord. It was slickly staged by Constance Grappo, in three 10-minute segments spaced over two days, and had no redeeming intellectual value. I couldn‘t stop laughing.