Review of XO_tic by Chris Danowski

This is not a review. I saw XO_tic by Chris Danowski at the Phoenix Fringe Festival on Saturday night, May 3, and was asked to write about it. (My own play, Certain Explanations: Magical Walking was performed at the Festival on Friday and Sunday). So, upfront, I know Chris and his performance group Theater In My Basement, and have seen maybe ten of his fifty or so plays, some at places like Modified Arts, others during the annual Teatro Caliente! festival (which he helped to organize) and several in his own living room. There are themes and schemes and a particular spin to his artful artlessness that make his plays like nothing anyone in Phoenix is doing, and few anywhere would even attempt. He works with a number of young actors and other collaborators (some are ASU students, where he teaches) and his ideas fit their emotional range and low key energies. I suspect they so intuitively respond to the bare anxieties and floating derangements of the self that are at the core of his theater that they are relieved that someone is putting words in their mouths, and not troubling them to think through what it being said. Then, again, thinking is not exactly what Danowski asks from most of his actors. He wants them to be glib person-like figures (like people you see but don’t talk to at the malls, or Wal-mart, or at ASU, for that matter), human-types who want you to like them, even as what is in their minds and guts spill out. You listen because what Danowski has to say, though difficult to follow, and, though at moments fluid, choppy, actual, dim-profound and startling, sounds like what might be in the air around you if people spoke about themselves and their relationships loosely, allusively, metaphorically.

Nothing really happens in most of Danowski’s plays, though they almost always involve a couple who can’t figure out why they are with each other, even if they are having a good time, and why the larger schemes of the universe (hauntings, political revolutions, mythical figures, idiotic commentators) are creeping up on them and infecting their days. The couples are generally on a journey (Mexico, Sedona). Clothes get taken off, bodies are drawn on. Mangled bits of identity and gender are in the soup, thickly, and roiling around. Inappropriate yet appealing recorded music is inserted. To get all this across, Danowski often relies on videos, projected imagery, and typed text that is scrolled, rolled, splotched, splayed or otherwise popped onto the stage area. For XO_tic (a vv pun on a TM SX call clock spasm?), the set consisted of a mattress, on the side of which a laptop was propped up, fronted by two scrims a few feet apart. You could not see Danowski and Eva Hamilton, who plays his girlfriend/lover. They lay on the mattress and speak or read out loud, and sometimes a video camera picks up their faces. Most of the performance consists of a text-narration that the audience reads through on the scrim. Danowski subtitled XO_tic “a video text for performance” as if video, text, and performance are separate entities and we could tell the difference, or it mattered. During the course of nearly two hours, dozens of scenes fly by as the couple wonder about erotic attraction, loss of self, powers (love? sex? memory?). Two pathetic male figures (played by Louis Faber) appear in video takes: one is Iron Man, a bearded rocker in a rage (over who knows what?) and an existential cowboy in an existential love funk. At the end, the cowboy holds a cat in a tree and is so sad and lonesome, you figure he will soon die from being his own cliché.

Obviously, if you haven’t gotten my drift so far, Danowski is brilliant, and puzzling, exactly right for the moment and, after others start writing about him, eventually famous. Or, as famous as low budget, wild weirdness based on a lot of words can get these days. His work reminds me of Richard Foreman, without the extraordinary sense of theatrical construction, and Thomas Bernhard, without the viciousness and loathing, Raymond Roussel, early Godard, without the poignancy, and someone I once met with a speech disorder. His work, by the way, can be very funny, which is part of its charm and appeal. By funny, I mean, two things: the essential deadpaniousness of his actors and his verbal humor. He will throw off lines like, ‘She was uncomfortable. Well, not uncomfortable, you know. Maybe, like someone who does not want to be seen eating ice cream. Or, something like that.’

To sum up: the actors in Danowski’s plays seem like they are barely acting, his mise en scènes are flimsy and careless, his video imagery and musical materials stutter and blur into flip-book non-action, and his rambling, episodic unnarratives make as much sense as someone else’s e-mails. Nevertheless, using shadows, lighting, projections, masks, nakedness and the uniquely placid technology of a laptop and Powerpoint, he creates startling theatrical moments that could throw you off your medication (or onto some). In XO_tic, the couple, in a series of video scenes, wind up in Sedona, stand by a lake and flap their arms. They are shown in a car turning into limp vampyrs. Their faces are smeared, their bodies are leaden, they have nothing to say for themselves. Why? Because, as far as I could make out, that is what love can do. Or, performance can vampyrize you? Dunno, really. Since it seems like these are the kinds of people to whom things happen, from love to demon possession, we laugh anyway. They are cool to look at. We are on their side. Why not? ‘They ‘r us.’

To end with what is most intriguing to me: Danowski’s inventiveness and fearlessness with language as a playwright and sometime actor. His plays are a wondrous flood of words, American English that spills all over the place, language that flies from actors’ mouths and rolls over their bodies, language, occasionally English mixed with Spanish, that floods, cascades, tumbles into the audience, language that bounces around laptop screens, video monitors and wanders onto walls, sheets, and his hairy chest. Chris’ language interferes with language, undoes talk and thought and revelation and meaning, twirls through voices, gets sardonic, stupid, darkly poetic, jokey. In a recent play,
Coyote Love, a young woman speaking as a coyote held me mesmerized as she explained the imagery on billboards. She spoke as if embarrassed, as if coyotes shouldn’t be explainers. In XO_tic, the new lovers relate why they are vampyrs, even though they are not, and it doesn’t matter anyway because vampyr is a metaphor for being alive and kinda dead. And, next week, there is more to talk about, more performances to go to, videos, texts to read and write. Stuff. And, Danowski will likely spin off another play and I am looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, congratulations to Jonathan Beller, Patrick Demers and the ambitious and thoughtful group that put on the Inaugural Phoenix Fringe Festival. It is something much needed in the city and promises to be bigger and better next time around. Check out the website: www.phxfringe.org.