waaaaaank (An unsolicited review)

Sigh. Pan Pan. You come so close, and yet remain so very far.

Their new show, One--Healing With Theatre, looked so very promising. 100 actors! 100 rooms! 100 audience members! Wacky concept with pristine red-lipped deranged nurses! A 14-hour film to accompany it! A boho concept-art extravaganza, right? I repeat: sigh.

Despite the fact that the list of the hundred actors revealed the presence of a few people involved that I would rather eat glass than see, let alone have a one-on-one personal theatrical experience with, I went in with high hopes. I am all for the eradication of the proscenium arch, and I loves me some site-specific theatre. And then, I entered the building and caught the very, very particular stench of unwonted self-importance.

First off, there was a 'bookshop.' This consisted of maybe 50-something copies of the same book laid out end-to-end on a waist-high shelf that wrapped around three walls of the room. This book was also entitled One--Healing With Theatre and I immediately thought, Ooh, spiff. Symbiosis. More concept. Swell. And myself and Companion in Snark start idly flipping through to find...full-page, vaguely artistic portraity things of the actors involved, accompanied by text that, in the particular actor's own words, details their reasons for becoming an actor. This is all the book had. 100 of them. I found myself compelled to flip through the whole book and was only saved from further horrified apoplexy by the doors to the 'theatre' opening. 'WHO WOULD BUY THIS BOOK?!' I sort-of whispered to CiS. There were a few interesting stories in there, mostly of people going through extreme circumstances like being stabbed or losing an eye, but, really, everything was just a variation on 'I liked the attention/I needed escape/I don't know, I always just felt like it/Daddy drank.'

And then came the 'show' itself. Between half-watching the noisy documentary playing on the walls, which as far as I could tell was the selfsame actors sitting around talking about fuck all of interest, and being patronized by the spooky Stephen King nurses, I started to get really pissed off. At least, when the glassy-eyed freaks wandered over with the bowl of numbers, I drew someone whom I vaguely knew, yet didn't mind seeing. Had I gotten one of the Unnameables, I would have either begged CiS to switch with me, or simply left right then. But, no, I allowed myself to be frogmarched to cubicle 48, identical to the other 99, resembling an office cubicle in size but a therapist's office in setup. Immediately: damn. I was hoping each room would be different. Instead, I sit on a barely cushioned plywood plinth and listen to a guy--surprise!--talk about why he became an actor, and perform a short monologue from a Billy Roche play, and then he makes me do some 'light therapy' with a magenta lamp and some music for a few minutes, and then I get paraded out to meet the rest of the actors.

Upon encountering CiS in the holding tank (the actors actually got whisked off behind some mysterious curtain), we immediately fled to the bar, which we were told in the same patient, patronizing tones of the 'nursing' staff, would be open in a few minutes. At this point, CiS, who had a headache from his light and was seriously nonplussed by his control-freaky actress who wouldn't let him respond back (as he put it, 'I don't respond well to people who tell me to "RELAX!"'), said, 'Why don't we just go masturbate in the corner and charge people fifteen euro to watch it!' I was like, 'Why don't we just LEAVE.' Because I had had fucking well enough and I really did not want to see the people I didn't want to see. But no--then there's an epic curtain call with all 100 wankers, while, I'm not kidding, 'There's No Business Like Show Business' blared, and a film showing the pristine, placid 'nurses' leaping about the waiting room was projected onto one wall. (CiS and I FLED.)

Okay, ew. Because first of all,

NOTHING IS MORE BORING THAN ACTORS TALKING ABOUT WHY THEY BECAME ACTORS. NOTHING. You know how you answer the question of why you became an actor? YOU ACT. You perform. YOU DO YOUR FUCKING JOB.

Second of all, please, Dublin theatre, please quit glorifying actors for doing things other than their job. The Dublin Theatre Scene, such as it is in the, ahem, 'upper echelons' (of money thrown at it, not necessarily TALENT or ARTISTRY), is generally about hanging out in the pub far more than it is about craft, and it is a rare and beautiful thing to encounter an actor who is unafraid to take their personal development as an artist seriously. It's just a stupid fucking THING about Ireland, that there's this reluctance to actually try to better yourself, because you get slagged for it. Fucking sick of it. Knock it off already. Also equally rare and beautiful is to find someone who is unafraid to love, to BELIEVE in stories, who genuinely honors and, dare I say, worships the transformative, transcendent powers of theatre. This is why I actually liked my Actor Man, because he did, in fact, get that. Still, though, the whole enterprise wasn't about going for that, because if it was, it wouldn't have been all these people talking AT you and shining lights in your eyes and calling it 'healing.' It would have been participatory, revelatory, individualized and dynamic; perhaps it would have resembled some sort of actual therapy (which theatre is for many people, in its way, anyway). Being someone who is not only interested in making theatre but in healing in and of itself--both being a healer and working on the things I myself need healed--I would have appreciated damn near anything other than these insultingly half-formulated vacant concepts of healing. It is an abuse of the term, not to mention blatant misrepresentation and false advertising, to call what I experienced Thursday night healing. What I experienced was another state-funded opportunity for the very tiny community of actors in Dublin to congratulate themselves once again on their abject specialness, and then go to the pub.

All in all, it was some of the most pretentious garbage I have ever spent money and hours of my life upon, and I went to NYU, so I know pretentious.

And to finish: This gets Arts Council funding? Fuckers. Just you wait.  ¶ 8:04 PM