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AMERICAN AS FOURTH OF JULY

Charles Mee’s ’Rauschenberg’ is a canvas depicting the artist’s life

By Paulanne Simmons
for The Brooklyn Paper
Michael Brosilow
Mother knows best: Bob Rauschenberg's mother, played by Kelly Maurer, in "bobrauschenbergamerica," which continues at the BAM Harvey Theater through Oct. 18.

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In homage to its subject, "bobrauschenbergamerica," at BAM’s Harvey Theater through Oct. 18, is really more of a panorama than a play.

The canvas is nothing less than a huge American flag, which forms the lawn and one side of Bob Rauschenberg’s childhood home in Middle America. And onto this canvas the actors bring ironing boards and ladders, lunchboxes and toasters, lawn chairs and swings, their love and their lust, their memories and their machinations.

Charles L. Mee, whose OBIE Award-winning "Big Love" was presented as part of BAM’s 2001 Next Wave Festival, has written a script that comprises a collection of scenes as eclectic and all-encompassing as the artist’s work - an oeuvre that includes recycled objects and crumpled newspapers. Director Ann Bogart and her experimental theater ensemble SITI Company have given Mee’s script the raucous feel of a traveling vaudeville show.

Rauschenberg himself never appears on stage. In fact, the only references to him come from his mother (Kelly Maurer) a ’30s mom who wears a tidy apron and a sedate perm. She comes onstage intermittently to present a slide show of her son’s youth - Bob with his friends, Bob with a girl, Bob at a dance, Bob riding a bike.

The characters who do appear in person have names in the program, but are never called by their names in the play. Instead they are identifiable as types - trucker, bum, sexy chick, girl next door, museum curator, psychopathic pizza delivery boy.

This hodgepodge of American characters play chess, eat chicken at a picnic, square dance, and tell bad jokes (a few good ones, too). The scenes are funny, poignant and ironic. A few are truly memorable: Gian-Murray Gianino is brilliant as the sociopath who delivers a lecture on the nature of forgiveness along with the pizza. Ellen Lauren is all pony tail and innocence as she tells her boyfriend it’s all over - all the while stuffing her face with cake until the icing comes out the sides of her mouth. Phil, the trucker (Leon Pauli), and his girlfriend (Akiko Aizawa) cavort and couple on a plastic sheet that’s been doused with liquor.

With its motley crew and multicultural cast and music (there’s pop, Latin and a band of bagpipers that parades across the stage and up the aisles), "bobrauschenbergamerica" is a lot like "Our Town" gone haywire. But Mee never lets the audience forget that something more important is going on.

There are soliloquies on the relationship between time, space and perception, and a tribute to the man who has been called the first American poet, Walt Whitman (born in New Jersey, but lived his life in Brooklyn). One character notes that when we see ourselves in the mirror, we always see ourselves as younger - and indeed we are, if you consider the time it takes for the image to get to our brains.

Lauren’s speech on the difference between men and women is a tour de force: "Women feel what they feel when they feel it and when they don’t feel it anymore they don’t feel it." The part about men is more complicated and more profound.

There are quite a few lines one can’t help but want to remember in order to bring them out at appropriate times: "He doesn’t know a typhoon from a fart," or the reminiscence on old times when "a silver dollar could get you a good meal or a good piece of ass."

The museum curator tells the audience that art "lets us practice freedom" and "lets us know what it’s like to be human."

"Art was not a part of our lives," Bob’s mother says several times. But Rauschenberg and the audience know better. One suspects she does too.

"Isn’t it something how he can see beauty in almost anything?" she asks.

"Bobrauschenbergamerica" is as exhilarating as a Fourth of July celebration. It lights up the stage the way fireworks light up the sky. What a fine tribute to an artist whose work is as wide and inclusive as this nation ought to be!

 

SITI Company’s production of "Bobrauschenbergamerica" will continue at the BAM Harvey Theater at 651 Fulton St. at Flatbush Avenue in Fort Greene Oct. 16-18 at 7:30 pm. Tickets are $20, $35 and $50 and may be purchased by calling BAM Ticket Services at (718) 636.4100, or by visiting www.bam.org.

©2003 Community Newspaper Group


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