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AMERICAN AS FOURTH OF JULY

AMERICAN
Michael Brosilow

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.