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| ABOUT TRaC |
Fast TRaC Spring 2005
New New Stuff at Performance Space 122 "Warhol," a haunting and sometimes ghostly piece by Drama of Works about the world of famous pop artist Andy Warhol, seems like the artist's version of Ebenezer Scrooge's journey into Christmas Past. Warhol's story is cobbled together through props and sound bites that emerge from cardboard boxes labeled "Warhol" in funky cereal box lettering on one side, and labels variously saying "My Junk," "Mom's Junk," "Interviews," and "Phone Conversations," followed by a range of years on the other side. All the "people" in the story are unidentifiable Campbell's soup cans except for Warhol, who is a soup can labeled "Andy" with a tuft of white hair, making Andy the oddball throughout the story. The show takes Andy Warhol's childhood story and puts it in terms of what he became known for as an adult, possibly reflecting just how important the idea of "Campbell's soup cans" is to the world's image of Andy Warhol. It is very likely that the journey that we see is an internal voyage inside Warhol himself, since the tall, skinny, aged puppet Andy Warhol, who is watching/directing the story, is described in the playbill as "the soul of Andy Warhol." The puppet is long and ungainly as it travels from box to box, and one is often acutely aware of the noise of the wooden puppet hitting the cardboard. Despite this, the puppet takes on an amazing amount of personality, both through the skill of the puppeteers and through the various sound bites of Warhol that float out of the boxes and give the viewer a very distinctive voice for Warhol the puppet, both literally (his intentional deadpan delivery) and through his thoughts and comments on art. Much of what the viewer takes in of this show is not handed to the viewer in a traditional straightforward fashion through dialogue in fact, there is no dialogue in this piece at all. The audience is communicated with, very effectively, in a different way. For instance, the constant search to find a ringing phone before it stops ringing suggests an artist trying to connect to something and failing many times. The mirrors unveiled on the back of the boxes near the end of the piece seem to echo Warhol's thoughts about his art that he wasn't creating objects, merely "reflecting" them on to a canvas. This piece succeeded in exploring and starting to explain the art and complex, disjointed world of Andy Warhol precisely because of the off kilter nature of Andy Warhol, this was no easy task. The second piece, called "The Pie Show in: The Cardiac Shadow," involve the confessions of four women locked up in a concentration camp during WWII and forced to be the subject of science experiments involving the freezing point of humans. I found this piece, which consisted of four monologues about the experiences of the women in a Nazi camp, too traditional to fit in well in a program with "Warhol." Even more problematically, while this piece did of course make the audience feel horrified, I believe that using memories of the Holocaust to bring up emotions is too easy. There seems to be little pressure on the performers to make the audience feel; their monologues do it for them no matter what.
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