AIDS and avantgarde classicism: Reza Abdoh's 'Quotations from a Ruined City.' (multimedia theater piece)

I carry the ruined city under my skin.

--Quotations from a Ruined City (Abdoh and Abdoh 1995:1)

I admire your optimism. My pessimism is only a form of optimism. I would like things to happen differently from the way they do and I find myself weeping over ruins. When I think that the ruins have great and surprising beauty and stimulate men in some unexpected direction within art. Cities in solid gold must sleep beneath the sands.

-- Jean Cocteau, "Letter to Americans" (Cocteau 1972:41)

Reza Abdoh's work appears on the grid of late-20th-century American theatre as both consummation and regeneration of the avantgarde tradition that has characterized innovative Western theatre since French symbolism's rejection of realism 100 years ago. Abdoh's work, and in particular his 1994 production Quotations from a Ruined City, fits into the continuum of American experimental theatre that, since the end of World War II, has led from the opening wedge of new theatre practices created by the Living Theatre, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham in the 1950s; through the Judson Church performances of Yvonne Painer and others, 1960s happenings, and the politicized experimental theatre of the Vietnam era; to the high postmodernism of Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and the Wooster Group. Abdoh's productions, working in the same vein of image-text-sound performance that, since the days of Lugne-Poe's Theatre d'art has stood as the constant antithesis to Western stage realism, have appeared in New York, Los Angeles, and in Europe as a culmination of modernist and postmodernist theatres' fragmented, multimedia collage technique, but also, in decided contrast to the content of postmodern performance, as a significant step outside (or beyond) the disconnected neutrality postmodernist theatre cultivated as its ideological means of survival.(1)

Abdoh approached his subject matter--the workings of American culture and American life in the post-cold war age of AIDS--an outsider: a queer, HIV+, emigre artist of color, born in Iran and educated in London and Los Angeles, who was, as he described it, "an addict for American culture":

I'm obsessive about it, and it makes me angry. There is so much food for

thought and observation in American culture. And every day when I wake

up I'm just amazed at the thickness of this culture. It's just so latent with

thoughts and ideas that either are related or unrelated, but are nevertheless

very rich. I find it very powerful culture, and I like to critique it and, in a

sense, see where it's heading and where it can head. (Abdoh 1994a)

Abdoh's last works, including Quotations from a Ruined City, were not universally acclaimed, even by audiences predisposed to avantgarde performance's traditional tactics of abstraction and nonlinearity. Responses to his shows typically ranged from devoted adulation to almost complete rejection. In the latter category, one Los Angeles-area critic called Abdoh's AIDS-centered Bogeyman 1991) "a tedious, repetitive series of noisy temper tantrums" in which "few clichi turns of performance art are left unstoned"; while another termed the show "as banal as anything produced by the commercial mainstream," and called Abdoh "the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the counterculture set."(2) In New York, a critic reviewing Quotations from a Ruined City for the New York Native noted Abdoh's "undeniable talent," but termed it "much too self-conscious of its avant-garde roots" (Cole 1994:33). The New York Times reviewer said Quotations was "a weary checklist of atrocities, couched in a fragmented treatise on enduring inhumanity," a production that "gives the impression of stoned channel-surfing through television on a particularly grisly news day" (Brantley I994:C20). The opposite (and equally fervid) response was represented by Village Voice critic James Leverett who, writing at the time of the Voice's Obie awards, called Abdoh "one of a scant handful of artists working in the theatre anywhere today who can create pieces big enough, passionate enough, complex, profound, and original enough to qualify as significant responses to what we feebly call contemporary reality" (1994:100).(3) If Abdoh did not receive an Obie in 1994, Leverett added, it would prove how "the sclerosis" of New York theatre "has become total mummification" (100). Abdoh did not receive the award.

Reza Abdoh's assaultive combination of nonstop live action, stardingly rich yet enigmatic text, very loud music, and surprising bursts of disconnected film and video images appeared to some audience members like the obscure rantings of an avantgarde muse gone over the edge into baroque indulgence. While Abdoh's penchant for "great visual eloquence" was generally praised by admirers and detractors alike, critical opinion fell on either side of the question of what it all means: whether Abdoh was creating coherent theatre, or, as Ondrej Hrab, the director of Prague's Archa Theatre said to me upon seeing Abdoh's Tight Right White (1993), simply "vomiting ideas." Abdoh's presentation of image and sound certainly had the explosive, excretive quality of Hrab's metaphor. The question about whether Abdoh was a "theatrical genius or just another crank peddling a vision" (Cole 1994) is answerable when one considers the meaning of the symbolic fragments forming what Robert Sember calls an "unstoppable river of information," Abdoh's "catastrophe that takes an hour and a half' (Sember 1994). Experiencing Quotations from a Ruined City, as Sember sees it, is like being caught in a controlled explosion of information made that much more powerful by its tight compression of symbols and its ability to work on several different levels simultaneously. The images in Abdoh's theatricallty register in the psyche on a subliminal level to connect with each other and with the bank of images anyone exposed to United States-based mass culture carries with them, willingly or unwillingly.

To a visitor from eastern Europe not yet over-drenched in American culture, the spectacle might indeed appear as a disgorgement of ideas. But, as one could say of Czech surrealist filmaker Jan Svankmajer's similar image explosions, the more one understands their source, the more the disparate images and the disparate ideas make sense.

Quotations from a Ruined City

Abdoh's Quotations from a Ruined City is go-minute multimedia spectacle performed by 12 members of his Dar A Luz ensemble. Centering action on a raised downstage platform bordered by a low, white picket fence and separated from the audience by 11 horizontal strands of barbed wire, Quotations is a 1994 state-of-the-world address, a theatrum mundi incessantly presenting Abdoh's paradoxical point of view: the perpetual outsider who happened to be, as Abdoh described himself, "a TV junkie," immersed in and fixated on the multiple levels of signification in which American culture does its work (Abdoh 1994b). Two male couples form the primary character focus of the show. Tom Fitzpatrick and Tony Tom, dressed first as Puritans and later as modern businessmen in corporate ties and blue blazers, are the capitalist would-be entrepreneurs of a postapocalyptic world. Tom Pearl and Peter Jacobs, initially dressed all in white and then in green shirtwaist dresses, are the queer lovers locked in a sometimes abusive relationship. These two couples are in transit through the ruined city.(4)

Sensory Overload

Quotations is a construction of sequences alternating repetitive tableaux, group and solo scenes, and frenetic dance numbers choreographed in a frontal, MGM-movie musical style by Ken Roht. Abdoh skillfully designed stage images from his rich visual vocabulary, which combined costume, objects, gesture, and a raw, physical acting style in an incessantly compelling high theatricality. jarring juxtaposition--a classic avantgarde device more surrealist than postmodern--was Abdoh's usual method here.

In addition to the downstage platform and a floor-level upstage playing area, Abdoh completed the performance space with two video monitors and two rear-projection film screens, both hung above the stage. These sporadically burst into a profusion of found images with startling intensity, an intensity matched (or bettered) by the similarly jarring montage of sounds that burst out aurally.(5)

Abdoh's basic technique here seems to be sensory overload--the controlled explosion of information coming at the audience on multiple levels. For example, near the end of the play the entire cast stands downstage left, dressed in Boy Scout uniforms (some with skirts instead of shorts), and sings a folk song, "When I First Came to This Land," with accompanying hand gestures. The video screens show a succession of farm animals (pig, goose, goat, etc.) sitting in a suburban living room. On the platform stage left, naked, the two lovers at the center of the show's focus (Tom Pearl and Peter Jacobs) "simulate," as a stage direction puts it, "tender fucking," quite realistically. The odd pastoral serenity of the uniformed Boy Scouts (men in skirts, women in shorts) singing an immigrants' song in the company of barnyard animals is in itself so striking that on several occasions during performances I witnessed, half the audience did not even notice the two lovers' graphic intercourse. The stage was so loaded with other images, and the audience so enervated by the experience of the preceding 80 minutes, that the startling scene of homosexual lovemaking simply existed on die periphery. This is probably how Abdoh wanted the image to work onstage: queer sexual congress presented not as a centered, solo action sensationally seizing our eyes, but as an everyday act of passion: decentered, simply occupying its own space, just part of the terrain.

Texts

Like the images, the texts of Quotations from a Ruined City, written by Abdoh and his brother Salar Abdoh,(6) are similarly disjointed, equally powerful. Coming in short torrents rather than in developed scenes, the shards of words, whether spoken in curious monolog, strained dialog, or in short, sharp repetitive shouts, are rich and poetically evocative. For example in the opening dual monolog introducing Tony Tom and Tom Fitzpatrick as patriarchal white men in suits who wander the terrain of the play, each actor is contained in a metal booth upstage of the main performance platform, dressed in Puritan costume, a spotlight focused tightly on each face as it peers out the cubicle's small window.(7) Tom and Fitzpatrick move their mouths; but their voices (like almost all the voices in Quotations) project from the speakers overhead, prerecorded and out of synch. The actors' heads also appear on the video screens, one to a monitor, prerecorded and also mouthing the words, out of synch:

TONY: The …