The Tracks of the Tears of Some Clowns, When Everyone's Around

[This essay contains potential spoilers.]

I admire people who can do solo shows. I suppose I’ve done them occasionally as a musician or poet, but I generally MacGyver things to ensure I am up on stage with other people. Because I like other people, often more than myself. And yet people have referred to pieces I’ve done as solo shows even when they plainly see others are with me on the stage — so they must be sensing some urge for going into that solitary expressive form. But to actually do a whole ass show with no one else actually there performing with you like Milo and Ikechukwu and Alexandra have?

That’s walking a tightrope. While making some jokes about it so the audience will take you seriously. And as you balance, throwing barbs at performance itself to sell the performance, at any price. It’s looking up from your feet and asking yourself: how embarrassed am I of how I live, of what it is I have to say, and how much of that embarrassment will I name? How much will I unmask, and how much will I continue to hide? Which am I doing and when? Will I fall?

SCHOOL
PICTURES
(erupt, erupts) (pic, pics) (rest) (crust) (pure) (rust) (trip, trips) (step) (curt) (ripe) (pert) (cup, cups) …can you find any other words inside of PICTURES? the Gifted and Talented kids grew up and are still going strong — as adults who play word games…

The students Milo Cramer has tutored and balladized for SCHOOL PICTURES are the site of an unveiling, conversations and realities in which Milo cannot hide. Milo inhabits their young charges through the piece’s style, building songs to reflect the students’ contrarian style and boredom (a term kids learn as a convenient label for their own stultifying fear and narcissism). But has Milo, like the students, determined meaning and beauty to be scarce, leaving scansion, true rhyme and care for these things unbearably outdated? Is Milo’s true focus connecting with kids on the kids’ own level, behaving how they behave, all to snag the grade of cool? We watch Milo doing psychological tap dances so the students will absorb knowledge learned and cherished, with the strongest lessons coming from outside the classroom in a dying friend’s joie de vivre and Milo’s mother’s exquisite method of positive reinforcement. With a little grace, Milo knows they could help these kids ace test material and assignments and growing up. Instead, Milo feels they’re failing their students, failing in life.

And systems are encouraging that failure, which Milo breaks song to acknowledge. They describe the raggedy, imbalanced state of the New York City Public School system, and brilliantly analyze a student’s essay prompt “Is Othello racist?” for the trick question it is, given the simultaneous invention of the play Othello and the concept of race itself.

The people with urgent stories to tell
don’t have the means to tell them.
The people who have the means to tell stories
don’t have urgent stories to tell.

Does Milo feel that their students’ stories are more urgent than Milo’s own? Is Milo’s story not urgent because Milo has the means to tell it? Maybe this statement is meant to be sarcastic, but as a refrain Milo repeated, it felt sincere to me. And I felt the opposite to be true: we always have the means to tell our stories, which is what folk art is, making something out of nothing, and that’s exactly how oppressed communities continue to survive, strengthened by secret languages designed to function in shadow. When those stories move into wide access, that’s when the co-optation begins and things get tricky. But access doesn’t always obviate relevance.

Still, I hear what they’re getting at, and it’s a real structural concern for any thinking theatermaker. This declaration seems to infuse Milo’s piece with a painful charm I kept clocking, a sense that it costs Milo to keep performing even though they are paid in constant laughter. They evoke a dissatisfaction laced with gratitude that just aches. How you doing Milo?

AMUSEMENTS
Possible definitions:

1. A way to spend your time when you deeply distrust and may want to
connect, idly, with people you have not yet met.
2. A search for delight full of deflection and risk aversion.
3. There are parks full of this.

Have you stocked up on your absurdism? This is a must for every prepper. Of course the most absurd things are facts. And logic itself. Be sure to toss all that perishable meaning please — it will not keep. Oh wait, don’t even waste your energy on throwing it out because look! It’s running away! Meaning, meaning! It’s evacuating the building! Well that’s convenient. In Ikechukwu Ufomadu’s gymnastics of reason, meaning looks more striking on the run, in a disheveled state.

Ike gives us amusements derived from his stating our expectations and upending them with the naughtiest harmlessness. Amusements full of incontrovertible truths, formal tautologies, equations of certainty which as statements have no choice but to be true. Nothing he says can be criticized or disproved. Ike also gifts us with some non-amusements like ending with a Bing Crosby Christmas carol or by yodeling his response to the state of the world. This way he doesn’t have to take the risk of suggesting something has significance for him only to find out it doesn’t for us. In other words, don’t say nothing that might get you in trouble. Stay within your homeplace somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, within the bounds of the Geneva Conventions. Stay hidden.

And aren’t we amused by tuxedos and accents and hilarious riffs — the way he hides to stay safe and throws that opacity in our face. Uh huh. That’s right. Who started this skirmish? he seems to be saying. Why do you think I’ve GOT to do this? You all pin me down enough, I am never going to do that to myself. You mispronounce my name? Not going to help you with that. You stereotype me? You’re really really wrong and that’s your problem. You think because I am coded as a Black Man I am going to Emote? Confess? Protest? Ha ha. Nope.

You can probably tell by looking at me
But I’m alive
I’ve been alive since
Oh, just about the day I was born
And I haven’t missed a day yet
Talk about perfect attendance

I’ll tell you where I stand politically
In line — To vote
For representatives who have my best interests at heart
And lucky for me, they all do

Far be it from me to use up valuable work time
Discussing something so personal and private
As my current emotional state

His (oxygen) mask is on securely. The mask is the material. I laughed at this avoidance. It’s clever and I recognize it because I do it too. And. Behind that armature, he takes a MASSIVE risk, the ones that stand up comedians do so fearlessly. He says I want your love. I want your love. AND if you give me the kind of love where I cannot completely and truly be myself, where I cannot speak in all my messy candor — then I do not want it and you do not truly love me. There’s so much beneath his mask. We in the audience have to show we deserve a peek behind it.

SAD BOYS IN HARPY LAND
A friend suggested a T-shirt brand to me when I complimented the graphics on one she was wearing. Browsing their selection online, the text on the shirts kept cracking me up. I hadn’t expected clothes to have such a potent comedic reward. Do you have any hinges? the text on one T-shirt said. Oh no, not me, I’m completely unhinged. I have been for quite some time now.  And now I think Alexandra Tatarsky may have designed it. In their brilliant piece, being unhinged seems like the sanest thing to do in this moment. Losing it — the thing we cannot help but do — truly feels like a prescription for clarity.

But there’s an expert way to lose it, an artful, knowing technique for healthy collapse. Choosing how to remove the mask, structuring what you’ll say as you leave your comfy hiding spot, takes skill if you want to bring your own sympathies with you. And if you can bring your self-loathing out into the light, maybe you can laugh at yourself. And if you can laugh at yourself, you might get other folks to laugh with you.

So Alex talks about their obsession with metatheatrical adaptations of Göethe and Gunter Grass. Because if you want a guaranteed laugh riot, be a Jew playing the protagonist in classic German novels. And talk about Wagner’s Flying Dutchman and (just briefly about) The Dutchman by Leroi Jones aka Amiri Baraka (because few women want to embody that role for longer than a mention), and about various sad boys featured in the Western art canon looking very suicidal which, if any self-inflicted harm was carried out, would only lead to said sad boys becoming trees in that particular circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno where harpies peck their branches and make them bleed. And of course all of these texts are anchored by the myth of the Wandering Jew. Of course.

The X-Games level of despair baked into these works and Alex’s emotive take on them is exacerbated by creative failure (Göethe/Wilhelm/Alex can’t write their play), the sin of inaction (with references to Kristallnacht and Nazis [who do not-see]), and compulsive self-pleasuring / unmet sexual desire. If this is hell, Alex has decked it out with the best of amenities. I wanted to linger in this torture realm where the agony has been wrung out through Alex’s uncannily naturalistic grotesquery. It’s a sweet exorcism that involves a bunch of wigs and titty jiggling.

So who knows what’s a mask and what’s a liberatory identity? Being a young boy, a German, a European, a tree, a mushroom, unwinding more hair for the beard of grief on a spindle — each act of clowning opened my heart to an expanse of human feeling we often don’t acknowledge or explore. The ugly, bizarre, repetitive pain and longing, the obsession with what fictional children experience when living through armed conflict — it’s all meant to be disgustingly fun. And funky, like that tinned fish Alex eats as the mom from The Tin Drum. Funk that starts to flow at the beginning of the show. And we smell it the whole time. I mean. Nasty. Later, Alex gargles some coffee and some falls out of their mouth onto the floor. When an audience member reacts, Alex snaps back with “You think that’s gross? Have you heard about war?”

Which made me hear my own revulsion being called forth. But Alex gives us a map to undo the hell they’ve crafted inside the black box, as well as our very real hell outside its doors. At the end, Alex as the Wandering Jew plays and sings a song on the guitar, clad only in a red pair of stockings pulled up above their nipples, with “hole” embroidered on the ass. They’re a human-sized earthworm, a tongue. It’s a moment where music floats over the casualties and debris and reminds us that the heart does not seek violence, but peace.

So I’ll keep sailing the ocean blue
For I am the Wandering Jew
But I’m not cursed I’m blessed to be
On this earth just wandering free
Cuz I don’t want to have a country
And I don’t want to have an army
Cuz I don’t want to do to you
All the things they did to me
And when I die I’ll be a tree
I’ll grow roots instead of feet
I’ll grow up by growing down
Knowing I don’t own this ground
Knowing no one owns the ground

And we leave emboldened by the truth. Not only has Alex released their performance armor and unmasked themselves, but has unmasked the reflex of warmaking. The sin of inaction, the escapism Alex has accused themselves and us of throughout the piece is now utterly redeemed. This is exactly the transformative power theater promises but rarely makes good on. What seems like a silly trifle can lead us to the sort of brave thinking that can save all of our lives.

Eisa Davis likes to write, make music, and act, in any order, or all at once. She’s from the Bay Area and lives in Brooklyn. Some works: Bulrusher, Angela’s Mixtape, Mushroom, Ramp, The History of Light, The Essentialisn’t, Afrofemononomy, songs for Devil In A Blue Dress, justice, joy.