Arts & Events

--"What if we ended it right there? The overview may be enough ... "

--"But what about my song?"

Just Theater, in collaboration with Shotgun Players, has taken on Jackie Sibblies Drury's 'We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as Southwest Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915,' now going into its final weekend at Ashby Stage, about a mixed race ensemble struggling in taking on a seemingly undefined--and protean--project concerning a not-so-well known colonialist genocide of an indigenous African people a hundred years ago--by turns awkward and funny, argumentative and increasingly gamey and troubling to both players and audience.  

It's one of the most interesting and deliberately challenging American plays of recent years in its dramaturgy, going into rough territory in many ways--including satirizing the very forms of performance it seems to derive from and representing what it seems to renounce as an impossible means to display its own ineffable subject matter, only realized in the evidence of documents, letters home from the German soldiers and a few photographic images. 

What's perhaps most remarkable is that the script and actions onstage are completely comprehensible to the audience--not much heavy Critical Theory in the lines or behind them, though that seems to be one of the script's major sources and one of its targets of satire--yet they're often loaded with an ominous ambiguity and irony that verges on sarcasm.  

It's hard to more than merely indicate what the show's about or how it progresses without spoiling its surprises, or falling into the traps it constantly warns of, losing oneself in the factual details, both stark and vague, or taking the abstruse map the cast argues over for the unfathomed, maybe fathomless territory they seek to explore.  

Yet the play and the players persist, staging flurries of agit-prop, deconstruction, sketch comedy, almost-Method attempts at empathy with both victims and perpetrators and finally a kind of ritual regression to come to grips with the grim situation of the past, a past closer to home and to the bone for players and audience, their own emotions and disintegrating sense of community.  

Molly Aaronson-Gelb has directed well a very game ensemble--Lucas Hatton, David Moore, Patrick Kelly Jones, Kehinde Koyejo, Rotimi Agbabiaka and Megan Trout--who distinguish themselves by treading on quicksand as a group, during a time of great national questioning about race and community. 

The only "negative"--and telling--criticism that comes to mind: maybe the playwright's means, the means given to the players to work with, too closely parodies what the play essays to criticize. And the climax and rapid conclusion--talked up in very positive, even highly emotional terms in the press-is, in a way, a kind of deliberately faked catharsis, to give it a sort of Masters and Johnson's term in the sexual politics of dramaturgy.  

Both audience and players--the actors the cast is portraying--realize chagrin, the hapless players by inadvertantly acting out their own deep hysteria, set off by inability to confront the material of the play--and their own lives--and the audience through the playwright's very deliberate arrangement of a series of parodied surfaces which collapse, leaving the spectators watching themselves observing, at times laughing at the implosion of the players' company.  

The title is reminiscent of Peter Weiss' 'Marat/Sade'--'The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis De Sade'--which harkens back to the Epic Theater of the 60s and before--something still going on today, as the remarkable performances here a year and a half ago by Poland's Studium Teatralne, produced by the San Francisco International Arts Festival demonstrated, a stream of modern theater that doesn't rely on catharsis--or rather on a kind of realization or epiphany not achieved through catharsis, something boggled by most reviews of that stunning show ...  

Walter Benjamin--a figure taken up by the same Critical Theory ' We Are Proud to Present ... ' seems to spring from, parody and criticize--wrote about Epic Theater during the crisis of Fascist political and military successes which Epic Theater was endeavoring to represent and confront, that the interruption of a gesture or an action-- an old technique in popular performance but a new, reinvented one in cinema and the arts of the avant-garde of the time--results in even more gestures ...  

Mimicking the gestures of American theater, of sketch comedy, of Critical Theory as it's usually applied to the arts and to politics in America, can dead-end in a hall of mirrors, in the empty space replacing a sought-after catharsis, an empty space that fills with free-floating shame and chagrin, both personal and social, at witnessing or producing the multiplication of empty gestures. 

Last performances: tonight & tomorrow (Friday/Saturday, March 6-7) at 8, Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby at MLK, across from Ashby BART. $25 general, some lower prices for students & those under 25 by reservation: justtheater.org