The Last Supper (review)

Every weekend, Ed Schmidt performs The Last Supper for an audience of no more than fifteen people in his kitchen, which he has dubbed The Church of the Holy Transformation. Reservations are required. Audience members enter through the basement of his two-story brick row house, passing first into the toy-strewn backyard and then into the kitchen via the back door. In the kitchen there are two rows of pews, a wooden counter in the center of the room, and a floor-to-ceiling red curtain separating the kitchen from the rest of the house. Schmidt is there to greet you, and on occasions his wife and their two young children appear in the kitchen before the show.

Like Yoshiko Chuma's Living Room Project, Josephina Baez's Apartarte/Casarte (see review by Ramon Rivera-Servera in TJ 52.1), Sharon Hayes's Lesbian Love Tour, and numerous other cases of Domestic Performance, Schmidt utilizes the intimacy of the domestic environment to focus on the social energy of performance. Schmidt adeptly performs within the boundary between "real" and "pretended" actions by staging this performance in his own home—a space considered functional, not fictional. Confronted with the fullness of an inhabited space, the audience perceives the thin barrier separating the story of the show and the bedtime story being read to Schmidt's daughter on the floor above. This is not an "empty space" (Peter Brook) that lies in wait for imported meaning; it is "lived" (Henri Lefebvre), resonating with the daily experiences of Schmidt and his family.

The performance itself consists of Schmidt's explanation and partial enactment of his play, The Last Supper, which is about the women who prepared this legendary meal, rather than being a full production of a self-enclosed fiction. Schmidt interjects comments, digresses on issues of faith, tells stories about his childhood, and discusses some of the supposed legal issues of mounting a theatrical production in a private residence. It is never clear what is scripted and what is improvised, nor is it discernible if any of the information Schmidt provides is true, fabricated, or a combination of both. The structure of the performance leaves room for any kind of interruption, and it is therefore in tune with the circadian rhythms of everyday life. Schmidt answered the phone several times. Though only one phone call was actually written into the show, the others completely meshed with the production.

The meta-theatrical structure of performing a piece about performance and the tongue-in-cheek humor that pervades the production serve to further call into question the veracity of what Schmidt presents. The program provides a page-long list of his rejections from many theatres to which he has submitted scripts. The repetition is comic and ludicrous, yet Schmidt maintains that they are not fabricated. Schmidt also produces a threatening letter from the IRS that lists the many tax code violations of presenting a play in his home and serving dinner to the general public. Considering the problems that venues such as Franklin Furnace have had with city agencies, it seems likely that Schmidt could draw the ire of the government, until he notes with amazement that the IRS agent who penned the letter is named Arthur Miller.

Faith and storytelling are central elements of this production, and these come across in the subject matter and structure of the performance. One of Schmidt's first "digressions" is about the miracle of the bread and the fishes from the book of Matthew, which, as Schmidt points out, is a story that was written more than eighty years after the actual event. Schmidt challenges the audience either to accept that Jesus miraculously transformed five loaves of bread and two fish into a meal that could feed and fill 5,000 people and still have twelve full baskets of food remaining or to consider that 5,000 people could pass twelve baskets of broken bread...