Everyday Business by Cindy Lubar (review)

gestures. Antin is narcissistic, too, in assuming she can pass herself off as an art object simply because of her "signature" on her work. She makes the foolish mistake of setting up a theatrical context which she unwittingly demolishes through her own ineptness as a theatrical presence. Surely performance art can be more than an excuse for translating private mythology into public obsession. If Before the Revolution suffers from a lack of technique to the degree that it moves into the area of theatre, Southern Exposure manifests excessive technique even as theatre. Had Antin decided on the camp style she might have gotten away with her performance by the mere fact of letting the audience know she was aware of playing a "role." Southern Exposure is a more complex case because Akalaitis steers clear of art as subject matter and deals with potentially tragic theatrical material in a context where irony seems an evasion of emotion and subject. In both pieces, however, the attitude of the performing strategies is not clearcut, and one of the reasons this is so is that the narratives are not given a credible social context . Watching both pieces I was surprised by the acceptability of naive performance (in Antin's case) in the art world, and (in Akalaitis' case) by how much theatre audiences are becoming seduced by glossy Images. Indeed, the two artists' approaches offer very different viewing experiences. One kind of performance is based on the idea of the authentic (untrained), the other is based on artifice (skill); one looks rough and homemade, the other is technologically precise; one offers the performer as herself playing a role, the other shows the performer in a role; one documents the performer, the other a moment in history. If style means one thing to Antin, it means its very opposite to Akalaltis. At the very least their two works demonstrate the difference between the artless and the artful. The paradox the two pieces suggests is that while Antin-and other performance artists -desperately needs to develop more sophisticated ideas about performance, Akalaitis reflects a mannerist, even decadent , phase of theatre that appears as infatuation with technique, unsupported by a world vision which can move her work beyond the surface. I think both pieces indicate that the world of performance is ready, Indeed poised, for a breakthrough, to unite the two seemingly contradictory aesthetics. Which will we be served up: the raw or the overcooked? Bonnie Marranca Cindy Lubar, Everyday Business. Pace University (April). Everyday Business is a play of small events in the lives of thirty-six people during the course of a year; real life speech and situations are cleaned up and pared down to the succinct. Its structure is based on three locales and four seasons: an office building lobby in spring and winter, a city street in summer, and a subway station in the fall. Roaming through these archetypal spaces are businessmen, secretaries, young professional women, a psychic, two thieves, a policewoman, a bag lady, a female firefighter, and a free-lance researcher taking notes for an article on "casual relationships between women in public places." No aspect of New York behavior seems to escape Lubar's gen42 BEFORE THE REVOLUTION tle wit and incisive comment. The actors have characters to play, roles obviously shaped by their real traits. (Lubar includes a program note explaining that much of the dialogue resulted from set improvisations .) This is non-acting acting. However, tone is not one of individual personalities presented raw. Instead, they play distanced versions of themselves. Likewise, Lubar works at a distancing of voice and action from emotion by prerecording most of the dialogue. To time performance action to a pre-recorded tape is difficult , and occasionally the dubbing becomes clumsy. For this reason, when the actors occasionally speak live, the definition iS blurred, creating an awkward effect. But what does develop is a cinematic sound quality in a proscenium use of space, interesting for the juxtaposition of live reaction time and canned voice. When someone doesn't quite make it to the right spot in order to deliver a taped line, the theatrical illusion is broken. Because sound and action are out...