Bob & Bob, and The Kipper Kids

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 of sync, the imaginary wall disappears. With such devices as uneven unison of action ,repetition of language in theme and variation motifs, cloning of characters, and sometimes outright vaudevillian routines, Lubar architecturally edits her view of New York private and public life. She at once respects an image and points out its surface artifice, which is why the audience laughs with Everyday Business-it is laughing at itself. The play's very sociable tone is witty, endearing , and stylistically successful. The dancing is happily kept within the range of simple gesture and tempo, and is performed well by strong natural movers. Michael Riesman's music is pleasant although sometimes too reminiscent of Philip Glass. Lubar's strength is her sense of everyday time, which is not the attenuated time of Robert Wilson. Visually, the family resemblance is stronger. A certain spiffing up of ordinary place and clothing key the aesthetic shared by Lubar and Wilson. But whereas Wilson's recent works (Einstein on the Beach, Patio) set isolated props and objects in starkly minimal modes, Lubar fills the stage with color and almost homely decor (by Lubar and Christopher Knowles). The atmosphere is one of fertility rather than order. Most importantly, Lubar's keen sense of humor keeps Everyday Business from being overly sweet. I have the feeling that Everyday Business was so thoroughly conceived and re-conceived by Lubar and her cast that its dialogue, decor, and movement could be geometrically graphed . Yet it's a play that is playfully chaotic in its reportage: a homemade dream. Margaret Eginton Bob & Bob. The Kitchen (January). The Kipper Kids. The Kitchen (November). With the idea of performance art as vehicle for entertainment as well as aesthetic expression gaining credibility among those committed to a visual art-theatre interface, it is not surprising that several artists have begun to realize work in cooperative pairs. The prototype, of course, is Gilbert & George, whose persona projection-campily selfconscious in their self-proclaimed "sculpturality" and anxious to keep up those British traditions of the stiff upper lip and the pub crawl-had to be masked in the early 43 seventies rationalizations about performance and body art being some form of "sculpture." With that post-minimalist cant by now discredited, other tag teams have joined G &G, providing the Saturday evening art world with enough demonstrations of wit and timing to make for a kind of mini-revival of vaudeville. It is easy to figure out why two of the most successful performance art pairs have come out of Los Angeles; entertainment capital of the world, L.A. breeds in any of its ambitious residents or visitors a desire for the limelight. At the same time, the seamy side of this egoeconomy is all too apparent to everyone there looking at each other in the glare of the sunshine or the fluorescent lights; the only way to face the fact that you've gone home no more loved than you were when you woke up is to take an ironic view of the whole rat race. To mock it and the hopes and pretensions of those who participate in it is to survive cheerfully the studio-lot atmosphere that pervades even the museums and restaurants. This...