The Mind King Abdicates

Despite its caffeinated title, the characters' libidinal bluster and short attention spans, and the violence cresting and subsiding so regularly it tears at the very seams of the stage, Richard Foreman's new production, Panic! (How to Be Happy!), is most compelling when seen as a study of immobility.The four main actors—two women, one dressed in black and theother in white, and two men, one speaking in falsetto and theother in a low growl—embody the war of alternatives inhibitingall decisive action and thought in their world. Balance, here,doesn't foster well-being. Instead, it arrests at their highestintensity numerous pairs of irreconcilable longings. Sexualobsession vies with revulsion. Spiritual seeking pulls againstsecular cynicism. Enthusiasm for the future can't triumph overpreoccupation with the past. Unselfconsciousness is forever deferred by these pendulumswings in mood, if not permanently squelched by the characters'analytical habits. They recoil from their every act to judge it,unable to resist contemplating all the options they didn't choose. The panic envisioned in the titlewould be a relief. Characters could then release their pent-upenergies until they're spent—learning, at last, "how to be happy." Yet the few times they do break loose, they abruptlyreassert the kind of decorum peculiar to theOntological-Hysteric Theater—in this production, one character'slazy-eyed anomie, another's impacted resentment, a third'stightly wound cheerfulness.

This picture of violent ambivalence furthers an argument Foreman has been waging with himself ever since Pearls for Pigs (1997). There, he wondered openly whether his familiar solipsism was losing its ability to nourish him. No longer was itreliably steering him to knowledge buried beneath mereself-awareness, he implied, or causing epiphanies about matters beyond the self altogether. The mental transcendence he sought was coming into ever greater conflict with the body's more pressing, less exalted demands. This crisis was dramatically enthralling, as were the efforts to escape the self by abasing, fracturing, and dispersing it or renouncing the scene of its crisis—the theater—altogether.

Now Foreman seems to plunge deeper into doubt, rather than fretting over its symptoms or searching for what, inanother play, he called "the cure." Panic! is among his mostclaustrophobic works. None of many onstage exits leads anywhere except deeper intothe same setting. These spaces—a confessional-like cabinet, ahideaway behind an upstage flat, two inner sanctums, and apair of theater boxes above the stage—match the recesses andcompartments of a mind tormented by its own ingenuity. Likethe actors moving through these stages-within-stages, thoughtitself moves through an argument, only to find it hasn't goneanywhere except deeper into its first idea. "He goes where noman has dared to go" are the hopeful opening words of Panic!But the promise of such adventurousness pales with the secondline, "I shall not enter this tomb," and grows ever fainter until, bythe end, the characters are mentally paralyzed, destinations rather than travelers:"That thing entering the room," says a voice at the end, referringto an anthropomorphic object that could just as easily be another idea or emotion. "I forget what to name it, but I'd betterthink fast."

The play's inwardness derives from more than just this narrativeof creeping passivity. Almost all the text, like that of PermanentBrain Damage (1995), is spoken by Foreman himself, inominous voice-overs that blanket the stage like fog or (indeliberate mockery of their own heaviness) in high a cappellachant—existential plainsong. He speaks from within a deepsolitude, resigned to its privations when not actively rebuffingthe...