Krankenhaus Blues (review)

Since founding the Visible Theatre in 2000, Krista Smith, an actress, director, and advocate for people with disabilities, has nurtured a range of theatrical projects bringing able and disabled bodies together in performance. With a vision directed toward confronting issues of social exclusion and a mission to foster long-term development of provocative theatre art, the Visible Theatre enfolds all bodies in its theatre training, workshops, and new play development. In addition to producing original theatre pieces, the theatre sponsors the True Story Project, a performance collaborative devoted to autobiographical storytelling, and the Visible Lab, a studio for actors, writers, and directors to share work in progress. A month-long series at the Blue Heron Arts Center in New York City gave voice to each component of this inclusive theatre collective that is reconditioning the very notion of self.

Series events demonstrated that the full scope of the theatre's artistic activism expresses a range not only of embodied experiences, but also of processes in theatre making. The public airing of work-in-progress is characteristic of the theatre's commitment to maintaining open attitudes toward collaboration and toward questioning artistic endeavor. One highlight was a preview of the True Story Project's current work Sex, Spokes, and Other Cycles by its nine-member ensemble. Warning of an "R" rating beforehand, the stories traverse every inch of the body in erotic, angry, humiliating, and orgasmic ways. They celebrate conception, relate the ineffectiveness of practicing for a first sexual experience with a banana and Vaseline, and deride predators with "cripple fetishes" prowling the subways. Sex is pure, riveting storytelling, even at this early stage.

Krankenhaus Blues premiered as the centerpiece of the series. The play evolved collaboratively over two years among playwright Sam Forman, director Donna Mitchell, and actors Bill Green, Joe Sims, and Christine Bruno. It is the company's first original theatre piece to feature an inclusive cast. Sims and Bruno have physical disabilities, while Green is able-bodied. The piece drew from historical documentation on the mass extermination of the disabled, institutionalized patients, and those designated "impure" by the Nazi regime in killing centers. The company deliberately departed from a literal rendering of the subject in order to pursue the question of what it means to be undesirable in society. Mitchell's direction carves out a taut, seventy-minute, mind-bending roller coaster in which swiftly moving episodes conjure the voices of three social outcasts emerging from the playwright's hallucinatory spiral into genocide, incest, and self-annihilation. The characters—dynamically acted—are time-warped amalgamations of "undesirables." Bruno, an alcoholic homeless writer (Green), Fritz the clown, a black homosexual street performer (Sims), and the vixen Anka, an unemployed actress incestually obsessed with her father (Bruno), are found in a phantom German hospital—a Krankenhaus—awaiting their fate.

Each element of the production—the yawning chasm of a steeply raked forty-seat black-box studio space, Jessica Lynn Hinkle's stark lighting and Kimi Maeda's sparse set—heightens the production's sense of ghoulish humor, as does the sound. Musician Hannah Hens-Piazza sits on a high stool throughout the performance. Her original violin score interacts with the ensemble as a fourth character: adding ironic comments, underscoring tensions, offering commiseration.

Bruno, the playwright's alter ego, serves as the fulcrum of encounters. Perched on a narrow five-foot platform, he is both separated from Anka and Fritz and with them. Bundled in a raggedy trenchcoat and wool cap, he rambles about being drunk, sleeping in Tompkins Square Park on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and being abducted by Nazis. His self-lacerating time-twisted madness over his incapacity to write this...