Kommer, and: Big 2nd Episode (Show / Business) (review)

The 2006 Under the Radar Festival, produced by Mark Russell (former artistic director of P.S. 122) and held at The Public Theater in New York City, highlighted international theatres this year, many of which featured the use of film in their productions. This compact, five-day festival provided high-quality work from Europe, South America, and Asia. The festival also suggested that we live in a postmedia culture in which various forms of technology—from film to video and photography—easily interweave with theatre to create a more contemporary image of the world. Two productions in particular that did so proved to be the hits of the festival: Kommer, by the Netherlands-based theatre company Kassys, and Big 2^nd Episode (show / business), by the Vienna- and Paris-based collective Superamas. Both productions employed the banalities of popular television and film culture in order to comment on the ubiquity of these media in our lives, as they provide us with the comfort of a common language while at the same time diminishing our capacity to express ourselves honestly. The question addressed by these productions is: How has our behavior been standardized and commercialized by a media that is constantly selling us on the way we should act and speak?

Based in Amsterdam, Kassys was founded in 1999 by Liesbeth Gritter and Mette van der Sijs. The founders' background in dance places emphasis on movement as a core element in the company's work. Kassys's mission is to create shows in which theatre and film are combined in order to examine their codes. Kassys's piece Kommer consists of two acts, the first performed live, the second projected as a film. Deceptively simple on the surface, the first half of Kommer ("Grief"), directed by Liesbeth Gritter, is inspired by the world of the television soap opera. Limiting the text to phrases from Dutch subtitles that accompany the Netherlands' telecast of the US-generated soap opera As the World Turns, Kassys creates a Beckett-like minimalism as the characters rely on simple clichés in the face of tragic loss:

How are you?

I'm fine, considering the circumstances. And how are you?

Yes.

You have to give your grief a special place.

I never told him I loved him.

Life goes on.

These platitudes are contrasted with often minute, but sharply etched physical gestures of angst as the mourners confront the disappearance of a young man, who is presumed dead. They counter their powerlessness with subversive actions, from subtle nervous movements of a foot to the apparently unconscious and compulsive digging up, with bare hands, of a group of potted plants that are part of the funeral parlor's décor. The "stoic" wife of the deceased sublimates her grief by insisting, to the point of violence, that the others let go and express their grief. The mourners sit around a CD player and alternately push the selection button with increasing rapidity as they disagree over which sentimental popular song should be playing at this wake.

It might be easy to get trapped into a sentimental viewing of this piece as a comment on how difficult it is to express grief; however, the insistent use of platitudes and their subversion by the angst-ridden gestures of the mourners offers an absurd and highly humorous rather than tragic vision. The piece shows us what happens when human beings attempt to sublimate their feelings through the use of media or pop culture–generated clichés that cannot penetrate the core of the...