Peformance Review: Culture of Desire

Figure 1.

Ellen Lauren, J. Ed Araiza, Karenjune Sanchez, and Will Bond in the Saratoga International Theater Institute, Portland Stage Company, and City Theatre of Pittsburgh’s production of Culture of Desire, written and directed by Anne Bogart. Photo: Suellen Fitzsimmons.

Saratoga International Theater Institute actors like to describe their work metaphorically. According to actor Will Bond in a 1995 American Theatre interview, when working with Bogart he is not playing a character, but doing everything he can to fulfill a metaphor. In her program notes to the world premiere of Culture of Desire in Pittsburgh, Bogart describes Andy Warhol, the ostensible subject of the performance, as “our metaphor and central figure,” while in Viewpoints she talks of theatre itself as a metaphor.

But if metaphor appropriately defined Bogart’s work until recently, in new works such as The Medium and Culture of Desire the more accurate term has become conceit. Bogart latches on to a figure and pushes and pulls and teases it for all it is worth. Metaphor is embedded in metaphor creating textured layers of meaning. Warhol becomes a conceit for both the culture that produced him and the culture that he helped to produce, and this conceit is wed structurally to Dante’s journey to the pit of the Inferno. As the play begins a voice declaims the famous beginning of the poem: “In the middle of my life . . . .” A “Virgil” appears as a guide, and the journey begins not through Dante’s hell, but through the voracious consumer culture in which we all live, feeding our desire for more and more, gorging ourselves on products and celebrity, and sometimes finding ourselves consumed in return.

The set is bare but for two large metal shelves, perhaps eight feet in height, very much like the shelves that form the aisles in a discount warehouse. Cardboard cartons representing Warhol’s time capsules fill the shelves. Actors climb the shelves, stand precariously atop, walk and crawl over them, suggesting that man is perhaps no less a commodity than the detritus filling the cartons. Periodically, some are removed, giving glimpses of the backdrop: a triptych of identical copies of the terrified figure in William Blake’s Vision of the Daughters of Albion. Blake, like Dante, provides a heroic subtext for a play that seeks to make art out of warehouse shelves and advertising jingles much as Warhol made art out of soup cans and ketchup bottles.

The dominant image of the play is the shopping cart. The ensemble entrance is a ballet of actors and carts: some push, others are pushed. In a tour de force of physical control, actors pose in apparently painful positions pressed against the metal mesh as they glide gracefully around the stage in carefully choreographed patterns, once again suggesting that we are no less a product than the consumables that normally fill these baskets. Later, actors merge into carts through the moveable backs, becoming sphinx-like, half-man/half-cart avatars of acquisition.

If the play is a journey, it is a journey in the mind of the central figure. Warhol wanders silently out onto the stage. He looks around slowly, deliberately. A shot rings out. He crumples to the floor. We are caught up in the mind of the fallen figure: sequences of events are presented psychologically in a dramatic stream of consciousness paralleling Dante’s descent. Warhol’s descent takes only the time from the shot until the blast of an ambulance siren comes to take him away. The play indicts a culture that defines value in terms of how many objects you own and how many minutes of fame over the proverbial fifteen you can seize. If at times Warhol’s art can be read as a critique of those values, it can just as easily be seen as a capitulation; lengthy recitations of catalogues of products and advertising slogans give way to equally lengthy recitations of catalogues of Warhol’s works. His own...