Maria del Bosco, A Sound Opera: Sex and Racing Cars, and: Hamletango, Prince of Butches (review)

Subverting linear narrative depends, to a degree, on the willingness of the audience to enter the state of suspension that allows them to read a post-structuralist text. While experiments by the modern avant-garde have, through the course of the twentieth century, helped to move performance beyond the tradition of narrative, the recent trend in Hollywood films, such as David Lynch's popular Mulholland Drive, suggests that acceptance of subverting Aristotelian plot structure has filtered into popular culture as well. Two plays running within blocks of each other in New York this past spring offer different ideas of how to resist linear narrative. Richard Foreman's Maria del Bosco undermines conventional ideas of dialogue, character, and action, while Susana Cook uses perhaps the ultimate text of patriarchy in Hamletango to challenge ideas of gender and sexuality.

Maria del Bosco, Richard Foreman's fiftieth performance piece, does not deviate from his usual practice of collage sets and sound tracks of layers of recycled music and fragmented dialogue. In fact, the piece represents a return to some of his earlier ideas. Foreman has dubbed this piece a "sound opera," and the publicity material states that it is about "three ravishingly beautiful, sex-starved fashion models who fall in love with a racing car that turns out to be human consciousness in disguise." The piece resists a coherent reading and challenges the audience aurally as well as visually. The sound track alternates between comforting music, a quiet German lied sung by Lotte Lehman, and a raging rock song by Depeche Mode. Occasionally loud brassy sounds jar the audience out of any sense of complacency (I was not above keeping my fingers in my ears). A track of Foreman making relatively non sequitur statements plays continuously, with a track of a sedated, dopey voice repeating some of the statements underneath. Visually, the setting resists any attempts to locate it. A forced-perspective table occupies center stage, several work horses, an overstuffed chair, and a small, raised stage occupy the rest of the space. Drones labeled "stage crew" bring in large heads, babies, stuffed animals, and valentines from time to time.

In terms of stage action, three ballerinas explore their surroundings, alternatively horrified, envious, and overjoyed, but mostly sedated. Foreman's original idea had been to make these characters models, with the lean, vacuous look popularized in the 1990s by "heroin chic." In the program he states that this image did not resonate. Kate Mannheim is credited with suggesting the ballerina personae. Foreman recycles imagery from fashion magazines as the ballerinas, served by the stage crew, live in a celluloid, plastic world free from the visceral world of the real. When one of the drones pulls a toy doll-baby out of the Countess Maria del Bosco, after she straddles a barrel and whispers "all right, boys," no one seems to know what to do with the doll. Finally, the countess sets it atop a toy airplane and flies it out the window.

Some of the moments in the piece are humorous. A huge trophy is lowered from the ceiling as Foreman's voice intones "The Countess is given a prize as an award for her beautiful shoes." The three ballerinas open the tops of large heads and pull out plastic slices of pie, at which point Maria del Bosco begins whispering the words "My pie" repeatedly. When a pie piece is dropped, the voiceover states, "It is discovered how to remove a dirty shoe from one's consciousness." In the final moments of the piece, the women strap on phalluses, a nod, perhaps to the practice of the wearing of the phallus in Greek comedy.

Within this vaudeville of shoes, racing cars...