Chills and Thrills

This season's zeitgeist finds three of New York's most performance-oriented theaters-Squat, The Wooster Group, and Mabou Mines-doing shows which use film (actual footage and adapted techniques ) and soundtracks (of appropriated texts and actual music) while laying out sexual matters as one of their Big Subjects (topic for a whole other discussion: their politics). These angles are intrinsically related; movies (kiss, kiss) and music (let the good times roll) are desiring machines ne plus ultra, and a look at their parts in these plays turns up some new ideas on a performance style which embodies (rather than merely describes) theatrical hot shots with a beat. When Janis Joplin sings "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose, and nothing, that's all Bobby left me" ("Me and Bobby McGee"), the lyrics' face-inthe -beer existential dreads are contradicted by the raw passion and nostalgia-ridden timbre of Joplin's voice: she and Bobby had (have) something-love-and he (or it) just could be on down the road. Squat's K Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free operates like that song, displaying a New York City hell with such energy and wit that the group's "Mrs. Free" works out. subtextual message-'"Don't Abandon 47 Hope, All Ye Who Live Here"-is stamped on their every view of the abyss. Like all classic spleen artists, Squat's vision is a dented but not disillusioned Romanticism expressed through blasted images and pessimistic statements that still vibrate with furtive yearning. That's what makes Mr. Dead andMrs. Free a moral fable. The performance is like a live album, a series of wordless tableaux set to musical numbers. This action is movie-ized by being staged at a long distance from the audience : the set looks like a far-off movie screen. Watching over the events and staring out at the audience is a giant papermache baby with video eyes; as we watch the images displayed from within its electronic head (the creature also wears stereo headphones), Squat's conceit stands out clearly: we're only getting pictures of pictures . Mr. DeadandMrs. Freebegins with an actual film which alludes to the group's history (expelled from Hungary, they settled in New York in 1977) in scenes of Europeanstyle theater-of-cruelty violence-an Andulusion Dog razor-slit throat for example -set to campy silent movie jazz. Then the film switches to American superreal surrealism: a parody of a fashion commercial (a striptease ending- in a pieta pose), a one-armed Gestapo agent exercising his parts with a Vacu-Jac enlarger, a coked-up punkette asking a bellydancer /astronaut to teach her to dance. These vignettes unfold to nervous, dissonant , "skronk" jazz (DNA, the Lounge Lizards, James Chance). So does a longer, tabloid-like narrative sequence in which a cop calls his pregnant wife, then is shot dead by a thief; the wife delivers her baby (actual footage of the actress giving birth), a documentary followed by a sequence in which a Lolita-like Esther Balint recites 48 hard-core porno adventures to another young girl while walking through an abandoned warehouse area. The wordless-action-set-to-music concept continues in the performance's live events as does the hilarious, grotesque, and finally blasphemous sexual imagery (Central Europe is a very Catholic place). For starters, a woman performs yoga exercises, a thoroughly spiritual discipline rendered weird by her working out nude, setting up a voyeuristic relationship to the suddenly almost prurient positions. Other scenes work changes on these themes. A military chaplain reads a Dear John letter to a wounded GI who then tries to masturbate; the padre gives him a last-rites blowjob -the grunt pukes and dies. Another soldier chants an obscene rap to recorded funk by DNA: "Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free, fuck with you and fuck with me." The final sequence shows how musicdetermined the entire niece is. A formallv dressed chanteuse and a tuxedoed violinist perform James Brown's "Sex Machine" in Hungarian; then muzak plays ("I can't help falling in love with you"). Next, the waitress' lover leaves with another woman and she commits hara-kiri with the shishkebab she...