The Captain in LA: Reza Abdoh's Bricolage and the Rise of Neoliberalism

Reza Abdoh: Theatre Visionary, a documentary film by Adam Soch that premiered at the Films on Art Festival in Lisbon on October 2, 2015 and is now making the rounds on the festival circuit, serves as an unsettling reminder of how far we have traveled politically during the two decades since Abdoh's death in 1995 from complications due to AIDS. The film is replete with testimonials of those who collaborated closely with Abdoh and his company Dar a Luz: Tom Fitzpatrick and Juliana Francis, Ken Roht, Tony Torn, Tom Pearl, Anita Durst, Brenden Doyle, Peter Jacobs, and many others still haunted, inspired, and full of wonder. Soch made the film because "the next generation needs to know about Reza," and he describes him as "a man who created theatre not for any gain at all, not for money, not for fame—quite unusual today."¹ A longtime collaborator, Soch first met Abdoh after attending a performance of the director's first full-length play Peep Show, which was staged in 1988 in the various rooms of a run-down motel on Hollywood Boulevard. Astonished by the audacity of Abdoh's staging, Soch videotaped and edited the rest of the director's main productions, including Minimata (1989), Father Was a Peculiar Man (1990), The Hip-Hop Waltz of Eurydice (1990), Bogeyman (1991), The Law of Remains (1992), Tight White Right (1993), and Quotations from a Ruined City (1994). Surveying this body of work and its impact on other theatre luminaries—among Abdoh's admirers are Richard Foreman and Peter Sellars—it is remarkable to remember that Abdoh was only age 32 when he died (fig. 1).

Returning to Abdoh's body of work twenty years after his death is a sobering exercise—the focused assault of contemporary neoliberalism on the individual dramatized in his plays has certainly not abated in the interim. Theatre Visionary is more than a memorial, and the film reminds us how prescient Abdoh was about the forces at work in the United States and world culture during the 1980s. Theatre Visionary positions him at the forefront of the post-punk "no wave" moment, which flourished in urban centers, even as what Sarah Schulman refers to as the "gentrification of the mind" characterizing the Reagan era began in earnest.² In all of his plays, Abdoh's characters struggle against hostile and aggressive energies in order to maintain their own autonomy and erotic connections to one another. These hostile energies, all of which can be linked to the capitalist economy, arise in Abdoh's plays both externally as assaultive agents and internally as psychologically introjected voices and prohibitions.³ These internalized voices take the form of looping bits of dialogue lifted from sitcoms and advertisements, which seize control of Abdoh's characters from the inside, stripping them of agency, and binding them to a timeline in which they are accountable, paradoxically, for their own success in a projected future.

Figure 1.

Reza Abdoh directing Quotations from a Ruined City (1994). (Photo: Jan Deen.)

I use the term bricolage to underscore the post-punk heterogeneity and discontinuity of Abdoh's fast-paced collage aesthetic, which Marvin Carlson described as a "constant mixture of text, music, movement, video, film, and visual spectacle … moving so rapidly as to defy analysis, even comprehension."⁴ Using what was at hand, including personal stories and biographical material that he would solicit from his actors, Abdoh repurposed available cultural icons and symbols—detouring, profaning, and hybridizing them to make the authoritative sources and control of meaning-making visible.

But it is only today, as neoliberalism culminates in a reiteration of the Gilded Age of monopoly and oligarchy defining the late nineteenth century, that the link between this formal device of bricolage and the cultural milieu of neoliberalism can be fully understood. Specifically, Abdoh's bricolage articulates a mode of resistance to a core dynamic of neoliberalism in which the spatial conquest of industrial capitalism is transformed into a temporal form of capture. In this state...