This Is Home, This Isn't Home: Reza Abdoh's Tight Right White

This Is Home, This Isn't Home: Reza Abdoh's Tight Right White EHREN FORDYCE Everything must be arranged to a hair in afulminating order. - Antonin Arlaud (283)' "It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining" (Beckett 240). The aesthetics of aporia and failure that Beckett ushered in has been an unlikely legacy to try to build back from, especially for artists with an interest in the sociopolitical. Likewise, Artaud's lucid madness and his mockery of the world's mad pseudo-lucidity have seemed no less vital for late twentieth-century theatre artists to struggle with, but as with Beckett's aporia, Artaud's madness has seemed relatively intractable when applied to political theatre. In recent years, the Italian company Societas Raffaello Sanzio (SRS) has been one of the few companies to scramble successfully across this paradoxical terrain of aporia and madness and to retain a sense of perspective on the sociopolitical.ln the late 1980s and early 1990S in the United States, the director and writer Reza Abdoh was also one of the few artists able to acknowledge the potentially solipsistic deconstructions of identity furnished by Beckett and Artaud while still holding onto a sense of social engagement. One more quotation, this one from SRS's Claudia Castellucci, may help to situate Abdoh's work, the subject of this essay: The age of supremacy of the logic word is over, the logic word which logically. with Beckett, ends handing itself over to its own draining. Do we want to keep on thinking that words help men to understand each other? Do we still have this nineteenth-century idea of word? Modern Drama, 47:2 (Summer 2004) 219 220 EHREN FORDYCE If words (and theatre) are not about understanding and communicating, then what do they do? There are several possible answers to this. In part, artists like the company members of SRS and the Abdoh do not say their meanings; they perform them. This is a slippery point, but effectively, Abdoh's performances model a simultaneous affirmation and negation, as in Beckett and Artaud. This mode of aporistic thinking, this how more than what, has a further purpose . By deconstructing, by using a rhetorical and performative mode of simultaneous affirmation and negation, Abdoh can momentarily articulate a utopic space outside logical cause and effect, outside history. Abdoh's penultimate, and perhaps most crystallized, piece for the theatre, Tight Right White, communicated loudly when it was first performed. And yet, at each moment in the piece, words, gestures, and staging were put under an intense pressure to reveal the discomforting ways in which language creates the desire for both meaning and the disavowal of meaning. The piece is actually about communication, about helping people "to understand each other," in the sense that it provided glimmers of a possible community amongst the performers, as well as between the performers and the audience. At the same time, the piece stubbornly persists in acknowledging the unavowable nature of community, the way in which even when seeming to agree, two parties speaking to each other may simply be engaging in "passing theories," momentary suspensions of disbelief about each other's strangeness.2 Abdoh's own volatile mix of identities no doubt made him particularly sensitive to the strangeness of communication and identity. As an artist, he worked on two coasts, in Los Angeles and New Y,ork; he was born in Iran, educated in Britain, and lived as an adult in the United States. An HIV+ gay man, with relations to SM communities, Abdoh also seemed to deeply understand Hegel's point about masters and slaves, that antitheses are frequently susceptible to flipping in their relationship of power. Tight Right White was, according to Abdoh, a piece about "slavery, submission ... that equation" (Abdoh, Interviews), and indeed, much of the piece deals explicitly with the history of American slavery. At the same time, the piece consistently de-situates and displaces its historical frames. One could say that it is,utopic in the way that it strives to express a sociopolitical identity that is not reducible 10 historical hierarchies. By constantly flipping and slid~ ing multiple...