“There is so much mad in me”
Faye Driscoll
Dance Theater Workshop
New York, NY
March 31, 2010
by Leigh Witchel
copyright © 2010 by Leigh Witchel
The last noted on my pad after watching Faye Driscoll’s “There is so much mad in me”: Do I like this or not? I still can’t answer (several weeks in hindsight, I think that I did) but it’s impressive to provoke that confused a response.
The theme of Driscoll’s evening length piece, true to its title, was anger. Driscoll examined it in setting after setting – relationships, friendship, public display – in a series of sketches that could have transferred to downtown burlesque, but they would have skipped the angst.
Driscoll started her cast of twentysomethings off with the awkwardness and frustration of peer groups – backstabbing, selfish friends, all the ghosts of high school back to haunt us. She also riffed on talk show hosts, Oprah, Jenny Jones and Jerry Springer in a raunchy sketch that started with Michael Helland playing a woman with two vaginas (a left and a right one) and morphed with each host, catching their distinctive tics.
In an unexpected turn, Driscoll took anger channeling into a public outburst to a logical, frightening extreme. The stage went dark and Jacob Slominski screamed in the darkness to GET DOWN AND GET YOUR FUCKING ARMS BEHIND YOUR BACK. The lights came on white hot and we were at Columbine or Virginia Tech. Then Slominski went into the audience and made an audience member get out of his seat, sit down on the steps and put his arms behind his back. Slominski pulled off the sense of harrowing hysteria and violence for the most riveting section of the show.
He and Nikki Zialcita also pulled off some of the hardest acting of the evening. At the very end they went back into the audience, sat and had a couple’s argument that managed to pull together the themes of the piece just when it threatened to spin out of control.
There was very little choreography in the work – the best of it looked lifted from an aerobics class. Mostly it was physical theater. Driscoll’s sense of theater makes her worth watching – she’s loud, funny, raunchy, mostly cogent and at her best extremely effective.
When “There is so much mad in me” was not at its best, during the petty arguments and clashes between friends and acquaintances, it felt like outtakes from drama therapy. Driscoll is 34, but she’s working with a less mature assumption that personal, internal angst actually matters to an audience. Plenty of artists make the stage their therapy couch but that has to be transformed into a piece of theater. It’s not about your process, or what you’re feeling, but what you say to us. Driscoll went there, but only some of the time.
copyright © 2010 by Leigh Witchel