Wake Up Mr. Sleepy, Your Unconscious Mind is Dead

This off-off-Broadway play, performed at St. Mark’s Church on 2nd Avenue and 10th Street is Richard Foreman’s mixed media play where film clips play on screens while actors move about on stage, saying almost nothing.  There may be a few words and a couple of grunts and other sounds.  Avant garde theatre, to be sure.

Now I have no problem with avante garde theatre or art or anything else.  Everything new is avante garde.  But at least contribute something.  What Richard Foreman contributes here is just a technique, but there is no story, certainly no plot, I would not call what these actors do acting and I have no idea what Foreman is trying to say.  Okay, the technique is interesting, but even on a bad day a grade school student could have used this technique to tell SOME kind of story.

Or maybe it’s me.  Maybe I’m dense and he has just solved some great mystery.  The play has been held over, but the overhead must be low in the church, and there aren’t all that many seats.  Why even the seventy-five or so seats even fill up for one performance is a puzzle to me.  Save your twenty-five bucks on this one.