Radiohole’s “Whatever, Heaven Allows” bums out New York

New York City is an amazing place if you’re into theater.  There are, of course, Broadway shows up the ass that you could attend any time you like.  Some of these are very good (Cats) and some of these are liberal propaganda bullshit (Rent).  But part of the charm of the city’s vibrant theater culture is that it also includes a significant amount of alternative spaces that embrace challenging, Avant-garde productions that push the limits of what passes on stage for art.  Performance Space 122 likes to think of itself as one of the premier venues for outsider and renegade works.

It’s called PS 122 for short, which the founders thought was just too deliciously clever.  See, in New York, many of the public schools are simply referred to by the acronym PS followed by their respective number.  PS 122 was, in fact, at one point Public School 122.  Here’s why the pun works: “Public School” and “Performance Space” both have the same amount of words and they start with the same letters!  This means that they’re not only a forward-thinking cultural institution, but they also choose to honor the history of their building.  Artists are just so generous.

In 1983, PS 122 hired a full-time curator by the name of Mark Russell (see image below).  Portlanders might remember Russell from his guest stint curating the Time-Based Arts Festival a few years back.  He parted ways with PS 122 in 2004, and according to the scuttlebutt around the Big Apple, the place now sucks dicks.  Sunday night was my first chance to visit the venue.  I received an e-mail from Erin Douglass, one of the actors currently performing there, just after arriving to New York informing me that she had heard I was to be in town and wanted to invite me to the show.  They had a ticket held for me at the box office and since my dinner plans with Roberta Smith mysteriously fell through, I thought I might as well come down and have a look.

Erin is part of a cast of six New York-based actors comprising an experimental theater group called Radiohole.  Their piece, Whatever, Heaven Allows, just finished a run at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and you can catch it at PS 122 until March 21^st.  They debuted it at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis (where I heard Slug from Atmosphere walked out halfway through) and will finish their tour this October at UCLA.  According to the blurb about the show, it’s a radical interpretation of film director Douglas Sirk’s 1950s potboilers and Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Right.

Coming into the show without being familiar with Radiohole’s previous work, I still made some legitimate assumptions based on the fact that they are supposed to produce experimental theater.  I guessed a few things might happen:

1. The show will open with an oblique monologue that lasts approximately five minutes too long.
2. One of the actors will at one point speak incredibly quickly like an auctioneer about something.
3. There will be an ironic dance number to a song with which most members of the audience are likely familiar.

You can just go ahead and call me Ms. Fucking Cleo from now on, ‘cause I predicted that shit like it wasn’t nobody’s business.  Whatever, Heaven Allows began with a large bald man sporting incredibly large eyebrows speaking abstractly about some insurance commercial that he really liked where everybody was “falling up.”  Then he talked about Hell.  I couldn’t tell if he was being ironic or not and I felt like he was making fun of Eternal Damnation, which is not a fucking joke.  This man also became quite sweaty, which made me uncomfortable.  As he was delivering this nonsensical rant, a small man dressed like a Dandy was sitting at stage left, sipping a Pabst.  I felt like I was at the Aalto Lounge in Portland for like two seconds until I realized that the drummer from Sleater-Kinney was not DJing this event.

After the monologue, the show spiraled quickly out of control into what appeared to be a series of completely unrelated vignettes whose goal was to make me feel stupid.  There was a large hula-hoop hanging from the ceiling that had TVs on it and it lit up.  This was dead center on stage, flanked on either side by large sheets of metal onto which twin projectors shot mirror images of illegal drugs, abstract compositions, and other things that were relevant in the 1970s.  Five actors interacted with one another making conversation about nothing while music was played off of record players.  At one point, a character who I believe was named Maggie said, “Fuck these golden Chinese Trees.”  I will admit that I thought that part was pretty tight.

Several of the players were wearing what appeared to be iPhones strapped to their wrists.  I believe that they used these devices to cue certain auditory elements and lighting changes during the show.  It is also worth mentioning that one of the actors looked EXACTLY like Jim from The Office.  At one point, somebody used the phrase “mommy cave” which sounded perverted to me.  By the middle of the show, they were screaming at the audience to some obnoxious rock soundtrack and throwing shots of pudding into their faces.  I almost walked out at this point, but I was too embarrassed to stand up because Erin is a terribly attractive woman and I had become sufficiently aroused by the site of a sticky substance hitting her in the face.  The man sitting in front of me probably wouldn’t have been too happy to have my boner poke him in the back of the head as I stood up to excuse myself to leave.  Oh wait, he was at a theater show – he probably would have liked it.  SICK BURN.

What the fuck else happened?  Oh yeah, the Dandy ate a banana at one point.  They did a little homage to Carrie by Stephen King in the second half where the character Maggie had an entire bucket of red Jell-O poured onto her from above.  Except that she didn’t stand in the right spot and the Jell-O missed her.  And then either right before or right after, all five cast members chugged a Pabst together and a couple of them looked like they were going to yammy.  The Dandy then spoke at a frantic pace about something, confirming my second prediction.  The third proved true when Maggie and Erin did a rendition of “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” by Helen Reddy as a duet.  While the cover was relatively faithful to the original, they did take the liberty to include the word “fuck” several times.

You’re probably wondering what the plot was.  Well, here is what I was able to gather:  Maggie is the mother of Erin and Ned (played by the guy who looks like Jim from the Office).  She is dating Henry (the Dandy) but decides that she will not marry him because she is secretly in love with the gardener (the bald guy with the big eyebrows).  Her kids get pissed because I think that Henry has a lot of money and having a gardener for a stepfather would bring them great shame.  Maggie tries to quell their fears by insisting that he’s an arborist, not a gardener.  Ned licks his mother’s arm and tells her that she tastes “wonderful” towards the end of the play.  I found this to be disturbing and creepy.  These actors are the type of people who buy into the whole Freud bullshit that falsely assumes that for some reason I want to kill my father, Theodore Dobson, and fuck my mother, Belissa Dobson.  Psychoanalysis should consider changing its name to sickoanalysis because it’s so gross.

I don’t know whom Maggie ultimately chooses because by the end of the play I had no fucking clue what the hell was going on and they were starting to call the Ned guy Kyle and people were like putting on different wigs and they even talked in German for part of it.  Is it just me, or is German like the ugliest fucking language of all time?  You win the award, Germany, for having the language that sucks dicks most out of any on the whole planet.  The finale of the play was a video playing on the aforementioned projection screens of a woman wearing a sweater or something, pissing her pants while she smoked a cigarette and made weird faces.  Oh, and she was wearing felt antlers on her head.  “Hey guys, I know that we’ve been having a bitch of a time figuring out this ending, but last night my friends and I were illegally tripping on pot and I thought of the craziest ending.  It’s a woman.  Peeing her pants.  In a sweater.  Wearing fucking antlers.  Are you guys getting this? Antlers.”

While this production utilized the same tricks as other Avant-garde theater troupes (Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Miguel Gutierrez, the Blue Man Group), what they did have going for them was spot-on production.  A lot of media was flashing about and the amount of audio samples and light triggers were a flashy and squwibbly addition to the performance.  If Star Trek had a baby with Pee Wee, that baby might look a lot like Radiohole.  Muffalo Botanjemar and the Moosefoots of Boregardshire.  Can you fucking handle that?  My visit to PS 122 was exactly what I thought it would be (except that I didn’t get Erin’s digits – PSYCHE!).  Experimental theater is for stoners.  On a scale of Gary, Indiana to Portland, Oregon, I’d give Whatever, Heaven Allows a Boise, Idaho.

I found this on YouTube: