The Memphis Flyer, May 10 - 16,
2001
by CHRIS DAVIS
When Spurt of Blood opens at TheatreWorks on a double bill with E.E. Cummings' Santa Claus Friday, May 11th, Memphians will have an incredibly rare opportunity to see a work by the 20th century's most significant yet least performed dramatic artist. Plagued by mental illness, poet, playwright, and theorist Antonin Artaud spent his entire life in and out of asylums. It is only fitting that Our Own Voice Theatre Company, an organization dedicated to the creation and performance of original dramatic material by mental health-care consumers, would choose to mount Spurt of Blood, Artaud's seemingly unstageable combination of ritual and poetry.
Over the past decade, this ridiculously unappreciated group has, under the guiding hand of artistic director Bill Baker, applied the thinking of progressive theorists like Bertolt Brecht and Augusto Boal to create original works such as the screamingly funny send-up of the local theater community Ephemera, the bizarre yet poignant This Is Not An Outlet, and the only rock opera in existence that really rocks Supergroups A+. In short (and in spite of the group's perennial lack of trained actors), Our Own Voice makes the most consistently innovative, interesting, and complex theater in Memphis.
The foundations of Artaud's theories are really quite simple, if, in the end, their application seems close to impossible. "It has not been definitively proved," he wrote in his book The Theatre and its Double, "that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact on us." The goal was to create "a directly communicative language": aural and visual pheromones, if you will. He believed that the world was diseased and, as a result, humanity was diseased. His Theatre of Cruelty, which is not so much cruel as it is jarring to the senses, is, holistically speaking, the great panacea. Informed by the art of the Mannerists, who often lumped dozens of disparate subjects and actions into their intensely symbolic paintings, Artaud's vision for the theater was not entirely unlike hypnotism. It was designed to possess the audience and control them utterly -- but for their own good. This aspect of Artaud's work led British innovator and one-time Artaudian advocate Peter Brook to claim that the Theatre of Cruelty was, at its core, flawed by fascism. By Brook's achingly liberal definition, a roller-coaster ride would likewise be a fascist event.
Santa Claus (Spurt of Blood)
at TheatreWorks May 11th-13th.