I Could Have Maybe Possibly Seen Paul McCartney Yesterday, In Theory, Like Hypothetically

I was having dinner with Lindsay at a Mexican restaurant, and she started telling me about the show that her roommate was in, which we were going to see afterwards.

"It's a performance piece--it's called 18/6, like eighteen-slash-six. There are projections, and people painting circles onto a canvas, and other stuff. It was done in 1959, and they're doing it again because of some anniversary thing with it. The playwright was really, really specific on how he wanted everything to be done, like he wrote out the exact movements, and dimensions of the set, and timing and audience instructions, and how many years after his death it would have to be before he would authorize it being re-released. It was this really underground thing back then, and for some reason it got really popular. They were hoping it would stay more underground, but the mainstream got word of it, and all the nights are sold out. It's kind of a really big deal." She looked a little sheepish. "Oh, yeah, and also, the guy who's painting circles on the canvas, it's going to be Paul McCartney--"

I choked on my tamale.

"--but not tonight, it's just a dress rehearsal, he'll be there another night. I guess that's how important an event this is supposed to be."

We took the subway to Queens and walked about six blocks, when we came upon a gaggle of warehouse spaces at a dead end overlooking the East River. Lindsay said to "look for one with the garage door half open," which made the event sound more eerily "underground." We entered and saw what looked like the skeleton of a really small house, with transparent plastic stapled to the frame to make walls, red and white and sometimes blue light bulbs lining the top beams, and divided with the transparent plastic into three rooms. They gave us brightly colored cards with handwritten instructions on which rooms to go for parts 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and 5 and 6. I was in room 2 for the first two parts.

Imagine your typical performance piece. Stereotypical, even. This was it. The actors entered, walking slowly to a beat. There was atonal music. They moved linearly and robotically, turning at right angles. They did some poses. One guy said monosyllabic words at irregular intervals. They left as they entered. Two minutes later, two actors re-entered, stood on opposite ends, and read two different speeches--on "art" and "time/perspective" that occasionally overlapped.

I switched rooms. The actors entered again. One girl stopped in front of me, grinned grotesquely, and began mechanically, rhythmically bouncing a small rubber ball. At one point she fumbled and it rolled by my feet. She held out her hand simply, her eyes imploring. I gave it back, and she resumed the bouncing. I wondered if it was part of the show. The actors came back, lined up, and screeched a few notes on some instruments--a small banjo, a kazoo, a recorder, and a violin. I switched rooms.

They re-entered. Some posed again, one stood by a projector while slides shuffled, one marched back and forth in front of a mirror, stopping every so often to brush his teeth or straighten his tie, and one squeezed oranges into juice and drank it. They exited. They re-entered. They pulled down scrolls of paper from a bar, read the different monosyllabic words on them all at once, and then marched off. It was over.

Lindsay and I left. She looked at me quizzically. "There were so many metaphors," I said wearily. We laughed. One of the girls afterwards made a remark about how it was "obviously" social commentary. I didn't get the obvious part, but I can go back in places and see where it could have been.

What I got from it was that performance art is not really my cup of tea. But I understand where it fits in the spectrum of theatre. I once visited a boyfriend when he was working at a theater in rural Indiana, where they essentially did choreographed musical revues for old people. The one I saw had a circus theme, and took 90 minutes worth of songs out of context in order to loosely wrangle them around elephants and trapeze artists. Thay even threw in "Send in the Clowns" because it had "clown" in the title. My boyfriend at the time complained about working there, saying that it wasn't what he wanted to be doing, that this wasn't art, he wasn't "creating" anything or making people think. Which was true; it was theatrical Cheez Whiz, icing, full-fat mayonnaise, purely for pleasure and stress-free entertainment, requiring no mental commitment.

Last night was the exact opposite. It forced you to not only forge connections for yourself, but decide where they would be forged, and when, and what the metaphors stood for, and if there was even any meaning at all. It was like they gave you a glass, a cow, some spices, pasturizing instructions, and then a hollow book of Les Miserables with a soggy Fig Newton inside. What I saw could have been very, very deep and over my head, or it could have been some playwright laughing his ass off at the thought of five actors walking around like robots and bleating nonsense. It reminded me of a story Rachel once told me, of a guy who one a poetry contest with a poem that consisted of one word: apple. The sponsors justified this because they said his poem made you question what a poem was, and what it meant that this was being classified as "good" or "winning" poetry, etc, etc. Or it could have been some frat guy who did it on a drunken whim.
Regardless, it suceeded in facilitating discussion and brainstorming between the two of us, even if it was only on the nature of what constitutes art and legitmacy and how we both preferred the middle ground, like Shakespeare, which I guess would be like fine Cheddar. Or Moliere, which could be Brie. Neil Simon would be American. Andrew Lloyd Webber--maybe Kraft singles.

The show is sold out for its entire run. Tickets ran around $250. I can't exactly call them suckers, though, because some of those lucky shits will actually get to see Paul McCartney.