In
Rodrigo García’s play I’d Rather Goya
Robbed Me of My Sleep Than Some Other Son of a Bitch, a father, in a
last-ditch attempt to avoid emotional collapse, withdraws the five thousand
euros he has saved in the bank, and
plans to spend it on an evening with his sons, an evening that will center
around breaking into the Prado and staying up all night looking at Goya’s black
paintings. But he intends that they should do it in style – before they break
into the museum they will drive around Madrid, drinking wine and snorting coke
with the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, flown in for the occasion. He
doesn’t want to spend the money on a trip to Disneyland Paris (the boys’
suggestion – they are aged six and eleven), nor does he want to blow through it
in clubs, brothels, and bars. Instead, the father explains:
We’re
going to spread [the money] around, with discernment; and thanks to this
discernment, we’ll stand out from the crowd. It’s nothing to do with good
sense: discernment, for us, includes confusion. One hundred percent. We owe
that to our book collection.
This
passage provides a nice opening into the Boom Arts production of the play,
directed by Jude Christian, based on her earlier production at London’s Gate
Theatre. This production not only highlights and develops the thematic material
of the play (the claims of traditional European culture against the encroaching
monolith of American consumer capitalism, the emotional and psychological effects
of widespread economic instability, and especially the emotional challenges of
parenting) but it also introduces new formal confusions: first, it is being
staged in a space that is primarily devoted to the exhibition of visual art,
and second, the actors playing the children in this production are piglets.
These two interventions work with
one another to subtly disrupt our spectatorial experience – hemmed in by a
small picket fence, the actor and the piglets are on exhibition like the Goya
paintings at the center of the narrative, and the pleasure that we take in the
display of an actor’s virtuosic theatrical skill (provided by the accomplished
Ebbe Roe Smith) becomes confused with an altogether different kind of pleasure,
the joy of watching piglets just being piglets—no skill involved—their utter
lack of pretension to being anything else constantly threatening to overwhelm
the world of the play. Traditional theatrical wisdom recommends against the
casting of animals (with some notable exceptions – Annie’s Sandy comes to mind), because the fact that we know that the animal isn’t really
obeying the laws of the fictional world puts too much pressure on our
suspension of disbelief. Famously, the disastrous performance of the dog cast
in the 1891 premiere of the symbolist playwright Maurice Maeterlinck’s play The Blind sent its Parisian audience
into hysterics at what was meant to be a moment of tragic recognition. But
here, in this production, the confusion is productive. Not only because it
generates the self-awareness often found in experimental theater (we all know
this performance is a performance) but because, as the play’s protagonist
argues, confusion is a necessary component of an authentic experience.
Otherwise you might as well be at Disneyland. Here our experience is troubled,
multiform, and radically incomplete.
Of course, García doesn’t present
his protagonist in an entirely uncritical light. The father is pushing an
agenda on his children that they do not seem to want—like the piglets, they
don’t take direction easily—and the reference to Goya’s black paintings can’t
help but call to mind the famous image of Saturn devouring his child, evoked in
this production when the father eats a can of Vienna sausages while gazing at
his porcine sons. But even if the father’s quest is quixotically misguided or
worse, we empathize with his attempt to combat his sense of total powerlessness
in the face of implacable images of global brands and his own limited
purchasing power—“delving in the dregs for the cheapest of the crap: all we
could buy with the money we had.” Strikingly, what’s billed as the most
important element of the plan is the part that doesn’t cost any money –
breaking into the Prado and looking at the paintings. It’s also this part of
the story —the actual experience of the paintings—that is curiously elided as the
play reaches its conclusion, perhaps because it can’t be adequately captured,
or perhaps because it has necessarily failed to deliver on its promise.
Under
Christian’s direction, we get the sense that the father is driven by an irretrievable
personal loss, a human story that echoes the cultural and economic themes of
the play. This lacuna at the center of the tale possibly prompts his mad grab
for some kind of meaningful relationship with his children and with the world.
But what the Boom Arts production of the play drives home is the necessarily
confusing disjoint between a father’s vision for his children and how they
actually experience the world, because this relationship is echoed in the
formal structure of the presentation – we, as audience members, are like the
piglets more than we are like the man attempting to corral them. The
implication of placing the work among the other works on display (currently
large-scale geometric compositions that interrogate the architecture of the
gallery space) is that we might ourselves wander into another part of Disjecta’s
white spaces and achieve our own kind of aesthetic transcendence, or perhaps our
own discerning confusion—but that the artist, like the father, can only arrange
a set of possibilities, which we are free to take or leave.
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