Shows that defy norms of theater
Fury Factory pieces push the envelope
If you’re looking for theater that eschews boilerplate, whose form, language, politics and staging are as unique as the artists’ consciousnesses that created them, foolsFury’s 2018 Fury Factory offers a bounty of riches.
Just one night at the biennial festival of ensemble and devised theater, which runs through Sunday, July 22, at three Mission District venues and one in Oakland, probably will tug at and toy with your notion of what performance can be.
“Space Pilots in Spaaaace !!!! ” by the Bay Area’s 13th Floor and “White Feminist” by Philadelphia’s Lee Minora, seen on Wednesday, July 18, both begin by asking for something from you.
As you file in for “Space Pilots in Spaaaace !!!! ” (correct pronunciation of the
title’s last word seems to require emulating a free fall), a six-person crew in red jumpsuits, each bedecked with officiallooking patches and body harnesses, scurries about the Joe Goode Annex, alerting their commanding officer (Derek Harris) to a litany of malfunctions on their spaceship, the Punisher, and getting scolded in a Russian accent in return: “Unbelievable!”
Seats are arranged in a giant V shape, suggesting the nose of a rocket, and as you sit in one, Dr. Rodriguez (Colin Epstein) might ask you if you’ve eaten any root vegetables lately. Or another crew member might crawl between your legs in search of one of the varmints that have infested the vessel. Or you might get handed a bright-red radio. You’re part of the crew, and when you are taught the ship’s emergency procedures or asked to move your seat for your own safety, it’s impossible to resist partaking in the joy of make-believe, and why would you want to?
The 13th Floor structures the show as a cartoon-style caper, complete with cliffhangers and commercial breaks. The ensemble scamper like animated woodland creatures, and each gives his or her character’s central flaw — the scientist’s excessive zeal, the pilot’s imprudence, the engineer’s cowardice — so much pep and dash as to make crashes and explosions and plummets both constant and inevitable.
There’s a lot of rolling around on the floor and a lot of technical mumbo jumbo; 13th Floor doesn’t always rein in the glee enough to keep movement sequences precise, nor do they always cut a clear path for their audience into their pretend world. But aboard the Punisher, giddiness ultimately prevails.
Lee Minora brings a different kind of joy to her entrance in “White Feminist,” stripped to her underwear, sashaying in with two middle fingers thrust in the air, which she then licks and uses to caress her bra. “Aren’t I brave?” she asks, for showing us her “real body.”
Minora is Becky Harlowe, host of the talk show “Becky’s Time,” where she celebrates women’s “good deeds and even better intentions,” insisting that she represents “all women,” with her platinum wig, enormous engagement ring and white minidress and cape. With a booming voice that tags an “OK?” onto the end of most lines, that simultaneously communicates both wide-eyed credulity in her character and withering sarcasm, she grills us, her studio audience: “Who texted ‘resist’ to a bot this year?” “Who got in a Facebook fight about their values?”
In an era when a white woman called the cops over a black family having a barbecue at Lake Merritt, when the Los Angeles Times ran a magazine cover about women’s achievement in film but pictured only six white women, it’s necessary and urgent to investigate how whiteness and privilege have appropriated feminism, erasing how the battle for gender equality intersects with other progressive causes. Yet Minora takes the point one step further. In “White Feminist,” she’s interested in how white women use their legitimate claims of oppression and victimization toward nefarious ends — how those wrongs can become trump cards and blind spots, conversation enders that thwart real exploration of how one can be both advantaged and disadvantaged at the same time. Our discourse isn’t sophisticated enough for such complexity, Minora implies. We’re much more comfortable with yes-or-no questions, which Minora posits to individual audience members: “pot yoga,” yay or nay? How about Taylor Swift? Or separating families at the border? “No, don’t f—ing do it!” she says, with faux innocence and solemnity. Thank goodness we have white women like her, to register their displeasure and do nothing more.