Show uses 3-D to alter views
Performance takes place in MARVL lab
What if time past truly was time future, allowing us a mulligan for past mistakes and the chance to build a better world?
That’s among the heady questions on the table in Cooperative Performance Milwaukee’s “Fruition of a Delusion,” a 50-minute piece written and directed by CPM’s Kelly Coffey and Don Russell that opened over the weekend.
“Fruition” is staged in the aptly named MARVL: Marquette University’s Visualization Laboratory, which opened in 2014. A small three-sided structure that can hold an audience of approximately 30 people, it’s an immersive environment allowing high-resolution images to be projected on the walls and floor.
Aided by 3-D glasses for the audience, MARVL can whisk one across the universe. And it does, here, with a Renaissance courtyard existing alongside travel to the stars — one of many ways in which Coffey and Russell urge us to rethink the self-imposed boundaries limiting all we might be.
We see those boundaries being constructed in a prelude giving us the creation story, which unfolds as The Fallouts (three vocalists, accompanied by keyboard and percussion) serve up Nirvana’s “Lithium,” suggesting humans create gods to compensate for our failure to connect with each other.
In this fallen world, Ruby (Molly Corkins) wanders the world alongside a stuffed cat named Edison that’s mounted on a remote-control car — symbol of the sort of useless, commercially driven gadgetry whose invention consumes the world’s best minds.
It wasn’t always so, as Ruby soon learns through the arrival of some of the great scientists of the past: Marie Curie (Anna Lee Murray), Albert Einstein (Sarah Ann Mellström), J. Robert Oppenheimer (Selena Milewski) and Nikola Tesla (Ben Yela).
While they spend too much time within undigested and insufficiently dramatized discussion of concepts such as quantum entanglement, the underlying point of such theorizing is clear: If we realized that we can’t even think ourselves into being except in relation to others, we’d stop imagining ourselves as alone — “each in his separate prison,” as Oppenheimer says — and also come to see the temporal notion that one moment follows another as an illusion (Oppenheimer again, this time quoting Vonnegut).
True to this vision, “Fruition” is stuffed with quotes from Romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth, juxtaposed with hopeful songs such as Moby’s “We Are All Made of Stars.” Having first relived an atomic explosion, we enter a multiverse in which this ensemble collaborates to harness energy that might save the world rather than destroy it.
At its best, this piece’s wellchosen musical selections team with MARVL technology (the real star of this show) to make such visions seem real. Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But as the title suggests, the fruits of such delusionary thinking can make our dreams come true.