A PORTABLE COMMUNE SELF-DESTRUCTS
This weird show is a strange but stirring entry in Steppenwolf’s three-play “Garage Rep” series: Red Tape Theatre’s The Walk Across America for Mother Earth is a very 60s-style, interactive, feel-good “mixed bag,” theatrics on steroids. This groovy “do your own thing” combo of Hair, Lord of the Flies, and Marat/Sade both mocks and celebrates agit-prop radicalism and counter-culture political correctness. What you get here depends a lot on what you bring, politically and aesthetically. That can be dangerous.
Set in the summer of 1992 and stretching from New York to Nevada, the fluid situation is a nine-month trek or rampage by a dozen manic outsiders. The rag-tag band of anarchic hipster eco-activists march–and finally run–like a moving Mardi Gras to an atomic test site in the desert (as designed by Yu Shibagaki, towers of Coke cans and a frilly proscenium frame the stage, along with a festive, papier-mâché depiction of a mushroom cloud).
Their expedition is meant to memorialize the Shoshone tribe who got kicked out of the Great Basin to make room for nuclear bombs. Along their busy way, the merry pranksters alternately indulge in bursts of fantasy and attempts at actuality. The eccentric troupe, gorgeously painted and dressed by Izumi A. Inaba, burst into freedom songs, involve audience members in the action, and trade in sex and/or love. Convulsing into confessionals and mad scenes, they often give a whole new meaning to T.M.I. (a weirdly audience-based talent show opens the second act). “Dial it down” often comes to mind, if not to mouth.
Ultimately, it’s irrelevant to playwright Taylor Mac–or intrepid directors Bonne Metzgar and Eric Hoff–whether these trekkers ever get to ban the bomb. It’s the proverbial journey, not the destination. That crazy crossing amounts to a bizarre, sometimes exasperating, series of wacko events, including an unseen but persistent tornado, repeated votes on protest procedures like “die-ins,” and frenetic breakout dances (boldly designed by Witch Hazel)–all traced on a giant map of the U.S. that chronicles their nutso peregrinations.
Among the merry misfits, we meet a self-proclaimed Belgian organizer (Angelica Roque), a reluctant rapist named King Arthur (Sadie Rogers), a vomit-eater (Nick Combs) with crazy-clown shoes that symbolize his rancid feet, a cancer victim (Sean Ewert) self-medicating on urine), a blonde bimbette named Flower (Ruth Margraff), and Greeter (Johnard Washington), an elderly, dreads-laden African-American, here to lure pretty boys to his cabin in the piney woods. This is the sort of precious comedy where a teenager is forced to apologize for sexual abuse committed in a previous life.
No question, Red Tape’s often hilarious, sometimes moving, dirty dozen have contagious fun with Mac’s rapid-paced nonsense and convoluted ribaldry. But at play’s end an unsettling doubt lingers. It’s all too easy to believe that right-wing reactionaries–the Joe the Plumbers, the Sarah Palins–could find this spoof and its caricatures a tad too amusing. To less sympathetic souls these ex-hippies seem too representative of the idiocy of do-gooders and bleeding hearts. It’s not funny when you give aid and comfort to the enemy. Are the jokes on us?
photos by Anna Sodziak
The Walk Across America for Mother Earth
Red Tape Theatre
part of Steppenwolf’s Garage Rep 2015
Garage Theatre, 1624 N Halsted St
ends on April 25, 2015
for tickets, call 312-335-1650
or visit www.steppenwolf.org
for more info on Chicago Theater,
visit www.TheatreinChicago.com