Ordinary Time

Sat., Aug. 1 @ 5:30 p.m., Sun., Aug. 2 @ 10:00 p.m. Tue., Aug. 4 @ 7:00 p.m. Wed., Aug. 5 @ 8:30 p.m. Sat., Aug. 8 @ 8:30 p.m.

http://www.fringefestival.org/2009/show/?id=975

"I sometimes wonder if it's me that's being made love to. I feel like I'm being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God."  Emily Jessup, Altered States.   

I saw Ken Russell’s adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky's novel in 1982 with a man who aspired to be Eddie Jessup.  I married him anyway.  When phillip andrew bennett low gets on the stage, I have flashbacks. 

This is an artist with a passion for Arthurian legend, who connects deeply – and I suspect quite personally - to the themes inherent in these texts: loyalty and betrayal, free will and destiny.  The quest that is at once choice and compulsion. The burden of trying – and failing – to live up to a moral standard that preserves the social order.  The uneasy harnessing of violence in its service.  What it means to be worthy of love.  And of allegiance. 

To set Arthurian themes in the context of the first Gulf War is intriguing – though I cannot say I understand more about the nature of either leaving the theater.  Nor am I sure I want low to push it.  A connection between Kennedy and Camelot – that I can stomach. 

I like to think at the Fringe.  I like to be challenged by the material.  I am grateful to anyone who sees fit to bring myth, legend, literature to the stage, and can get an audience to come out and watch it instead of sitting glued in front of the oxymoron that is Reality Television.  I may, in fact, be one of the few people in the universe who wants to see low do more work with the Gnostic gospels.  The piece I saw at Spirit in the House two years ago blew me away. I not only want to experience it again.  I want others to experience it.  I want others to understand why they should want to experience it.

The energy low pours into the esoteric, the unabashed love of brain food, his palpable, intense love of language – we need that.  He is clearly a genius.  But he pummels us with it.  Like Emily Jessup, I sometimes wonder why I am there.  Virtuoso performance does not draw you in.  It calls attention to itself.

I want to see low’s work with complex, difficult material become more accessible. Paradoxically, this means I want both more and less of him in the performance.  I want it to be less of a demonstration of how intelligent he is – we already know - and more an effort to engage the audience with the text.  To do this he has to care enough about that audience to move them through his own experience of it so they, too, get to feel that energy, that sense of connection, that intense love.  I am tired of being a voyeur.  And he is capable of more.  Of creating that altered state - in which both the individual and the community are fully present – which is the bard’s Holy Grail.  Whether or not he is a Rockstar.