Contrary to common wisdom, the art world was extremely active in speaking out against the Bush administration over the last eight years. Across just about every platform, and especially in the more traditional, politically-minded medium of theater, its conscience and instinct for dissent never died. The tragedy of the Bush administration was that executive privilege was so abused that the powers that be could willfully ignore their constituents, which left some of the more naïve lefties feeling hopeless.
Not so for the Nonsense Company, a radical fringe group that formed its identity in southern California and currently resides in the Brooklyn of the Heartland: Madison, Wisconsin. Of all the countless and underappreciated political plays that emerged in the Bush era, Nonsense’s Great Hymn of Thanksgiving/Conversation Storm, which made a heralded debut in San Fransisco in 2007, may be the furthest from convention. That makes the play a crucial document of just how far Americans were willing to go to let themselves be heard, no matter what Ari Fleischman or the British press claimed we were capable of.
Great Hymn of Thanksgiving is ostensibly a musical composition, consisting solely of percussion and some spoken word fragments by a three-member cast all of whom have a musical background. But Great Hymn is a theatrical piece through and through, intricately choreographed despite its appearance of looseness. All the words in the piece are muffled, cut off, or lost in a train of thought. Meanwhile the violent sounds coming out of everyday utensils make sure you won’t even come close to losing interest. Great Hymn is the first play I’ve seen where I could imagine a half hour without dialogue that wouldn’t put anyone to sleep. In fact, it’s more of a wake-up call—while words are muffled and held back, the realities of the situation are still as loud and unsettling as ever.
The second part of the evening is Conversation Storm, soon to be published in Martin Denton’s Plays and Playwrights 2009, which starts out by saying a “a playwright has given us 30 minutes to talk about torture,” a zinger that is not at all the most stunning moment of meta-theatricality in the evening. Rick Burkhardt, the playwright/composer/co-director/actor, has taken a political debate between two people who fundamentally disagree on a hot-button issue—something we’ve all become accustomed to lately—and blows its conventions to pieces with a intermittent fourth wall, Tarantino-esque nonlinearity, and language that is intensely graphic, but only for the purposes of honesty rather than obscenity.
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