Fringe Lab: Experimental Performance 08/10/2011 2:15am

Abstract "Brandon’s had some setbacks. His job. His ex. His father’s dementia. And now, his eyesight. Today, however, somewhere over the Atlantic, on a flight where the time is always 2:41pm, an unlikely hero will rise." (taken from the show page on the Fringe website) Method This show employed the following elements, in no particular order: spoken word, awkward "ice dancing," the Batman theme, a box o' masks (with rightsideup/upsidedown writing), a toy phone with an answering machine and a direct line to NASA, mathematical numerology, the voice of God (okay, a disembodied Peanuts-like Dad), the seduction of a toilet, film noir a' la Haruki Murakami, solipsistic breaches of the space/time continuum, synaesthesia-enhancement technology for the creation of supersoldiers, "curing" insomnia with video games and comic books, a transatlantic flight to Prague by way of Iceland, video game music and villainous laughter, the conjuration of red, rambling and awkward voice mail messages from a long-lost sister, job-hopping from politics to blogging to journalism, emotional infidelity via Facebook, the removal of faces, mashed potatoes and fig newtons, a teddy bear inside a bucket of chicken, a rape fantasy, the recreation of a scene from Poltergeist using TV snow and a silhouette hand, a memento mori, 800 saved messages, magical glasses, and a superhero fantasy come to life. There was also a red light bulb (intentional? unintentional?) that flashed on and off directly above my head toward the end, at a very crucial moment, which very nearly made me lose my shit (no pun intended). Results In short, I don't think I've ever been more disturbed by anything I've ever seen in my entire life. And that's saying a lot—I’ve seen Takashi Miike films. But Reykjavik just about pushed me over the edge. Leaving the theater after seeing Chris Kehoe's one-man show, I was left with a number of lingering impressions—the foremost in my mind being sheer, abject terror. The reason being: I think Chris Kehoe and I just might share the same brain. Not only have I been to Reykjavik on a layover on a transatlantic flight, but the background image on my computer, the one I've had for six years, is an image of the Blue Lagoon (a steamy oasis of hot sea water about 30 minutes from Reykjavik). But this was not the only coincidence. No—there were many more—too many more for me to feel any semblance of safety or surety of the nature of my existence on this planet as I strolled, a little too casually, past the chorus of crickets in Rarig's lone spot of fecund ground, under a gibbous moon, toward my car. Predictably, I heard an armada of helicopters in the distance, somewhere over the Mississippi River. I waited for a moment or two for the Fringe Division to show up (no, not the guys in the orange shirts—I mean the hot blonde gelfling in the gray suit and her bad-boy partner). Then, satisfied that I wouldn't be encased in amber anytime soon, I got in the car, turned on the radio, drove home and, several hours later, after scanning my computer for hackers, I felt safe and sane enough to write this review. That's the kind of raw, destabilizing power I saw in Kehoe's one-man show in the '09 Fringe, Monster—a show that put him on the Twin Cities cultural map for his turn-on-a-dime character shifts—I saw him change from aw-shucks good old boy to stony-faced psychopath in the blink of an eye. So I knew the man could act. But could he write? Now I know—not only can he write, he writes about the things I care about most, in the manner I love most. Having done my homework via the interwebs, I know that, like me, Kehoe has a professional background in communications, and, like me, is a gender theory nerd. I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that, somewhere along the line, this guy fell hard for semiotics (and, dare I hope, George Lakoff?). He knows that language, like culture, is like a rhizome—that thin, fibrous underground network of fungus that lives off of the decay of the unconscious. It just spreads and spreads, ever outward, occasionally erupting in mushrooms, toadstools, and Fringe shows. And that's how you have to understand a show like this. It's a free-association fiesta, a smorgasbord of signs. And it is the only way the human mind can make sense of something like grief, which undercuts all rational sense, all logic, and adheres solely to an empty time, a time out of mind, and seemingly out of body. Grief is dark, sticky, and clings to you, no matter what you do to cleanse it away. It is a substance that passes through that rhizomatic system, both in the individual mind and throughout human culture, like a toxic chemical agent. In biological systems, from forests to prairies to the human mind, toxins are dispersed through natural processes like rain, soil buildup and erosion, plant respiration, until they are eventually rendered inert. Another example of this idea at work is the Hayao Miyazaki film Nausicca of the Valley of the Wind—the toxic jungle evolved to clean the world of pollution and warfare (the Giant Warriors). This is why synaesthesia is such a powerful metaphor in the show—it makes use of those connections we usually don't understand, those parts of the human mind that lead us along the channels and causeways of intuition, in order to arrive at peace of mind. This is, I believe, the main reason why we write—to assimilate what we have experienced, not by quarantining it in labels, but by dispersing it throughout the whole of our being, and allowing it to leave its trace on us in the form of an elemental understanding. But there are ways of making sense of grief that are intellectually honest, and ways that are not. The good guy/bad guy dynamic of much fiction is one such way. (I should have known that this was where he was headed from the very first strains of the Batman theme...which oriented me unconsciously to the terrain of the piece, even before my conscious mind told me what I was hearing.) But this is the type of narrative that leads us to label others—good, evil, right, wrong, sane, insane—in real life, where these labels damage real lives. The other type of narrative is one that disperses the toxins without the use of such good-versus-evil storytelling. It does not leave one with the sense of a clean finish—but then again, that's the whole point—to understand our lives and experiences without reducing their complexity and cheapening the fine interlacing traces they leave on us. The great irony is that, just before trotting off to see this show, I was having a pleasant dinnertime conversation with my husband, also a writer, about why I write so slowly. He suggested that I use outlines, a practice I abandoned years ago, to speed things up. I chafed at the notion—recalling complicated architectures beaten into me in Catholic school, torturous artificial structures that led to wooden narratives filled with largely regurgitated ideas and information. He laughed and said that I only need to create as much structure as I need to let the organic process of writing—that is, of free association—fill in the negative spaces on its own. And that is what Reykjavik is, and does. It could not be anything other than what it is. Conclusion This show works like a steampunk supergirl on rollerblades, powered by magic and elves. If you don't see it, you may not ever know what you missed. And that would be a most irreparable tragedy—to have passed by the one thing that could have saved you, and spend your whole life wondering about a truth you will never chance to find again.