Fringe Lab: Experimental Performance 08/11/2011 3:54am

Editorial
Abstract "The murderous son of King Arthur recounts his history with the court to his dying father, while Arthur's greatest knight traverses a post-war landscape to find his queen. Both reflect on how their actions brought about the death of the dream in this brooding one-man tale of light and darkness." (taken from the show page on the Fringe website) Method In phillip low's one-man show, he alternates between two characters—Lancelot and Mordred—each of whom occupies his own half of the stage. low's stage crosses and character changes alternate with studied grace and practiced anguish—punctuated occasionally by the voice-over presence of Sir Gawain (read by Charlie Bethel). Through storytelling, verse (spoken and sung), movement, and a handheld tape recorder, low overlays the Arthurian legend atop a post-apocalyptic American landscape of nightmare and fantasy—a blend of courtly love and camo flak jackets, of the quest for the Holy Grail and a web video that sparks a revolution. low draws his frame from a lifelong passion for Medieval romances and fills it with the stuff of conscience—love, betrayal, conflict, and the meaning of truth. What starts out as a story about warfare between opposing sides, and the complex and contested loyalties of both Lancelot and Mordred, eventually turns itself inside out to reveal the existential conflicts they have externalized in their battle for the control of history. With this new-found self-awareness comes the realization for each man of how he has used conflict with others to thwart his own sense of internal inconsistency—and so understand that their real battle is one they can never win. Results Yesterday afternoon I met with Adam Whisner, who is blogging about political theater in the Fringe this year. We talked for a long time about many things--the role of the imagination and empathy in politics, the difference between art and advertising/propaganda, and how an internal commitment to truth is the distinguishing factor between the two. And it was on this note that I told him that if he really wanted to understand the power and political potential of drama, then Camelot is Crumbling is the one show he really needed to see. low is one of my favorite Fringe performers and, along with Chris Kehoe, one of my two favorite Fringe solo performers. Like Kehoe, I first saw low perform in the 2009 Fringe and was impressed with his ability to alternate seamlessly from one character to another. But unlike Kehoe, who is like a man possessed, it is low's slow-burn quality, his smoldering intensity, that supercharges his delivery style and imbues even the briefest pause or the smallest gesture with meaning. As both characters, but especially as Lancelot, low uses the dramatic pause to indicate cognitive dissonance—a sign of the characters' desire, but ultimate inability, to believe their own words. What are they saying, and what are they doing? Lancelot's story is one most of us know well—he is at once Arthur's most faithful knight and his most faithless friend. Less well-known than Lancelot, but just as integral to the Arthurian legend, is Mordred—the son of Arthur's incestuous relationship with his half-sister. In the classical, Dantesque sense, Lancelot and Mordred are vertically symmetrical, the highest and the lowest—just as the circles of hell mirror the spheres of heaven. But low does something different with this story, which was ironic long before irony was cool—he takes a rather postmodern turn toward the elegiac, turning the Dantesque symmetry on its side. Lancelot loves Arthur in the way he loves truth—with a fanatical and outsized devotion. In the absence of an interventionist god, one must love a man like Arthur in order to make sense of the world, or else go mad. His love for Guinevere is both equally intense and entirely opposite—in overlapping waves of images and words, he alternately describes his uncontrollable and obsessive passion for her and the kind of frenzied madness of summer (something we Minnesotans know well). Warmth, heat, light...all these inspire the mammalian sense in all of us—that desire for connection, for the always-unattainable other, for the real—and so Lancelot learns that, in fact, one cannot love a man like Arthur at all. One can only worship him. Mordred, on the other hand, realizes this about Arthur early on—and in this realization, along with the recognition that Arthur is imperfect, he comes to despise his father the king. And it is only in killing the demigod that he can come to know, if not quite love, the man. But in killing the demigod in Arthur, Mordred comes face to face with the hated presence of the demigod within himself—the same craving for an undeserved omnipotence that arises from the belief that one must be perfect in order to be loved. Unloved, defeated and dispirited, in perfect symmetry, the two men collapse into their own self-contradictions—those irreconcilable and entirely internal differences of mind that thwart their every hope for the peace of a unified self, for the sense of justice that arises from the knowledge that, despite everything, they deserve to be loved—which is the only thing that gives us peace of mind when the ones whose love we crave (parent, partner, friend, king, god) deny us. Without such certainty, we are left in darkness and in doubt, through which we come see that both god and godlessness are equally terrible possibilities. Between the two, the soul travels, ever turning in a sideways figure eight, ambivalent, ad infinitum. Conclusion This is a fully realized production—beautifully written, beautifully performed. It offers everything one could ask for in a work of art—it ascends to the heights, descends to the depths, and enraptures the eye and ear, all in the space of an hour. phillip low has been developing this piece for many years, and his care and attention to detail is evident. I'm not sure what the show description has to do with anything I saw on stage—but, then, no description could do it justice. One could call it a show about war, or about conflict of any kind, really, but it is about so much more than that. The reason I told the author of Emotiolitical that this was the one political theater piece he must see is because it contains the one thing all politicos should bear presently in mind, in any of the work they do: an honest assessment of the central human drama. We will play out our internal conflicts on any stage that will have them until we find a way to live in harmony with all of the many parts of ourselves, and in so doing, become whole.
Headshot of Sarah Wash
Sarah Wash
Fringe Lab: Experimental Performance : All art is an experiment. But some experiments are more…well, experimental…than others. With some, you know pretty well what the results will be. With others, you can't be sure. What do you get when you mix baking soda with vinegar? Carbon dioxide (and, on occasion, an enthused five-year-old). What do you get when you put on a show and there's no one to see it?