REVIEW: A bucket for a drum

Wandering through the first half of Relics, the inventive, quasi-emersive piece created by Sarah Agnew, Nick Gofis and Chantal Pavageaux, I started to lose my bearings. The creators have re-imagined the Dowling Studio as a faux museum, complete with cleverly created dioramas, charts and maps. You arrive at this museum through a makeshift tunnel—as if visiting the site of an archeological dig. The story this dig tells is simple: some time around 2014, human society was destroyed by an unspecified calamity (“The Great Wipe”). As human civilization was struggling to get back on its feet, a group calling themselves “The Truemen” seized power, insisting for propaganda reasons that 2014 was the beginning of the human race. Nothing—including us—existed before that date. Enter the wonderfully named Anarcheologists, who have created and sponsored this exhibit, defying The Truemen to tell the story of our past to their future world. The titular relics are familiar artifacts from contemporary American life, every one of them wildly misinterpreted by the Anarcheologists. The willfulness of these misinterpretations eventually leaches some of the pleasure out of the event. It’s not that archeology can’t or shouldn’t be mocked—much of it is indeed guesswork based on very slim evidence—but when the mockery depends on our hosts being very, very stupid, the humor loses some of its bite. So we can enjoy the hilarious “Neil Dynamite”—an Anarcheologist pop star who thinks our pots and pans are complex musical instruments—even as we acknowledge it takes a lot more work to transform cooking tools into drums than to lift one by the handle and think, “Huh, I wonder if this was some kind of cooking tool?” The piece works best as you wander that faux museum, and later on when we’re gathered into a more traditional audience format for Luverne Seifert’s painfully hilarious lecture on “The Ancients” (as we’re called). Seifert’s mad-scientist/nutty professor has just the right tone of pompous condescension, and his discourse on our mating habits (complete with demonstration by the playful ensemble) hits the perfect note of plausible mockery, throwing a well-deserved pie in the face of centuries of misguided anthropology. The show’s three parts—the museum, followed by mini-demonstrations of “Ancient” culture, and then Seifert’s lecture—don’t always mesh well. Halfway through our museum-going, we became distracted by the live demonstrations on the other side of the wall and couldn’t help but rush our way through the displays to get to the “real” theater. This was compounded after the show’s abrupt ending, when my companion tried to go back to read what she’d missed and was denied re-entry. We were in the tail end of the group, to be sure—but a lot of thought and care went into the faux history and those exhibits—we would have liked to spend more time with them. The creators have said they were informed by historical reenactments like Colonial Williamsburg. Those places are cheesy indeed—but the mockery they make of our historical past has little to do with mistaking a musket for a telescope. Perhaps I’m making too much of a light entertainment—the piece is barely an hour long—but the artists involved are at the top of their game—was it wrong of me to want more than a charming diversion?