A Groatsworth of Wit
If a play is titled References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, you have to go see it, right? If you don’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life wondering what a play called References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot could possibly be about. And you’ll probably never have another chance to go see it, since a play called References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot does not seem like the kind of thing that would pop up again and again in your life.
That was the thought process behind my taking a risk, going downtown, and seeing a play called— take a guess— References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot this past Saturday. The rest of the article will mostly be an excuse for me to retype the phrase References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot over and over again, but it’ll also serve as a little reflection on weird theatre. And this play definitely qualified as weird: it had nothing to do with Salvador Dali, and quite a lot to do with prickly cats, horny coyotes, the Moon trying to give its reputation a makeover, and a veteran/potential war criminal who really wants to have sex with his wife. It was very strange! Potted plants floated up and down, a “coyote” sniffed the back of my neck, and my friend actually had to get up out of her seat so one of the actors could climb over the audience and onto the stage.
None of this was as jarring as it should’ve been, because (not to sound like a retired spy) I’ve seen things. You want weird? Try a two-hour play called Small Mouth Sounds during which the actors didn’t speak. Or how about Gary, a play which featured an onstage pile of fake dead bodies emitting both blood and flatulence at unexpected moments? Not weird enough? My dad was in a play called The Pillowman, a dark comedy about torture which featured a completely silent young girl in head-to-toe green body paint. My mom refused to see the show.
I’ve also been a participant in all the strangeness! Last year at Brown I was in a production of a classic Ibsen drama called Hedda Gabler which, in our version, featured slippers falling from the sky, guns dangling from strings, and my character being electrocuted to end the play. (None of that was in the script.) I was once in a production of a Shakespeare play called Troilus and Cressida where we replaced the swordfights with lightsaber battles and several heroes of the Trojan war put on alien prosthetics. (Also not in the script.)
But I think it would be a mistake to say that new theatre is so odd right now, because new things always freak everyone out a little. Back when Shakespeare was writing the lightsaber-free versions of his plays, a more traditional author named Robert Greene wrote a book with the relatable title A Groatsworth of Wit in which he went off on the Bard:
“[T]here is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide… is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country."
I bet Robert hi-fived himself really hard for coming up with “Shake-scene.”. (It’s not even a pun? He just added “Shake-” to the beginning of a word?) He’s a great illustration of how everything new makes people uncomfortable. It isn’t just true of theatre: it’s true of science, of slang, of fashion (I would imagine). And then everyone gets used to innovations, and then something weirder has to come along and stir the pot.
This is all by way of saying that References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot was very good while it was being very strange, that Small Mouth Sounds was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to, and that seeing The Pillowman was worth the ensuing nightmares about tiny green children. I encourage y’all to go watch/listen/try on something very weird tomorrow.
Just make sure there are no lightsabers involved, ‘cause that show was a trainwreck.
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