12-16-06, 10:01 am

As capitalist formula based mass production came to dominate all areas of life, including fiction, films, TV, recorded music and the majority of 'live' concerts and plays, many artists ended up like Yossarian in Catch-22, that is, seeking to escape from the machine both by acting outrageously and seeking different venues in which to perform or display their work (in Yossarian's case a neutral country like Sweden).

In the 1950s, Abstract Art of the kind represented by Jackson Pollock (called 'action painting' by its practitioners) and 'theatre of the absurd' plays of the kind represented most famously by Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, were examples of this major development in contemporary art.

While left critics generally condemned such works as escapist, other critics saw them as simply incomprehensible and a kind of artistic fraud. Such works, largely though the passion and vitality that burst through their canvasses and their monologues and dialogues, became influential among students and intellectuals and, in the case of abstract art, a very lucrative business for dealers and collectors.

I thought of the Theater of the Absurd tradition last month when I saw the last performance of Krankenhaus Blues an off-off Broadway play by Sam Forman. To be honest, I went because Joe Sims, Political Affairs editor, comrade and friend, was one of the stars (although that will not in any way bias my review because Joe is a comrade, not a crony, in the Bush administration sense).

Krankenhaus Blues was a production of The Visible Theater, which defines itself as a center for experimental and alternative work with social meaning. 'We believe,' the Visible Theater states, 'that the provocative voice of the artist can create positive, lasting social change, contributing to a culture of self-healing.'

Krankenhaus Blues does exactly that, whirling themes of fascist genocide, marginalization of disabled people, and the social straight jacket that conventional double standard morality represents together in ways that shock, sometimes titillate, often amuse, and for many encourage critical thought.

As a Woody Allenesque Jewish literary schlemiel, Bruno (Bill Green) is kidnapped into his private hell--a Krankenhaus or hospital in Nazi Germany where hideous experiments are performed on the 'physically' and 'racially' unfit for the greater glory of both the Reich and Science. Here he finds himself in No Exit conversations with Anka (Christine Bruno) a disabled actress-singer with an incestuous relationship to her Nazi father and Fritz (Joe Sims) a disabled Black Gay Mime with the self-control that the other two never have and insights that they only display sporadically.

Historical time is fractured as Nazi Berlin, contemporary America, striving for personal success and overwhelming anxiety and depression flow together. In the Theater of the Absurd tradition, you hear and see things in moments, fragments, spurts. But here, the spurts don't have to be deciphered.

Whether it is Bruno's pretentious monologue on cheese or Anka's burlesque of Marlene Dietrich, the comedy and the horror the dialogue conveys leads the audience to at the very least to be confronted with questions concerning contemporary collective injustice and oppression and its effects on individual lives.

This is most clear at the end when Fritz (Joe Sims) connects his fictional character with his real one (and perhaps vice versa) by challenging Bruno (Bill Green) to go beyond theater clichés and whiny stereotypes and tell real stories of the exploited and the oppressed, to make theater an engine of social change rather than a cross between careerism and therapy (my interpretation).

Since Krankenhaus Blues was performed in a small theater space where the audience was often as close to the actors as they were to each other, this made for a much more egalitarian involvement between performers and audience, something more akin to 'direct democracy' than the 'representative democracy' of large theaters, class divided seating, and formal distance between performers and spectators (who are only in audience in the passive sense of that word).

Donna Mitchell's tasteful direction, Helen Yee's really effective musical (viola) accompaniment, and Kimi Maeda's barebones set all enhance Krankenhaus Blues as both entertainment and a source of critical insight for the audience.

It is too bad that there isn't a cable channel (since we are inundated with cable channels in the U.S.) that could bring Krankenhaus Blues with this very fine cast and many similar works to a larger audience. These are the sorts of theater pieces that many people can discuss, and learn from.

In fact, its assault upon one dimensional cause-effect thinking, time, and what one might call forensic theatrical 'rules of evidence' in terms of plot and character make it all the more interesting, because large numbers of people in the U.S. and everywhere else have learned to tune out and psychologically shut off one dimensional forms of entertainment and news media, which in contemporary society are increasingly indistinguishable from one another.