The first disturbing story that we’re told in this hour-long collage of dancing and diatribes, horror and love, concerns a man named Tantalus, who killed his son and chopped him up with the aim of feeding him to the gods. But the gods caught on, and sent Tantalus to Hades to punish him. They forced him to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree, with both the food and the water just beyond his reach: “Tortured by thirst,” we’re told. “Tantalized forever.”
The story of Tantalus as the origin of the word “tantalized” is a fitting start to “Aristotle Thinks Again,” since we are tantalized by what’s just beyond our reach in this show – not food and water, but, as in many such experimental theater pieces, a straightforward plot and a crystal clear meaning.
It would be too harsh, however, to call it torture.
“Aristotle Thinks Again,” at La MaMa through February 4, uses the stories told by the eminent artists of Ancient Greece to comment on violence and family and love in modern times – which are expressed by some eminent artists of the American Avant-Garde. The octogenarian playwright Chuck Mee (“Big Love“) wrote the text, and the quartet from the Great Jones Repertory Company who perform, co-created, and co-choreographed the production includes Valois Marie Mickens, a woman with a gorgeous name and a glorious half-century-plus history with cutting-edge theater; an original member of Great Jones, founded in 1972.
It is she who, in front of a classical-style painting of what is probably a meeting of Greek philosophers, tells us the story of Tantalus as if it’s the synopsis of a play (“Act 1, scene 1 Tantalus, a mortal friend of the gods…Scene 2 The gods realize the truth and are horrified…”) and then recounts in the same way the generations that followed Tantalus in the cursed House of Atreus – most familiarly, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Orestes and Electra.
When she’s finished with these horrendous tales of incest and murder, she concludes: “So it is that we see revealed the dreadful nature of what it is to be human — that nature that we try always to rise above.”
We see the rest of the ensemble (of a younger generation) sinking into violence, or rising into love. They dance wearing pristine white togas or chemises, or modern dress with animal masks.
They change into modern business suits and don the sort of creepy rubber face masks that people in protest marches wear to mock presidents of the United States; if I couldn’t nail their particular identities, they are certainly meant to be old white men with power.
Thus costumed, they bounce around the floor, get into violent fights, re-enact one-sided courtships, and riff on the nature of love. (“You’re born, you die in between, if you’re lucky you have one great love; not two, not three, just one.”) Valois Marie Mickens comes back out to give a synopsis as if it’s a play of the ancient Greek love story Daphnis and Chloe, which is convoluted and full of hazards but has a happy ending.
Free of their masks, the performers talk about the apocalypse, and answer the questions: What three things would want to take with you to the other side? What one thing would you want to leave behind? – Then ask some members of the audience the same questions.
One woman in the audience said she’d take “Plato.” I suspect she got a lot out of this play.
Aristotle Thinks Again
La MaMa through February 4
Running time: 60 minutes
Tickets: $10-$30
Performed, co-created, and co-choreographed by maura nguyen donohue, John Maria Gutierrez, Valois Mickens, Kim Savarino and Marcus McGregor.
Directed by Dan Safer (Witness Relocation) with original text from playwright Chuck Mee, music composed by Julia Kent, set designed by Sara Brown, lighting by Jay Ryan, costumes by Alicia Austin, and sound design by Attilio Rigotti
Photos by Maria Baranova
