Mad kings and shadow puppets feature in the experimental-theatre pieces “My Onliness” and “This and That.”
of text by a Pole, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, who changed the theatre a hundred years ago. The other shows I saw looked back all the way to the playroom—in two days I saw both a dance piece and a multimedia event involving shadow puppetry—the kind you do with a bedsheet and a flashlight.Photograph courtesy Maya Sharpe
What, was I going to refuse? No one could resist such a king, particularly because he’s played by the Rabelaisian director Daniel Irizarry, a capering theatrical creature with a goat’s appetite for heights. His titular Onliness is always bouncing up onto his “throne,” a gold-upholstered armchair jacked up five feet off the ground, boinging off the walls, dragging some character into the wings, or cajoling an audience member to do the torturing for him.
“Aha,” I hear you cry, “a tyrant, both ingratiating and infantile? I bet he’s a metaphor!” But the moment you box up His Onliness into a recognizable symbolic package, the show busts him back out again. There’s certainly a junta-on-its-last-legs scent in the air, but Irizarry’s long dedication to this sort of hyperphysical work has more to do with its energetic vibrations and the contagious freedom imparted by his various Monster Heroes—His Onliness is a gonzo cousin to the Professor and Ubu.
Meanwhile, at the Chocolate Factory, a former machine shop in Long Island City, there’s a show that Witkacy would have loved. “This and That” is chock-full of pure forms being manipulated and juxtaposed. Staged amid a mess of equipment and projectors and lights on stands, it has the feeling of a demonstration hour, a sharing among friends. It is free of psychology and dialogue, at least in the conventional sense, a bare hour of “choreography” made just from light and shadow.
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