PSST... (2003)

April 2005 Psst!
mnartists.org, Lightsey Darst

the·a·ter, n. A building, room, or other setting where plays or other dramatic presentations are performed.

Take the dark Franklin Art Works. Great ductwork hanging overhead; you can’t tell whether it’s half-finished or in its final, avant-garde stage, avant-garde often seeming to mean half-done. In the dark you are in company with other people, many surprisingly young, lineless. You are also in company with the drawings of Jason (a Norwegian graphic novelist)—large, simple, dog- or bird-like beings, looking straight forward, the acme of those drawings your friend did in high school, drawings that make you wonder but do not help you decide whether there is no inner life at all and we are all the same in thinking that we are different, or whether we are all so entirely different to each other that we may as well be aliens. What do we share? In the dark you have to ask this question.

Meanwhile someone has crossed the dark stage to spin the hanging world (a painted beach ball) into action.

hand, n. The influence or directing action of somebody or something. A share in the performance of an action.
A brief summary is necessary. Death, in the form of the Skull (played with gravitas by Jim Lieberthal) is in charge; just when the two main characters, the Janitor (Paul Herwig) and the Secretary (Jennifer Ilse), have broken free from their dull factory lives and found each other’s company, the Skull charms and steals the Secretary. The “Psst” of the title beckons the broken-hearted Janitor down into the Skull’s underworld, where he’s reunited with the Secretary. The Skull’s minions chase the couple and they are separated; eventually the Janitor finds himself back in the real world, while the Secretary remains dead.

mask, n. A covering for the eyes, mouth, or whole face. Something that conceals or disguises something else, for example, true motives or feelings.

The two main characters of “Psst” (the Janitor and the Secretary) remain masked throughout. At first this acts to remove them from us; they’re strange, not quite human creatures, bulky, unsubtle, without speech. As we get used to the heads, though, they become human, their blank stares so like the faces in bus windows. Helpless in their lives, they turn their large heads this way and that, pausing every so often for the assessment of the imagined spectator (god replaced by an audience). The Janitor and the Secretary are innocents and you feel for them as they navigate the crush of the world. Like us, they move and gesture to each other, but it’s like lifting large machines, the gears turn and work but we do not know what we are doing.

When the Janitor and the Secretary reunite in the underworld, they’re surrounded by the Skull’s minions, who are unmasked. This could make the minions more sympathetic, but in fact it does the opposite: their human faces, distorted with wicked glee, seem more like masks than the tranquil faces they wore as townspeople. Off-Leash Area pulls off a strange doubling effect here: while the masked characters seem pathetically human, the unmasked characters show the worst we are capable of: cruelty, enjoyment of another’s pain. We are forced to recognize ourselves in both.

Technically, the masks are an achievement: Herwig renders Jason’s drawings in three dimensions without sacrificing their flat look; Ilse and the company create movements that work with the masks, simple turns and lunges that extend the mask-feel to the entire body. The two main characters remain masked throughout the performance and yet engage our sympathy. Finally, the switch back from unmasked underworld to masked real world (possibly the trickiest moment in the performance) is both seamless—unmasked hellions one-by-one convert into masked civilians through a series of entrances and exits, until all are masked—and affecting: we move in a gray-scale world, no evil demons, no heroes, just people creating their various lives in the face of death.

the·a·ter, n. Dramatic performance as an art, profession, or way of life.
The ideal art creates its own form. “Psst” doesn’t fit into a neat category, isn’t predictable, doesn’t yield to any fashion or point to any particular philosophy. We have theater—dramatic encounter—but no speech; performers dance, but as people dance, imperfectly meshing emotion into movement. “Psst” is inspired by the graphic novels of Jason, and the performers wear papier-mâché masks that look like Jason’s characters; masked, they dance like cartoons, in large simple steps, and their acting becomes pantomime—but “Psst” is not solely a mask production, as performers do appear without masks. The plot is pure Orpheus-myth, the wishful denial of death, but the story occurs in the crushingly industrial modern world, a world without gods or magic; the death-figure, the Skull, dances between those lines, articulating his magical fingers even as he dings the bell on his ordinary bicycle. Music (composed by Marc Doty) shifts from being invisible beneath to leading the performance. There are no words (other than “Psst!”), but watching the performance gives the impression of words. Ingenious scenery serves as titles of a silent film—which this black-and-white performance often resembles; but “Psst” also shifts between resembling early melodrama, the intentionally flat world of the modern graphic novel, and the mad shenanigans of 1930s animated cartoons.

To summarize: what we have here is your standard stilt-walking, masked silent film-style mytho-melodrama in the modern world, alternately funny, creepy, heart-warming, schmaltzy, goofy, mad-cap, and heart-breaking.

the·a·ter, n. Dramatic or theatrical quality or effectiveness.
“Psst” could stand a tune-up. Until the Skull bikes in, the performance is slow. Throughout, important moments get told through three or four gestures instead of one, so that the impact is diluted. There’s a strange reliance on traditional partnered dancing that feels out of place, a bit of someone else’s vocabulary dropped into this very individual performance. “Psst” needs to become more completely itself.

hand, n. The part of the human arm below the wrist, consisting of a thumb, four fingers, and a palm and capable of holding and manipulating things. A degree of closeness to actual involvement in something being talked about.
Back to that spinning beach ball of a world. There’s no attempt to make us think it’s anything else, and no attempt to hide the person who sets the beach ball going. Throughout, the production is handmade, lo-fi, and ingenious rather than high-tech. When the Janitor falls down into the underworld, he lies on his back while a scroll of scenery winds upward behind him—simple, but it works. Tools are just that; when it comes to art, there’s nothing inherently superior about high or low technology. But here the simple scenic devices match the clean lines of Jason’s drawings, the comparatively primitive technology of early animation, and the dress-up feel of silent film.

“Psst” asks how we make our lives. The answer: by hand, out of what we find. We are all amateurs in the old sense—those who love, who do what we can.

the·a·ter, n. An operating theater (informal).
The surgery we’ll be doing tonight is open-heart. The story: we are in love in a drab world. Death comes riding his bicycle and takes you away from me; I dream you are in an underworld, that I can climb through the hinge of things and find you there, still alive. I wrestle to save you but the dream ends, fades back into tired life, and there I am standing at your funeral, in the rain.

There is nothing true about true love. It is an act of will, we have made it from dye and cut paper, two people decide and cling. When you love, it seems to be destiny—but is not, for we are parted as easily as we come together. Death may be the one true thing: when it comes, we are absorbed in it as we never are in love. On the other hand, we try. We’ve given our feeling a name; we even have a symbol for it—a cartoony cardboard heart on a stick that casts a shadow in the Secretary’s thought-bubble. Love may not protect us, but it changes us, wrecks us, lifts us.

These are big emotions. Expect to cry. Herwig and Ilse will not spare you , will not gloss over the great insecurity—the death of love—that dogs our godless urban sophisticate lives. They also don’t plan to offer a solution, except that old one—art—which can memorialize the lost, but cannot save.

The operation’s a success: you’ll clutch your sweetheart tighter after this performance. But you’ll feel the sutures tug across your chest.