A violet man in a lavender bathrobe lounges in an armchair, languidly puffing at his cigar. The bouquets of smoke that rise towards the ceiling and the fat sack of money by the violet man’s side speak to his wealth. But he grows bored of puffing his cigar. He grows bored of patting his sack of money. Agitated, he runs his hand over his stiff hair. Then, with a scream, he pulls out a strand, stiff and straight as a pencil, and with a careful motion, sticks it in the ashtray beside him. He pulls another strand of hair and places it in the ashtray. And another. And yet another, screaming with each pluck. Soon, he is bald, and his ashtray has a new grisly toupee. The violet man runs his hand over his face. His body contorts, his legs shake, and silently, he tugs his right eye out of its socket. He firmly impales the eye onto one of the hairs. He reaches his hand back up to his face and his body convulses. He stands. He stamps his foot. Silently, he plucks out his left eye and, like with the first one, he impales it onto another one of his hairs. Bald and blind, the violet man in a lavender bathrobe sits back and, assuming a contented posture, resumes smoking his cigar.
Puppeteers enact a scene from Dan Hurlin's "Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed" at the #macdowellbenefit. pic.twitter.com/vUWbNFyZmN— The MacDowell Colony (@MacDowellColony) May 17, 2016
Such a scene would be mortifying if performed on stage by a real person. But this scene, from the new Dan Hurlin play Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed, is performed by three puppeteers with a violet puppet between them, complete with a puppet-sized lavender bathrobe. Demolishing Everything was originally written as four short puppet plays in 1917 by Italian futurist Fortunato Depero but was not performed for the first time until last week.
The century-old time capsule of Depero’s scripts has birthed a work of incredible and troubling dissonance. We are reminded at the beginning of the performance to consider the events unfolding before us in the context of the Pulse nightclub shooting, ISIS and the Syrian civil war, and of course in terms of Black Lives Matter and the rhetoric surrounding police brutality. But as puppets wordlessly pluck out their eyes and tear off one another’s arms, as a wealthy woman throws herself off a building and her vindictive lover guns down a crowd of children, and as the animated corpses of an architect, a cook, and a train dispatcher apply their trades to slaughtering thousands and an escalating fatality counter primes us to anticipate to further carnage, we find ourselves at a loss for how to feel.
As a proud futurist, Fortunato Depero would’ve wanted us to feel desensitized to the butchery on stage. In a 1909 manifesto, key futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti espoused the role of violence in art, “No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.”* Marinetti followed up this declaration by saying, “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene,” a statement that permeates Depero’s play.
Two puppet characters from Dan Hurlin's play "Demolishing Everything with Amazing Speed" at the #macdowellbenefit. pic.twitter.com/4NST5Q2NrP— The MacDowell Colony (@MacDowellColony) May 16, 2016
Thus, we have two competing artistic visions. Dan Hurlin seems to want us to take a step back from the violence and think about the tragic consequences as the puppets act out their tragicomedy before a projected backdrop of bombed-out northern Italian towns and footage of World War I battlefields. Fortunato Depero seems to want us to subscribe to his futurist agenda and celebrate violence and destruction with him. So who’s authorial intent takes precedence – Hurlin’s or Depero’s?
The deciding factor on the meaning of this play rests entirely on the strength of its visual storytelling. I grew up with Punch & Judy shows, and seeing puppets brutalize each other for my entertainment took me back to my childhood. But where Mr. Punch would meet his just desserts (eaten, in my family’s Christmas puppet show, by an alligator who would then dispense presents to the audience) the puppets in Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed do not suffer punishments for their crimes. The thief takes refuge in his treasury in the clouds while his victims die violently. Morality, Depero seems to say, is absurd.
The puppet medium invites us to anticipate moral tales then subverts those very expectations. Moreover, the staging of the puppet show constantly reminds the audience of the artifice of the performance. The aggressively geometric features of the puppets, like masks in a commedia del arte, depict theatrical types rather than real people. The real people are the puppeteers, whose faces are clearly visible and who are dressed in eye-catching white, constantly drawing attention away from the puppets. At the edges of the stage, musicians and computer technicians generate sound and light in clear view of the audience. A narrator appears from time to time to superfluously describe the action as it happens (though, as I discovered after the show, other patrons actually found the narration necessary for understanding the content of the show). And at the most violent moments, cameras interpose themselves between us and the puppets, forcing us to look not at the action itself, but a live feed of the action projected on the back wall. This clear and constant inclusion of technology serves to remind us, again and again, that we are watching a show, and that none what we see is “Real”.
On one hand, Hurlin’s staging encourages us to consider the performance from a position of emotional distance, and thus be critical of what we are seeing. Yet, does not laying bare the machinery of the performance concur with the futurist perspective, which celebrates the beauty of technology? In the words of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes…is more beautiful that the Victory of Samothrace.”** A futurist would greatly enjoy the way Hurlin has unveiled the “great pipes” of live theater.
After the performance, I discussed with another viewer the merit of Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed. Was it worth unearthing four century-old puppet plays? Has the century-old futurist agenda reached insidiously into the 21st century to us or are we to see this as dark satire? Ultimately, it is up to us, the audience, to make meaning of this work. As Tristan Tzara, Dadaist and contemporary of Depero said, the meaning of a work of art “is neither specified nor defined in the work, it belongs, in its innumerable variations, to the spectator.”*** Dan Hurlin wants us to work for meaning, to work through the dissonance ourselves and draw some sort of parallel between 2016 and 1917. The meaning of this puppet carnage is up to us.
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Demolishing Everything With Amazing Speed is showing July 7-17 at the Fisher Center at Bard College.
*Quoted in the playbill.
** Ibid.
*** Tristan Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. trans. Barbara Wright (London: Calder Publishing, 1977), 7.
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