Populism Yea! Yea!
Benjamin Walker in Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson
Since 2002, Les Frères Corbusier has been building a reputation as a company able to marry the anarchic energy and scattershot intellectualism of groups like Radiohole and the International WOW Company with a more accessible, populist aesthetic. Their mission statement describes the company’s work as “aggressively visceral theater combining historical revisionism, multimedia excess, found texts, sophomoric humor, and rigorous academic research,” asserting that they seek to “speak directly to the mainstream audience continually ignored by the American theater,” rejecting “the shy music, seamless dramaturgy, and muted performance style of the 20th century in favor of the anarchic, the rude, the juvenile, the spectacle.”
All of which is to say that, led by artistic director Alex Timbers, Les Frères has created a series of shows that are akin to live-action South Park episodes with avant-hipster cred. In 2006 alone, (the year I first became aware of the company) they mounted Heddatron (written by Elizabeth Meriwether), in which a Michigan housewife is kidnapped by robots and forced to repeatedly perform Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler; Hell House, their version of the infamous haunted house-style spectacles staged by Evangelical churches throughout the United States; and A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, a deadpan musical satire (written and composed by Kyle Jarrow) featuring a cast of eight to twelve-year-olds celebrating the life and work of L. Ron Hubbard.
Les Frère’s shows are marked by clever writing, strong performances, confident direction, and a subversive sense of humor, but they also tend to be marred by an undertone of smug self-satisfaction, rarely achieving in performance the political sophistication and intellectual rigor suggested by their publicity materials. While it has often been said that the company plays its irony straight, never winking at the audience, the truth is that Timbers tends to set up structures and situations that have so much irony built into them that it is impossible to read them in a nuanced way. Even Hell House, which was conceived as reconstruction rather than parody, could not be taken seriously when mounted in one of the city’s hippest theatres, with skilled actors pretending to be amateur actors and an audience made up almost entirely of NYU students giggling at every reference to heaven or hell.
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, currently enjoying a twice-extended run at the Public Theater, re-imagines our seventh president as a post-punk, emo pop-rock star whose emotional scars drive him both to greatness and to genocide. There’s a touch of genius in framing Jackson as an emotional adolescent who overcompensates for both his own insecurities and his distrust of authority by adopting a swaggering, hypersexual confidence. As played by the ridiculously sexy Benjamin Walker, this Jackson wears skin-tight jeans and form-clinging long-sleeved t-shirts, brandishing his pain (and a holstered revolver) as a rallying cry against “Washington elites” as he rides his war-hero status and his populist rhetoric all the way to the White House. He wears black eyeliner, he massacres the Creek and Seminole tribes, he cuts his arm in the manner of a bipolar teen, he balances the budget, and he sings power ballads.
The tone of the show, and the brand of postmodernism it employs, are summed up nicely in its signature song, “Populism, Yea, Yea!”
Why wouldn’t you ever go out with me in school?
You always went out with those guys, who
thought they were so cool.
And I was nobody to you, nobody to you, nobody to you
But it’s the early nineteenth century
And we’re gonna take this country back
For people like us who don’t just think about things
People who make things happen
Sometimes with guns, sometimes with speeches too.
And also other things.
Populism, yea, yea! This is the age of Jackson.
The link between populism and anti-intellectualism is made even more explicit in the song’s second verse, sung not by Jackson but by a couple of his adoring constituents:
Take a stand against the elite
They don’t care anything for us
And we will eat sweet democracy, let them eat our dust
‘Cause it’s the early nineteenth century
We’ll take the land back from the Indians
We’ll take the land back from the French and Spanish
And other people in other European countries
And other countries too, and also other places
I’m pretty sure it’s our land anyway
Populism, yea, yea! This is the age of Jackson.
The song encapsulates the strengths and weaknesses of BBAJ nicely. The lyrics and music, by Michael Friedman, are catchy enough, and allow the performers to jump head-first into the sentiments of their characters, even while forcing the audience to maintain an ironic, critical distance. And, frankly, the show is fun, entertaining in a way that theatre—particularly theatre with a political bent—too seldom is.
Unfortunately, though, BBAJ is also a little smug, a little glib, and a little pat. While it pretends to challenge viewers to reexamine their preconceptions, it is actually designed to elicit self-congratulatory laughs and knowing nods from an audience that already shares its point of view. Its humor is almost entirely derisive and dismissive, particularly (but not only) when directed against Jackson and his admirers. Jackson is presented as without redeeming qualities, not only anti-intellectual but downright stupid. His persuasiveness and charisma are reduced to, and dismissed as, a result of the fit of his jeans and the cut of his pecs, a genuinely amusing conceit that cuts off any possibility of real engagement with the strength and appeal of his persona and his rhetoric. The show’s vision of Jackson also leads to a certain amount of musical confusion, conflating emo with cock rock, and emo fans with frat boys. Neither of these genres is executed particularly well; some of the songs are catchy, but the ridiculousness, the intentional badness, is painted on in thick layers.
There is a pressing need for theatre and other art forms to engage with American populism and anti-intellectualism in the age of both Obama and the tea party movement, and Les Freres should be praised for taking up that gauntlet. However, while the show has played to cheering audiences and received rave reviews in both New York and LA, it’s difficult to imagine bringing BBAJ to, for example, Jackson’s home state of South Carolina. Americans continue to vote more for those with whom they identify than those who show signs of being able to govern effectively; given this, the greater challenge for a piece of political theatre is not to mock those who identify with Jackson, or W., or Palin (or Obama), but to try to engage with, relate to, and THEN deconstruct that sense of identification.
That said: the show really is fun. Go check it out if you can get a discount.
• • •
Toshiki Okada, one of Japan’s most fascinating young playwrights, writes dialogue so vernacular, so hyper-realistic, that it comes to feel stylized. Sentences circle back on themselves in aborted attempts to articulate unfinished ideas. His characters are smart but largely inarticulate and without ambition, disenfranchised slackers who came of age during Japan’s “lost decade” and have since been unable or unwilling to join in the country’s subsequent resurgence.
Enjoy, which is just finishing its English-language premiere in a production by the Play Company, follows a handful of temp workers at a manga café as they drift through their lives, careers, and relationships. They over-think the trivial in order to distract themselves from more pressing matters, including the identity crisis brought on by entering one’s thirties while working part time in a manga café.
Aya Ogawa’s remarkable translation seems to capture Okada’s tone perfectly (think Waiting for Godot meets Clerks or Slackers, only in Tokyo.) This is a very Japanese play, but American generations X and Y will find much to relate to if they allow themselves to relax into the show’s static pacing. Director Dan Rothenberg (of Pig Iron) directs a solid, occasionally extraordinary cast with a deft hand. Okada’s work is poised to take on a higher profile in New York’s experimental scene (his 5 Days in March, which Okada’s company presented at the Japan Society last year, is about to open in English at LaMama); consider this your chance to know about him before all your friends do.
Also: it’s worth noting that this is the fifth of Okada’s plays to be translated into English by Ogawa. I can think of a couple of presses who should be publishing these plays post-haste. Anyone listening?
Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, written and directed by Alex Timbers; music and lyrics by Michael Friedman; sets by Donyale Werle; costumes by Emily Rebholz; lighting by Justin Townsend; sound by Bart Fasbender choreography by Danny Mefford; fight director, Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum. With: River Aguirre, James Barry, Michael Crane, Michael Dunn, Greg Hildreth, Jeff Hiller, Lucas Near-Verbrugghe, Maria Elena Ramirez, Kate Cullen Roberts, Ben Steinfeld, Benjamin Walker, Colleen Werthmann, and Emily Young. At the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette Street. Through May 30.
Enjoy by Toshiki Okada. Translated by Aya Ogawa; directed by Dan Rothenberg; set by Mimi Lien; lighting by James Clotfelter. With Jessica Almasy, Steven Boyer, Frank Harts, Kris Kling, Joshua Koehn, Mary McCool, Joseph Midyett, Kira Sternbach, Alex Torra, and Stacey Yen. At 59e59, through May 1.
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