Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods & Phillip Gehmacher/Mumbling Fish “Maybe Forever”
Posted by: Camela Raymond
Meg Stuart and Phillip Gehmacher are powerful and evocative movement artists, but unfortunately what they evoked for me was the experience of being cornered at a party by a drunk person puling about his/her bad breakup. I started getting that nervous trapped feeling around the time Stuart started delivering her first lines, a litany of recantations to her lost lover starting with, “Remember when I wrote on that postcard I wish you were here? I take it back!!!” Puling is bad enough, but phony puling?
(Who would actually write “Wish you were here” on a postcard? Who even sends postcards? And why take back something that meant nothing–actually, less than nothing–in the first place?) This quality of triteness and dull mawkishness continued. Despite lots of intricate movement, poetically disjunctive spoken phrases, moody songs (performed by singer-songwriter Niko Hafkenscheid), and fashionable costumes–the numerous costume changes were baffling, unless meant to suggest shopping as a cure for heartache–Maybe Forever just didn’t go anywhere. The performers mooned away over unfulfilled love, embracing and parting, rejecting and being rejected, longing and longing, eventually reaching a state of profound self-parody when Gehmacher proclaimed (in roughly these words), “I am aware at this moment that I must accept that this is the place where I am!” Yes, I know the feeling, and I apologize to others in the audience for sighing loudly, staring at the knees of the people seated between me and the exit aisle, and pointing my index finger to my head like a gun. In short, on the scale of TBA misfires over the years, Maybe Forever ranks worse than Coco Fusco and the singing chicken. Still, this wasted 90 minutes of my life were redeemed by the earlier performance I saw of Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment, a brilliantly crafted, profound, and exquisitely acted piece of theater that will show again tonight at 8:30.
