Collecting Anatomy

On Thursday during workshop, Glen told me about the Anatomy Collective's show, "Many Things are Destroying Me," and asked me if I might like to go see it. I said I would, so after my relatively failed writing session at the Pick Me Up, I trained home in a piss-poor mood to my home and then bused (bussed? bust?) out to Wicker Park for the show. By the first five or ten minutes, the bad mood was completely gone.

In essence, "Many Things are Destroying Me" is actually three shows: an interactive installation, a play, and an afterparty (if you can consider an afterparty a show...which I do). And the three parts were disparate enough that it's really difficult for me to review them as one item. The opening installation was a little like walking through a live-action version of Fly Guy. It invited the audience to wander through and a beautiful and surreal environment and interact with the miming characters within. A pair of women, bound in a wirework cage underneath a starscape of broken wine glasses sensually hand danced and made eyes at audience members. A mime in the middle of a circle of flowers played spin the bottle with himself (and anyone who wanted to sit with him) and tossed around an apple with a dancing girl in white and a persnickety writer who wandered the audience announcing himself with a horn. All of this was set to the music of an accordion player, who sat in the corner and whose face was so serious and intriguing that I was simultaneously enticed and terrified to walk up to her. In all, this was my favorite part of the evening, and not just because I'm a whore for artistic installations that invite me to play (although I am), but because of the balance struck between inviting play and giving the audience space. Which is to say that the Anatomy Collective provided ample opportunity for people like me to come and play, while not neglecting the beauty and visual elements necessary to rope in people who prefer to sit back and watch. It's a difficult balance to make--one that even some of the most accomplished spectacle companies often fail in, in my opinion--and the group pulled it off wonderfully.

The second part of the show consisted of five short absurd plays by Chicago playwright Taavo Smith. In them, a pair of men stand before the "Author" (played by Taavo, himself) and ask him questions fanboy-style, though all but his one knee is paralyzed. In another, a man and a woman talk around the presence and possibly rape of another woman (who may or may not even exist). Though they were well written, these really break no new ground. Instead, they tread over the same ground covered years before by Beckett, Ionescu (woot! spelled it right.), Pinter--essentially the canon of absurdist plays. In and of itself that might have left me unimpressed and cold, but they were acted with such commitment and skill that they really took on a life of their own outside of their genre. Thus a scene in which two men held an argument in gibberish, which in unskilled hands might have turned into just another knock-off of the French Dadaist movement, was performed so adeptly that it truly allowed the audience to divorce themselves from the meaning of words and experience the emotion of the argument. Sudden shifts in mood and style in the aforementioned man-and-woman scene helped lend gravity and a real sense of unease to a conversation that said nothing particularly unsettling or creepy.

At the party afterward, I got to speak with Taavo, as well as the Anatomy Collective's artistic director, Stephanie Acosta and company member, Alex Miles Younger. I found them very giving and unpretentious, and I really think that this aided in creating the inviting mood of the show. Because had they been pretentious or dismissive or uninviting, themselves, this would have bled into the performances of the actors. It's good to know, then, that there are people creating fun spectacle and interesting shows who are not so full of themselves.

In all, it was truly a delight to see this show. If you can, I recommend seeing it. It runs again tonight. If not, look for the Anatomy Collective's next performance, Prometheus. I have a feeling it will be very interesting.