nytheatre.com review - Cruel and Unusual Martin Denton · May 26, 2006 One of Antonin Artaud's early plays, Les Hunter's A Dream Play tells us, was violently interrupted by a band of surrealist playwrights whose violent and vocal protests eventually forced the play to be shut down. Think about that piece of information for a moment: a bunch of artists were committed enough, passionate enough, about what they believed theatre was supposed to be that they started a riot during a performance. Could that kind of thing ever happen nowadays? Well, a wonderfully scrappy group called the Brooklyn Playwrights Collective seem able to start, or incite, some kind of ruckus. I say this after seeing the first performance of their second annual Spring Festival, dubbed Cruel and Unusual and comprising half-a-dozen new short works based on/inspired by the life and ideas of Artaud, the founder of the Theatre of Cruelty. By "cruelty" Artaud meant work that would arouse and offend an audience; tough-minded, raw, off-the-wall stuff that would get passive chair-sitters off their duffs in anger, disgust, dismay, and/or shock. Jolts of the sort that Artaud was hoping to deliver are rarely found in theatre, in his time or our own; but these folks from Brooklyn are doing their best and making good on Artaud's promise more times than not in this smart, sharp, and compelling evening of theatre. There is, to start things off, a dazzlingly oblique playlet called Sum, by Al Lefcowitz, which is based on one of Artaud's poems and which amounts to an affirmation of individuality and purposefulness that every playwright and actor ought to recite every time they set out to practice their art. There's a funny and appropriately off-kilter comedy by Jeffrey Skinner called Gertrude Stein's Penis, in which the famous writer tries to deliver a lecture on the male sex organ to, as far as we can tell, nobody in particular. She keeps getting interrupted by salesmen and other unwelcome usurpers. (When she finally relents and buys a vacuum from one of these interlopers, he asks her "Check, cash, or charge?" and she snaps back at him "Go ask Alice.") Similarly silly, and similarly pushing us outside our comfort zones of sense and order, is Les Hunter's A Dream Play, in which another lecture—this one about the work of Artaud—is up-ended by the antics of two men, seemingly Artaud himself and the French critic Andre Breton, who illustrate and eventually take over the supposedly serious talk. This is the piece that contains that fascinating tidbit I mentioned earlier: Artaud was denounced by the surrealists because he chose to stage someone as (they claimed) conventional and stodgy as Strindberg! Will Cordeiro's contribution to the proceedings is A Long and Happy Marriage, billed as an experimental verse play. This one exploits one of Theatre of Cruelty's key ideas, which is to assault the audience directly. Cordeiro does so a number of times in this short play, mostly intellectually as he exposes a corrupt if economically convenient marriage with ugly (though darkly funny) candor; and sometimes physically, as when a chorus of "wives" grab several unwary audience members and bring them on stage for lap dances, or at the play's finish, in which the rest of us who stayed in our seats are mercilessly sprayed with water pistols. It almost feels political; Cordeiro's audacity definitely pays off. The other pieces on view at the performance attended (for it appears that the bill will be slightly different each night) are by Maria Micheles, who is certainly a talent to keep an eye on. The Letters is adapted from correspondence betwen Artaud and Jacques Riviere, an influential editor who refused to published Artaud's poems. The play brings the men to life in neatly unconventional fashion and serves as an introduction to the Artaud ideology in terms of content and form. Her other contribution, The Audience/Theatricks, is the funniest and most successfully subversive work of the evening (high priase, because the plays are all quite funny and, each in its way, subversive). But to tell you anything about what happens in it would ruin it for you, so I won't. The production values are minimal, but the directors all make their pieces work in Siberia's gritty pub setting (the festival moves to Galapagos for its final three performances, where it presumably will fit right in). Brett Vanderbrook and Sunrise Marks play Artaud and Riviere/Breton respectively in The Letters and A Dream Play; they're the standouts among a large and talented ensemble that also includes Diana K. Lee as an unflappable Gertrude Stein and Stephanie Shaw as A Dream Play's more easily rattled academic, among others. Best of all, perhaps, is the conception of the evening itself—a participatory celebration/conversation between theatre artists and ordinary folks in the audience. Too many "festivals" of one-act plays seem to have no raison d'ętre beyond serving as a hopeful showcase of talent to producers, agents, and other show-biz types who probably aren't there anyway; I love that Cruel and Unusual is an end unto itself, giving all who venture into the room a chance to experience some art of the raw and untried variety because that's an exciting, fun, and interesting thing to do. That we get a glimpse at the work of some fine young playwrights and their collaborators is simply a happy byproduct of an involving and intense night of theatre.