On the occasion of New York Theater Workshop’s hosting a revival of Lee Breuer’s Pataphysics Penyeach: Summa Dramatica and Porco Morto, I’m re-posting what I wrote about the show when I saw it last January:
January 10 – I went to the Mabou Mines Studio to see Pataphysics Penyeach, two one-act animations by Lee Breuer – Summa Dramatica, primarily a lecture by the holy cow Sri Moo Parahamsa, played by Ruth Maleczech, and Porco Morto, a memorial service for and visitation of the spirit of Ponzi Porco, PhD, all voices performed by Greg Mehrten. As usual for Mabou Mines, these pieces (presented as part of the Under the Radar Festival) were opportunities for plentiful pun-filled philosophizing by Lee Breuer and fantastic performances by his longtime colleagues. Summa Dramatica is a chunk of Lee’s magnum opus La Divina Caricatura, a multidimensional meditation on art, life, love, animals, animation, theater, media, and the soul, alternately erudite and wise-cracking. Pataphysics Penyeach refers both to Alfred Jarry’s whimsical “science of imaginary solutions” and to James Joyce’s early book of poetry, Pomes Penyeach. Sri Moo is a sort of therapist cum acting teacher whose Institute for the Science of Soul in Cheesequake, New Jersey, treats deconstructed souls like Marge Simpson, who have been reduced to mere cartoons. And she speaks in gnomic phrases that are both sage and satirical at the same time: “I pledge allegiance to the hype…The soul is not immortal anymore. Money is immortal…The Greeks have been in denial for 3000 years. The truth is not beautiful.” Ruth plays Sri Moo inside an elaborate Hindu deity/cow costume with headdress, which she removes halfway through – in Lee Breuer’s own brand of Jack Smith Brechtianism, all the illusion-making aspects of theater are exposed, so we see Ruth reading her lines from a teleprompter, and the other performers manipulating puppets and projectors are not tidily tucked out of sight, the way they might be in a slicker piece of theater.
After a break, we returned to Porco Morto, which began as a solemn memorial, with Greg Mehrten dressed in Secret Service garb with wired-for-sound dark glasses and funeral suit filling us in on the gruesome and somewhat mysterious demise of Professor Porco, a comic caricature version of an hipster artist not unlike Lee Breuer: “I was there at the first drop of acid. I was On the Road with Jack.” (This character was the subject of an earlier Mabou Mines piece, Ecco Porco, in which the title character was played by Fred Neumann.) This morphs into a kind of funeral ceremony or séance for which Mehrten becomes a kind of shamanistic robed priest, through whom the stuttering voice of Porco is heard, while Porco himself is represented as a three-dimensional puppet resurrected from his coffin to share, among other things, his lifelong fetishistic obsession with the New York Times. Breuer always knows how to push the bad-boy edge, here incorporating a long manipulated video of Times reviewer Charles Isherwood. Crazy funny stuff. The piece ends with a kind of chorale, with Mehrten and the puppeteers and a musician who wizardly plays both harp and violin doing “Sweet Mystery of Life.” Mehrten is a master of voices and this is one more tour de force vocal performance by him.
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January 10 – On an entirely different scale of dense theatrical inventiveness, I went to the Mabou Mines Studio to see Pataphysics Penyeach, two one-act animations by Lee Breuer – Summa Dramatica, primarily a lecture by the holy cow Sri Moo Parahamsa, played by Ruth Maleczech, and Porco Morto, a memorial service for and visitation of the spirit of Ponzi Porco, PhD, all voices performed by Greg Mehrten. As usual for Mabou Mines, these pieces (presented as part of the Under the Radar Festival) were opportunities for plentiful pun-filled philosophizing by Lee Breuer and fantastic performances by his longtime colleagues. Summa Dramatica is a chunk of Lee’s magnum opus La Divina Caricatura, a multidimensional meditation on art, life, love, animals, animation, theater, media, and the soul, alternately erudite and wise-cracking. Pataphysics Penyeach refers both to Alfred Jarry’s whimsical “science of imaginary solutions” and to James Joyce’s early book of poetry, Pomes Penyeach. Sri Moo is a sort of therapist cum acting teacher whose Institute for the Science of Soul in Cheesequake, New Jersey, treats deconstructed souls like Marge Simpson, who have been reduced to mere cartoons. And she speaks in gnomic phrases that are both sage and satirical at the same time: “I pledge allegiance to the hype…The soul is not immortal anymore. Money is immortal…The Greeks have been in denial for 3000 years. The truth is not beautiful.” Ruth plays Sri Moo inside an elaborate Hindu deity/cow costume with headdress, which she removes halfway through – in Lee Breuer’s own brand of Jack Smith Brechtianism, all the illusion-making aspects of theater are exposed, so we see Ruth reading her lines from a teleprompter, and the other performers manipulating puppets and projectors are not tidily tucked out of sight, the way they might be in a slicker piece of theater.
After a break, we returned to Porco Morto, which began as a solemn memorial, with Greg Mehrten dressed in Secret Service garb with wired-for-sound dark glasses and funeral suit filling us in on the gruesome and somewhat mysterious demise of Professor Porco, a comic caricature version of an hipster artist not unlike Lee Breuer: “I was there at the first drop of acid. I was On the Road with Jack.” (This character was the subject of an earlier Mabou Mines piece, Ecco Porco, in which the title character was played by Fred Neumann.) This morphs into a kind of funeral ceremony or séance for which Mehrten becomes a kind of shamanistic robed priest, through whom the stuttering voice of Porco is heard, while Porco himself is represented as a three-dimensional puppet resurrected from his coffin to share, among other things, his lifelong fetishistic obsession with the New York Times. Breuer always knows how to push the bad-boy edge, here incorporating a long manipulated video of Times reviewer Charles Isherwood. Crazy funny stuff. The piece ends with a kind of chorale, with Mehrten and the puppeteers and a musician who wizardly plays both harp and violin doing “Sweet Mystery of Life.” Mehrten is a master of voices and this is one more tour de force vocal performance by him.
another eye opens 