"SKEPTICS," Free Street’s MadJoy Theatrics at Pulaski Park
BY LUCIA MAURO
Individuals attending "Skeptics" – a new "body-phrased" performance piece created and performed by Free Street’s MadJoy Theatrics at Pulaski Park – will find themselves engaged in a rigorous brain dance. In order to receive the full impact of these fragmented musings on the mysteries of life and death, viewers must bend their minds into non-linear receptacles, which sort their contents into an arrestingly cohesive saga of the soul.
MadJoy Theatrics (formerly known as TeenStreet) is an ensemble of youth writers-performers who are part of TeenStreet’s jobs programs in the arts. Over the course of seven months, they participate in a highly physical form of stream-of-consciousness writing to create live performances that remove the artifice and clutter of naturalism. This frees them up to dig deep into issues and urges engulfing their lives. Far from tormented confessionals, a MadJoy work delves into the rhythms of breath and emphasizes an uninhibited but honed writing style – one that melds words and physicality into a fearless probing of our innermost selves.
Director Ron Bieganski and writer Bryn Magnus guide the young artists on their unpredictable journeys and, this year, Anita Evans helped them design video projections echoing images of emptiness and possibility – a window, a glass of water, a busy street, L tracks, scraps of paper dancing through the air.
These images grew out of the fractured scenes and repetitious riffs that make up "Skeptics."
With this show, MadJoy moves into spine-chillingly bleak territory tempered by an unearthly sense of calm. They dare to examine how far one can push oneself to the edge – stopping just short of death (or maybe not). They also illustrate a certain romanticized idea of death (like the longing to experience that last moment of "purity’) at the same time they dissect its more macabre realities (images of body functions/fluids abound).
And, while one’s demise is at the forefront of "Skeptics," the work paradoxically accentuates these artists’ full involvement in life. They break down our bodies to the molecular level in order to set free one’s individual spirit.
The eight-member ensemble moves in and around a series of recurring scenarios, many rooted in unfulfilling home lives and a relentless questioning of the education system. Throughout the 105-minute show, each performer will beg God to allow him or her to stay home from school – an idea that crushingly haunts one character, considering that she made such a wish the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. But their unwillingness to go to class is not wrapped around laziness or gratuitous rebellion. They set out to question our rather frayed social fiber at large.
Does education guarantee a stable life? How does one define education? When we die, is our soul really all we need? If anyone has ever spent long periods of time solitarily gazing at the ocean or other natural wonders, they can relate to these sophisticated young seers and their understanding of what it means to gently relinquish ourselves to something larger than our daily preoccupied existence. What really matters is both within us and around us. The MadJoy ensemble offers us insights that have taken others a life time to comprehend. They are capable of drawing an enlightening energy out of contemplation.
And they bring a fresh, unfettered perspective to our search for purpose and our need for self-justification. Their hearts spar with the notebooks scattered across the stage. One character sums up the debilitating nature of fact overload when he poetically shares, "I’m driving under the influence of all this information inside my head."
The bold and mature MadJoy cast consists of Christine Gandia, Brendan Faloona, Paul Green, Jasmine Harris, JoJo Klonsky, Melissa Pabon, Robert Rodriguez and Alicia T. Townsend.
A disturbing stream of final images consists of the actors placing plastic bags over their heads – amid projected white noise. Another cast member later splits open and removes the plastic bags. These artists have stirringly crossed the threshold from wanting to experience death to saving others – and, subsequently, themselves.ª
Free Street’s MadJoy Theatrics’ production of "Skeptics" runs through October 12 at Pulaski Park, 1419 W. Blackhawk. Tickets: $5-$10. Call 773-772-7248 or log onto www.freestreet.org.
