The Theater Of Danger

by Douglas Davis

[text about Antonin Artaud and fringe theater in New York]

Elevator Repair Service — or ERS — has been sizzling for several seasons now. Needless to say, the company rigorously avoids anything like a straight narrative line. In its masterpiece production, Cab Legs, which ran through the fall of 1997, the players often talked over each other’s lines about totally variant themes or turns in what can only be called a multiplicity plot. One of the players Rinne Groff, is terrifically gifted at going into a corner and talking incessantly to herself about lovers with such intensity I didn’t want to listen to anybody else’s monologues. She was back again in Total Fictional Lie this fall, a production based on the deification of serial killers, pop stars and assorted middle-American nerds beloved by documentary filmmakers. Once again Groff and the cast members talked mostly to themselves, interspersed with comic deadpan dancing based on hand-twitching and foot-turning. The visual japes are pushed to the limit: when a tape of Paul Anka boomed out the singers self-congratulatory anecdotes, a pair of legs belonging to Susie Sokol burst out of a big box in center stage: her feet wiggled in exact time to the rise and fall of Anka’s ridiculous words. But ERS lost some of its impact through the relentless use of multiple voices, plots and movement. What we “follow” in ERS productions is the pure formal brilliance of the ensemble itself.

[text about The Erotica Project and De la Guarda]

Elevator Repair Service’s Cab Legs [Sept. 11-Oct. 5, 1997] and Total Fictional Lie [Oct. 15-Nov. 8, 1998] were staged at New York’s P.S. 122. The Erotica Project played in Manhattan at HERE Performance Art Café [Aug. 14-29, 1998], and began again at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater this January. De la Guarda continues its run at the Daryl Roth Theater [through Mar. 28], where it made its New York debut on June 16, 1998.