Recent arts coverage
Austin’s alt-classical auteurs unleash their sixth symphonies | Austin Lyric Opera stages Chabrier’s ‘The Star’ | Q-and-A with Anne Akiko Meyers, violinistFollow @artsinaustin on Twitter
Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2009 > September > 21 > Entry
Review: ‘bobraushcenbergamerica’
Robert Rauschenberg was an optimistic goof ball genius. That his more than half-century of art-making that profoundly changed the course of art-making sometimes obscures the sense of fun Rauschenberg brought to visual art.
Rauschenberg’s fun wasn’t lost on playwright Charles L. Mee in his unapologetically entertaining — and fun —“bobrauschenbergamerica’ now getting a spirited thoroughly entertaining production at St. Edward’s University directed by David M. Long.
Himself fond of crafting scripts from found texts just as Rauschenberg crafted art from found junk, Mee presents the ultimate collaged homage from one king of collage to another.
(Rauschenberg isn’t the first artist Mee has paid tribute to. The playwright has also celebrated Joseph Cornell in “Hotel Cassiopeia” along with Jason Rhoades and Norman Rockwell in “Under Construction.”)
With some 40 brief scenes that romp by in 70 minutes, ‘bobrauschenbergamerica’ is a hodge-podge, a rapid road trip through Americana, a sloppy mess even. It is Mee’s suggestion of what Rauschenberg might have come up with if Rauschenberg had been a playwright and as Mee has noted, that’s going for “the sheer exhilaration of living in a country where people make up their lives as they go.”
A man in a chicken suit descends from a rope. Three people ride bicycles across the stage. A young woman spends the duration of the show zooming around on roller skates in flouncy red skirt. Two men fall in love. A man slides down a waterslide that’s been slicked up with a giant martini. And there are picnics and chocolate cake and country line dancing and plenty of chicken jokes. (Rauschenberg loved chicken jokes.)
Theatrically it’s a mess and a jumble, and yet somehow it all comes together as irresistibly entertaining and a spot-on riff on Rauschenberg.
The young cast had the perfect energy to manage the manic parade of misfit American characters. Guest actress Babs George as Rauschenberg’s mother — daffy, ditzy (and perhaps deranged?) — is a 1950s housewife with a bland smile stuck on her face. But she deftly captures a most poignant, nuanced moment. ‘Art was never a part of our lives,’ she says in one of the few moments when Rauschenberg’s poor, fundamentalist Christian South Texas upbringing revealed.
That Rauschenberg went so far beyond where he came from is genius. Or maybe he never left who he was and where he came from at all.
Ordinary American detritus is beautiful. Juxtaposition forms beauty. Oddballs are in.
‘bobrauschenbergamerica’ continues 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday through Sept. 27. Mary Moody Northen Theatre, St Edward’s Univ., 3001 S. Congress Ave. 512-448-8484. www.stedwards.edu/theater
Photo: Babs George and Sarah Burhalter in ‘bobrauschenbergamerica.’ Photo by Bret Brookshire.
Comments
Click here to report comment abuse.