North America

by Tish Dice

[text about Target Margin’s Strictly Dishonourable]

Whereas Target Margin claims to revive lost American classics, Elevator Repair Service, performing at P.S. 122, merely credits eclectic sources employed to produce a new and uniformly experimental work called Cab Legs. Some key ERS members also work with Target Margin, but ERS’s utter lack of adherence to primary inspiration — in this instance, Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke and its revision as Eccentricities of a Nightingale — produces a superior result.

Working in the spirit of the Wooster Group, ERS collectively creates an evening combining snippets of Williams, Truffaut, Betty Boop, Cab Calloway, Bach, east Indian films and music, and more besides — all refracted through an anarchic spirit somehow shaped by artistry into a vision of sexual repression released in frenzied group orgasm. ERS achieves, not some imitation of Liz Lecompte’s Wooster Group creations, but a wacky and worthy competition in that genre, combining an entertaining collage of music, shaking bodies, whispered dialogue just barely comprehensible, long pauses, intrusions by a dork evidently bewildered by the avant-garde, and clearly audible conversations. They also make imaginative use of off-stage spaces to augment their soundtrack.

This mixture conveys clearly Linda (ie Williams’ Alma) grappling with the conflict between acceptable behaviour for a spinster in 1947 and personal fulfilment. Indeed, when she finally speaks her mind — ‘Respect is such a good thing, but not if it means I can’t have sex’ — she expresses what the young woman in Strictly Dishonourable likewise concludes. Linda captures our hearts much earlier than this, however, when, in a somewhat improvised monologue, she rambles on to the man she hopelessly adores about the remarkable attributes of doctors in general and the object of her obsessive love in particular. She even, in a sadistically comic touch, surmises he must as a child have broken small animal’s bones so as to learn to repair them. Cab Legs, in short, both sends up Williams and creates its own bacchanalian vision of a repressed libido liberated. Hats off to director John Collins, head writer/co-director Steve Bodow, Rinne Groff as Linda and all of ERS, a now formidable force on the experimental scene.