Los Angeles’ cache of postmodern performance art troupes seems to be growing bigger by the day, and with Skid Row getting jammed with organic-vegan-yoga-retreat markets à la Bushwick, there seems to be no clear end in site. So I was naturally a little suspicious when I went to see My Barbarian, one of the better-acclaimed groups of the lot, at the New Museum theater. The group, known for its dry humor and campy bravado, gave a 45-minute performance entitled Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT), which was the culmination of a two-week workshop at the museum, in which they collaborated with local artists, musicians and actors who apparently share their love for muted tie-dye shirts and backhanded upheaval against hegemonies.
The show got off to a bang with each of the participants confronting the audience with something he or she wasn’t allowed to do. “I am not allowed to smoke marijuana in this theater!” screamed one, “I am not allowed to change my gender on my birth certificate!” bemoaned another, and, naturally, “I am not allowed to own a ferret as a pet!” While a unified grievance remained indiscernible, I later came to appreciate the directness with which the members of My Barbarian expressed themselves in this opener, as the ensuing performance left a bit to be desired in the way of earnestness.
The troupe’s staging of a number of adaptations of plays, including Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and Langston Hughes’ Soul Gone Home, were done with evident theatrical skill; the powerful messages inherent in the selections were adequately conveyed. However, a persistent twinge of sarcasm that marked the actors’ deliveries, coupled with the tongue-in-cheek banter between the renditions did just enough to undermine any sincere message that the selections, or the troupe, could have imparted. The audience laughed, but they were the type of laughs that kids/I would deliver in high school when they/I feared being left out of an inside joke.
The show’s redemption came in its musical numbers— trumped-up ditties that explained PoLAAT’s five principles (“estrangement, indistinction, suspension of beliefs, mandate to participate, and inspirational critique”). In these sporadic musical interludes, Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade, the troupe’s core members, invoked the ghost of early-days Burt Bacharach in an onslaught of pure showmanship that literally charmed the pants off some audience members (they asked us to get naked). The irony ever-present in their swagger was a bit alienating, but the performance made me realize that in My Barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater world, style supersedes significance. God is dead; there’s a Starbucks every three blocks on Sunset; and Gaines, Gordon and Segade are making the case that shtick is cooler than sincerity, one spectacle at a time.
