Bruce McKenzie stars in Daniel Fish’s multimedia adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
September 20-22, $55-$65
212-992-8484
nyuskirball.org
I first encountered the endlessly inventive, unpredictable work of Daniel Fish four years ago with A (radically condensed and expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, a brilliantly devised piece that combined a tennis-ball machine with actors performing lines spoken by author David Foster Wallace from audiobooks, interviews, and speeches. The New Jersey–born, New York City–based creator also involves film and classic theater in his avant-garde oeuvre, which includes adaptations of Molière’s The Misanthrope, Clifford Odets’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merchant of Venice, Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life, a piece titled Tom Ryan Thinks He’s James Mason Starring in a Movie by Nicholas Ray in Which a Man’s Illness Provides an Escape from the Pain, Pressure, and Loneliness of Trying to Be the Ultimate American Father, Only to Drive Him Further into the More Thrilling Though Possibly Lonelier Roles of Addict and Misunderstood Visionary. More recently, his Tony-winning revival of Oklahoma! is dividing audiences and critics at Circle in the Square.
Daniel Fish’s White Noise runs at NYU Skirball September 20-22
Fish now has turned his attention to consumerism run rampant as depicted in one of the best American novels of the second half of the twentieth century, Don DeLillo’s National Book Award–winning White Noise. Initially staged last year by Theater Freiburg and Ruhrfestspiele Recklingshausen in Germany, the seventy-minute multimedia work, running September 20-22 at NYU’S Skirball Center, focuses on DeLillo’s extensive use of lists within his narrative. For example: “The ashram is located on the outskirts of the former copper-smelting town of Tubb, Montana, now called Dharamsalapur. The usual rumors abound of sexual freedom, sexual slavery, drugs, nudity, mind control, poor hygiene, tax evasion, monkey-worship, torture, prolonged and hideous death.” And: “You know how I am. I think everything is correctible. Given the right attitude and the proper effort, a person can change a harmful condition by reducing it to its simplest parts. You can make lists, invent categories, devise charts and graphs. This is how I am able to teach my students how to stand, sit and walk, even though I know you think these subjects are too obvious and nebulous and generalized to be reduced to component parts. I’m not a very ingenious person but I know how to break things down, how to separate and classify. We can analyze posture, we can analyze eating, drinking and even breathing. How else do you understand the world, is my way of looking at it.”
White Noise: Freely Inspired by the Novel by Don DeLillo is performed by Bruce McKenzie as Hitler Studies professor Jack Gladney, with live music by composer and percussionist Bobby Previte. The bold projections are by Jim Findlay (including an appearance on video by nineteen German teenagers), with sets by Andrew Leiberman and costumes by Doey Lüthi. I could make a long list of reasons why you should see this, but it’s not really necessary. Just go if you want to experience another unusual theatrical adventure by the amazing Mr. Fish.