Nicolás Noreña’s The Kick Inside was inspired by Kate Bush’s 1978 debut album (photo by Jose Miranda)
THE KICK INSIDE
HERE Arts Center
145 Sixth Ave.
Tuesday – Saturday through November 7, $10.50-$126
here.org
“I’ve seen some weird things recently. I don’t know what to make of it,” Alenka (Tatyana Kot) says in Nicolás Noreña’s The Kick Inside.
I love weird; often, the weirder the better. But not always. And in this case, I certainly don’t know what to make of it.
The Kick Inside is an exquisite corpse play — a surrealist concept in which collaborators add pieces to a work of art in sequence — written by Penny Arcade, Jess Barbagallo, Ethan Fishbane, Richard Foreman, Hillary Gao, Nazareth Hassan, John Jesurun, Marvin Just, Dhari Noel, Normandy Sherwood, Hayley Stahl, and Fiona Templeton. It’s named after and inspired by Kate Bush’s 1978 debut album, which features such songs as “Strange Phenomena,” “Wuthering Heights” (about Cathy and Heathcliff from Emily Brontë’s novel), and “The Kick Inside” (about an incestuous relationship between siblings that ends with the sister’s pregnancy and the brother’s suicide). Although the play is not about the album, it does touch on many of the record’s themes, including the heart, the soul, and the strange.
It opens promisingly with Just’s “The Cinema,” in which a group of people are sitting in theater seats onstage, watching the closing credits of a movie — or the audience, as if we are performing for them. As Bush’s “Moving” plays, the viewers start leaving until a weeping Alenka is alone. “Moving stranger, does it really matter?” Bush asks.
Over the next few scenes, we meet Baba (Benjamin Forster), Jeannie the Tech Witch (Yuki Kawahisa), the voice of Alenka’s room (Alenka Kraigher), Alenka’s cousin Frankie (Frankie Placidi), Angel (Essence Lotus), Felix the Dog Who Is Also a Man (Felix Teich), and SN (Timothy Scott). We travel to a locksmith, a library, a bar, a diner, and various apartments as the actors rearrange Sherwood’s sets, makeshift pieces of cardboard, curtains, and other materials.
The abstract dialogue and plot are less surreal than confounding; while cool scenes occasionally pop up, including at a bus stop and a dry cleaners, everything else is too random, like atoms dancing around but never connecting. Amid aliens and oozing innards, there are discussions of words and rules.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for books that speak of language as magic,” Alenka says in a library. Jeannie replies, “Careful, in such a world it is necessary to learn the trick of remaining with one’s mind full of trembling expectation, poised to seize on the first and smallest indication of something happening — just outside the realm of habitual consciousness.”
Alenka (Tatyana Kot) and Baba (Benjamin Forster) try to connect at a dry cleaners (photo by Jose Miranda)
Later, in a diner, Jeannie tells a waitress who looks just like Alenka but claims not to be her, “For a long long time humans have been contained by their inability to communicate with the world around them. Languages were invented for this very purpose.”
Unfortunately, such dialogue does not communicate well to the audience, which, the night I went, was struggling to figure out what was going on. In addition, too much of the action occurs on the floor, so most of the audience is unable to always see it. Sitting in the last row, I used that time to watch foley artist Marija Kovačević to my right, where she was creating sound effects like on old radio shows, although occasionally too loudly.
The Kick Inside feels completely random; it has aliens, a talking canine, milkshakes, and innards. It also has a convoluted continuity and a confusing raison d’être. I’m all for breaking theatrical conventions and experimentation, but not when it is so forced, not organic.
“I’ve broken the rules!” Alenka declares. “The allegorical undeniable. In the allegorical undeniable, I have a name. Alenka. And everything in my path-encounter is fleeting-unnamed. But at some point a phrase a description a condition became a name and so now you know you have a name — you have a name to me!”
Even Denis Diderot, Noam Chomsky, and Steven Pinker would be confused. And Samuel Beckett too, especially at two scenes that borrow his stagecraft.
The first act concludes with Alenka reciting Bush’s “Feel It” from her first record, warbling, “Oh, feel it, oh-oh, feel it, feel it, my love . . . See what you’re doing to me.”
In his 1997 bestseller, True Love, Robert Fulghum wrote, “We’re all a little weird. And life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall into mutually satisfying weirdness — and call it love — true love.”
There might be others who feel it for The Kick Inside, but it was not true love for me.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]