My Onliness (director Daniel Irizarry) rules over a strange kingdom in new play (photo by Suzanne Fiore Photography)
MY ONLINESS
New Ohio Theatre
154 Christopher St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 24, $25
newohiotheatre.org
In Narcotics: Nicotine, Alcohol, Cocaine, Peyote, Morphine, Ether + Appendices, Polish polymath Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz wrote, “Now I am faced with an especially difficult task: I must avoid being misunderstood, which is against all the odds, given my verdict on peyote.” The painter, philosopher, playwright, and photographer better known as Witkacy experimented with numerous mind-altering substances; he wrote such novels as Insatiability and such plays as Metaphysics of a Two-Headed Calf, The Madman and the Nun, and The Beelzebub Sonata before committing suicide in 1939 at the age of fifty-four.
Running at the New Ohio Theatre through September 24, Robert Lyons’s fabulously chaotic My Onliness is an homage to Witkacy, a ferociously fractured fairy tale that is one helluva head trip. The story is set in an undisclosed time and place, in a possibly postapocalyptic land ruled by a mad king in a fool’s hat (director Daniel Irizarry) known as My Onliness (MO), a riff on “Holiness” and “Loneliness.” His ragtag court includes a pair of musicians (vocalist and melodica player Joanie Brittingham and guitarist Drew Fleming), two barely dressed mediums (Dickie Hearts, who communicates in American Sign Language, and Malik Paris), a tortured writer (Rhys Tivey) who he sees as the enemy, and the princess-like Morbidita (Cynthia LaCruz).
Radiant in a flowing off-the-shoulder white gown, Morbidita approaches the king with a garbage bag stuffed with a signed petition, but he is having none of it. Speaking directly to the audience (seated on three sides of the stage area), he announces, “Listen up! / I told you that in my presence you are all equal. / It’s true! / You are equally nothing. / Absolutely nothing. / Because I have no equals. / I’m not like some Emperor or King. / I am in a completely different Spiritual Dimension.”
Morbidita (Cynthia LaCruz) wants to help the common folk and avenge her family in My Onliness (photo by Suzanne Fiore Photography)
Expanding on his superiority, he proclaims in true despotic fashion, “I know you all say monstrous things about me behind my back. / I don’t want to know anything about that. / I don’t have any secret informers. / And I’m not going to. / I’m just not going to. / I don’t even have any ministers. / And therein lies my greatness. / I am alone like God. / I alone rule everything. / I alone am responsible for everything. / And I answer only to myself alone. / I suffer for you. / Like the devil. / Because I am sacrificing myself for you. / Out of all of us, I suffer the most. / Just be thankful that you get to suffer / in the presence of a person suffering like me.”
Morbidita, whose father was killed by MO, fears that they’re all trapped in an abyss, not wanting to believe “that everything could come to an end like this. / And not just in my dreams.” Meanwhile, the writer predicts, “This very same story plays out in countries all over the world. / It’s all going to end in a total Fiasco. / Like the world has never seen. / Or even imagined.” (It’s hard not to hear a Trump reference in those words.) Later, Morbidita calls for “an open rebellion,” leading to a tumultuous, helter-skelter finale that the ruthless leader tells the audience to broadcast live on social media.
My Onliness is a nonstop barrage of sights and sounds, a furious and unpredictable, often nonsensical and incomprehensible mythological fable that you can’t take your eyes off of. There is always something going on in every corner of the theater: The writer fills the walls with mathematical equations in chalk; the guitarist roams the space, sometimes posing like a rock star; an orderly in white wanders about; actors change costumes in the wings; and the characters reach for pots and pans and other props hanging from the ceiling.
There is a lot of audience interaction, although consent is always requested first; the relationship developed between the cast and the audience is key to the success of the show, and it also provides fun moments for Irizarry (The Maids, UBU), especially, to improvise, which he does very well. Nobody is put into a position that would make them feel uncomfortable, and some of the positions that audience members are willingly put into are downright hysterical. My involvement included a large puppet of MO as part of an extremely clever depiction of a fight, but to say more would be to give too much away. However, be on the lookout for thrown popcorn, splashed water, and a shared toast with real alcohol.
On one side of Jungah Han’s set is a makeshift throne (an old chair) on top of an open black square; on the other, steps lead to a perch backed by a temporary wall with an abstract design on it. Brittani Beresford’s costumes range from Morbidita’s elegant dress to tight, barely there elements for others. Christina Tang’s lighting and Lawrence Schober’s sound design are as unpredictable as everything else. Alexandria Wailes and Kailyn Aaron-Lozano codirected the ASL, which is sometimes incorporated into the choreography.
A coproduction of One-Eighth Theater, the New Ohio, and IRT Theater, My Onliness has the feel of a show put on by people living in an asylum, as if Randle Patrick McMurphy (from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) was the star and director, or maybe a work put on by people in prison. Morbidita does say at one point, “Let’s start an open rebellion among the prisoners.” In either case, it deals with people who are not in control of their lives, like living in a fascist state. Composer Kamala Sankaram’s rollicking score ranges from pop to hip-hop to opera in such songs as “The New Truth Serum,” “Let the Phantom Dim,” and “Grandpa’s Been Converted,” with words and lyrics credited to “Lyons — from Witkacy.”
Late in the play, the writer says, “This is the End. There’s Nothing Left. / Actually, there is one thing. / The absurdity of life in-and-of-itself. / In and of itself. / That’s something you won’t see on the stage of any theater.” If My Onliness is about anything, it’s about the absurdity of life, brought to compelling madness on the stage of the New Ohio Theatre. And I cannot confirm whether peyote was involved in any way.
