Five characters are in search of a new beginning in Are we not drawn onward to new erA (photo © 2023 Richard Termine)
ONTROEREND GOED: Are we not drawn onward to new erA
Under the Radar Festival
BAM Fishman Space
321 Ashland Pl.
January 4-8, $45
publictheater.org
www.bam.org
“We are stardust, we are golden / We are billion-year-old carbon / And we’ve got to get ourselves / Back to the garden,” Joni Mitchell sang in her 1969 song “Woodstock,” an ode to the festival that can also be read, especially today, as a call for environmental change, with its references to smog, war, and returning to the land to set one’s soul free.
Belgian theater company Ontroerend Goed goes back to the garden in its deliciously clever experimental tableau, Are we not drawn onward to new erA, running January 4-8 at BAM’s Fishman Space as part of the Public Theater’s annual Under the Radar Festival. The seventy-five-minute production unfurls like a palindromic puzzle, not just in the title but in the narrative itself. As the play begins, a small tree is near the center of the stage; in a far corner a woman sleeps, then notices the tree. A man enters and shortly picks an apple from the tree, which they proceed to share. The eating of the forbidden fruit kicks off a descent into humanity’s destruction of the planet.
A cast of six (Angelo Tijssens / Giovanni Brand, Charlotte De Bruyne / Leonore Spee, Jonas Vermeulen / Ferre Marnef, Karolien De Bleser / Britt Bakker, Maria Dafneros / Kristien De Proost, Vincent Dunoyer / Michaël Pas) soon gathers, speaking a mysterious language that evokes Stephen Hawking, AI voices, and characters in the Red Room in Twin Peaks. (The official BAM website says that there is “no spoken language,” but that is not quite the case.) The everyday but distinctive costumes are by Charlotte Goethals, with lighting, video, and sound by Jeroen Wuyts and Babette Poncelet.
Belgian theater company Ontroerend Goed looks to the past to save the future in US premiere at BAM (photo © 2023 Richard Termine)
Then, at the midway point, a twist occurs that might take you a moment to figure out, but when you do, you’ll be hooked, scanning Philip Aguirre’s set for clues as Spectra Ensemble plays William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops,” made from deteriorating tapes (involving magnetic coating pulling away from its plastic backing) and completed on September 11, 2001, when the American composer watched the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center from his Brooklyn roof. Basinski has referred to the magnum opus as “an elegy,” but director Alexander Devriendt uses it as a bastion of hope in the second half of the show.
Are we not drawn onward to new erA is more than just a gimmick-driven production; it’s an engaging attempt to make us ask whether we can turn back time, whether it is still possible to save the Earth — and have fun while doing it. As Joni Mitchell also prophetically sang, in 1970, “Don’t it always seem to go / That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone? / They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”
