There is reality and there is fiction — an easy
distinction to make, right? Well, things aren’t always so cut and dried,
especially when we consider the performances we undertake in our real lives and
the fictional stories that borrow from reality — the boundaries between what’s
true and what’s false often get blurred.
اضافة اعلان
In Playwrights Horizons’ new series “The Kill One Race,”
reality TV meets theater for an examination of the ways we shape our values,
form relationships, and bounce between the realms of reality and fiction in
both our entertainment and our daily lives. This streaming production, and
another recent digital theater hybrid, “This American Wife,” reflects how the
peculiar combination of theater and reality TV may complicate the viewers’
contract with the art form and their understanding of what is artifice and what
is truth.
“The Kill One Race,” conceived by choreographer Raja Feather
Kelly and his company Feath3r Theory, brings us to a dystopia where
24-year-olds become contestants in a reality competition full of social experiments.
The most ethical person in the group is granted the honor of dying and
ascending to the Empire, a vague Xanadu of eternal comfort and righteousness.
Seven characters compete over seven days that are rife with
challenges, schemes and manipulations. You may be thinking of “
The Hunger Games” or any of the countless other dystopian works of fiction that involve
monitored competitions. Despite the proliferation of these stories, I was still
surprised by the variation theater brought to the theme. Filmed at Playwrights
Horizons and released over the course of eight overly lengthy episodes, “The
Kill One Race” so closely mimics the style of “Big Brother,” “The Real World”
and other classic reality series that “theater” feels like a terribly
insufficient way to describe it.
Kelly, who also directs, borrows the filming conventions of
the genre, with many split screens, confessionals and voyeuristic close-ups. He
uses the techniques so well, in fact, that the naturalism is jarring —
confusing, even. The performances of the cast, too, are so exact and
understated, with each actor having such a clear understanding of his or her
character’s disposition and way of thinking that the ethical discussions feel
uncannily real.
This is what tripped me up (other than the production’s long
runtime and the fascinating though similarly overlong Ethics 101 discussions):
Was I actually watching some kind of social experiment, featuring real people
responding in real ways within the scaffolding of a fictional world?
It reminded me of the discomfort I felt watching “This
American Wife,” with its meta play on Bravo's “Real Housewives” franchise that
reproduced actual scenes and dialogue from the shows alongside scripted and
improvised material. In my review, I wondered what was improvised, what was
borrowed from the franchise and what was real.
My problem has to do with the question of artifice and
honesty — fitting for a show about ethics. I avoid watching reality-TV dramas
because the performances of these supposedly “real-life” scenarios are too
transparent. They feel disingenuous, parodies of reality despite the shows’
claims to the contrary. And this extends beyond the frames of the TV screen —
the carefully curated fiction of characters’ stories and their relationships
with one another become part of those individuals’ celebrity. It’s profitable.
Although theater is not an art form of total honesty either,
it is its own kind of artifice; the difference is in the presentation of that
fiction. In theater, there is the expectation of fantasy — we sit in an
audience and wait for the curtains to open. When we step into a theater we
agree to suspend our disbelief for the duration of a show. Reality TV, however,
depicts lives that continue without intermissions and characters who actually
exist in the world.
So, when these two realms collide, as they do in “The Kill
One Race” and “This American Wife,” it warrants a renegotiation of terms
between the theatrical production and the audience — a redefinition of the art
form and what is generally known and expected of it in its most traditional
forms.
I have stated my unease with this collision between reality
TV and the “honest” fiction of theater, but that’s not to say that this is an
aberration — or even an error — that productions ought to avoid. In fact, such
contortions and hybridizations of theater and other media allow art to confront
audiences with their preconceived notions about which stories should be told in
which ways. In the end, perhaps the truest sentiments lie somewhere in the
space between reality and theater.
"The Kill One Race" Through July 4;
thekillonerace.com
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