Strike a Pose

By Steven Drukman

Richard Foreman’s Maria del Bosco, which premiered at New York’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater earlier this year, will appear at the Singapore Arts Festival June 6-9.

Richard Foreman’s 50th production, Maria del Bosco (Sex & Racing Cars: A Sound Opera), marks a bit of a departure for New York’s downtown doyen of deconstructive dross. The nine-time Obie winner may be gunning for double digits with his exploration of—get this—supermodels, pop culture and the after-effects of Sept. 11. These less abstracted “things” are, of course, filtered through his trademark Foremania, but the astonishing result proves that this 64-year-old American auteur is not content to rest on laurels and repeat the same play ad nauseam. What began in 1999 as his first biographical treatment of a real person (Bad Boy Nietzsche!) and continued in 2000 as a wrestling with ideological doctrine (Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty) now flips through the pages of glossies and blows kisses from the catwalk. With Maria del Bosco, Richard Foreman has gone to Elle and back.

Still present are the bells and buzzers, the fractured phenomenology of objects-in-space, the bright lights and loops of music. As always, there are some nifty visual puns: At one key moment, the production’s three ballerinas-cum-supermodels clasp pictures of hearts to their chests and pluck strings fastened across the canvases. (Renderings of hearts that, incidentally, look like Jim Dine’s paintings re-drawn by Keith Haring.) And, of course, there’s still the mess, the cluttered, brightly lit bric-a-brac that provides the Foreman visual cachet. 

The playbill contains, surprisingly, an explanatory program note from Foreman, as well as two epigraphs (both by T.S. Eliot). There is a pastiche of advertisements cut from magazines along the walls—in Kodachrome and full non-Foreman color—in place of the usual frieze of Hebrew letters. The “sound opera” of the subtitle consists of 40 cryptic aphorisms—“tripled in layers of processed sound,” the director informs us—with at least one layer barking out a goofy voice that is not unlike an animal from a Warner Brothers cartoon. 

It’s curious that Foreman seems to be making gestures toward the “real,” when one of the tape-looped aphorisms proclaims that “the real is what destroys you.” No doubt, the image of a jumbo-jet flying into a paned casement window—even if held aloft by an apparently vacuous ballerina—has some resonance of “real” events after Sept. 11. (Another aphorism in the play raises the question of whether violence is the only poetry left—resonant of the remarks that got Karlheinz Stockhausen in hot water after the Twin Towers collapsed.) What all this may have to do with the deadening effects of fashion-induced anorexia, a racing car that goes to the brain (or not) and slices of cherry pie are left by Foreman, as always, to each individual spectator.

The taffeta-bearing trio (Funda Duyal, Okwui Okpokwasili and, in the title role, Juliana Francis) is, indeed, supermodel gorgeous. Each has mastered the distracted look of the Helmut Newton prototypes that first inspired Maria del Bosco (before Kate Manheim—Foreman’s wife and longtime featured actress—suggested that the characters become ballerina personae). In only one hour, the play speaks volumes—think of Jacques Derrida writing beauty tips for Vogue and you start to get the idea. Gray may be this year’s black, but let’s hope that the plays of Richard Foreman never go out of fashion.

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