Performance Review

The Medium

The Saratoga International Theater Institute, five of whose actors constitute the cast of The Medium, was founded by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki in 1992. The Medium is a theatrical essay on the ideas and work of Marshall McLuhan, composed in the kinetic hieroglyphs of superbly disciplined actors' bodies. A relatively small portion of its text is derived directly from McLuhan, who in a brown suit of 1950s cut, a bow tie, and serious brown shoes addresses us avuncularly at the top of the show. The bulk of the dialogue deluges us with information on the Information Age, wittily illustrated in short scenes steeped in pop culture imagery. The show's rhythm deliberately suggests "channel-surfing," as McLuhan abruptly shifts the action with an (anachronistic) remote control. A ceaseless and very loud soundscape (including Dionne Warwick, mega-bass heart beats, thunder claps of electronic static, and a rendition of "Short'nin' Bread" by the Dave Brubeck Quartet) both underscores and counterpoints the dialogue.

Reminiscent of Arthur Kopit's Wings, The Medium transpires at the moment of McLuhan's stroke. The recurrent electronic buzz frequently referred to by the cast also registers a mortal cardiovascular event, thereby making McLuhan's own body the battleground of the technological revolution. One might thus construe the action of the piece as McLuhan's attempt to "get the word out" about the impact of technology on the human psyche--an attempt that ends poignantly in strangled silence.

The acrobatic cast buzzes through twenty or so sketches in a fast hour and a half. Virtual reality is explained through a stand-up comedy routine. Detective drama dialogue delineates McLuhan's famous distinction of hot and cool media. A talk show, CNN, a cooking show, "The Dating Game," and other staple television formats divertingly convey gobbets of information on cybernated greenhouses, telebrain sets, the Human Genome Project, nonfattening fat, cyborgs, renewable body organs, tucking your kid in from a phone booth, and the prospect that Mick Jagger's "Sympathy for the Devil" will in the future be heard only on easy listening stations.

This would (and occasionally does) strike one as overly facile were it not for the mesmerizing ensemble work, facilitated both by the Suzuki training and Bogart's own system of "viewpoints." In contemporary business clothes rendered with [End Page 357] harlequinesque whimsy by Gabriel Berry, Bogart's five actors wrestle chairs and a table, manipulate each other's bodies like ventriloquist dummies, execute Robert Wilsonian slow-motion stage crossings, collapse in rag doll heaps, and occasionally drape themselves over the square, tubular steel frames backed by black curtains which lend to the setting a faint suggestion of black and white television. If there are in all this ghostly after-images of Meyerholdian biomechanics, Open Theatre transitions, Laban technique, and Grotowski plastiques, they only serve to enrich the theatrical context by adducing a proud avant-garde tradition.

The character of McLuhan, played with intense energy and relentless concentration by Will Bond, sometimes controls the action with his remote, but is ultimately drowned out (a recurring motif) by the media buzz that, in the contention of The Medium, is numbing us to death. Just before the end of the piece, Bond's McLuhan, his body frozen in contortion, literally chokes on the line "There is no inevitability so long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening"--grinding it out for painful minutes, an anti-aria of stifled voice, failed breath, and suspended purpose.

Here and throughout, the grueling Suzuki training not only sustains the stamina required for the nonstop action; it also enacts the theme. Against the Cheshire Cat disembodiment (an image evoked in the text) effected by technological revolution, these actors launch their own bodies into the breach--asserting kinesthetically what the text leaves in doubt. The medium (of theatre) is the message.

There is a familiar, if faint, ring of self-congratulation here. The Medium implies that theatre is the last bastion for humanity, a position that in this case gratifies the conscience, but not the heart. While the opacity of the text manifestly reaches for the "cool" and inclusive, as an emotional experience The Medium remains simply cold.

Attilio Favorini
University of Pittsburgh

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