Stage
Weales, Gerald
STAGE DOWN THE TUBES BLUE MAN GROUP 'PIECES' When the advertisement for Blue Man Group's Tubes appeared last fall, it looked like a case of upward-mobility tidying. When I first saw Matt...
...David Greenspan is a playwright with performanceart connections...
...The intensity of Blue Man—their solemnity in earlier days—suggests that there may be more to the show than its gags and gadgetry...
...Their set, designed by Kevin Joseph Roach from their concept, is the whole theater, lined with tubes along the walls...
...It is a grand hysterical finish, and the audience loves it...
...GERALD WEALES Commonweal 13 March 1992: 25...
...Character 1, as this solo performer is called, appears again in "The Big Tent," this time played by a woman (Tracey Ellis) who discusses the play she/he is working on with his/her aunt (played by a man, Ron Bagden) and the offstage lover from the toilet turn (again Bagden), now onstage allowing for quick-change bits...
...In "Portrait of the Artist," he sits on the toilet and contemplates his meager reception as a playwright (in fact, there were only a handful of people in the audience the night I saw Pieces), fantasizes the celebrity he says he does not want, talks to his offstage lover, and lipsyncs to Barbra Streisand "People Who Need People...
...A critic with a stronger taste for significance-seeking than I have might make something of the skewed comments on art and communication, might cluck over the excesses of our consumer society, but whatever meaning Tubes has lies in the disintegrative function of comedy...
...I assumed that "Group" was added because Blue Man (or their producers) feared that the larger off-Broadway audience—unlike the one they customarily faced in the performancearts venues—would be confused by the plural as singular...
...Mainly, however, they are about a gay Jewish playwright who is writing a play about his family, and, if we can believe the 24: 13 March 1992 Commonweal actors in "Too Much in the Sun" (Bagden and Ellis again) who discuss the work they are supposed to be rehearsing, it is hardly a nostalgic picture of the old folks at home...
...Two of the long short plays that make up The Home Show Pieces, recently presented at the Public Theater, are solo pieces, performed by the author...
...The "collectively known as...
...The heart of Tubes is the show that I saw in much simpler form at MTI...
...The show had been running for a few months when I got to it, and it was obvious that the group had developed groupies—like those that keep turning up at Penn & Teller shows—who come delighted with the action before it begins...
...in the program seems to confirm my suspicion...
...Greenspan's fondness for sexual cross-casting, indicated in his production of Gonza the Lancer last season, seems more a trick than a revelation, although the autobiographical content his work (Dead Mother) suggests a confusion more complex than his homosexuality, which is one of his subjects in Pieces...
...a strobe light cuts through the space and the group and the combo join in a sound assault...
...Take earplugs...
...The interrelated pieces are about the making of the play, a game with the audience because the work teases beneath the deconstruction of conventional theater and it makes a joke of the demands on the audience...
...At the Astor Place Theatre, where they are currently playing, they have much more equipment to work with—a screen for instance that can show action backstage— and tubes, tubes, tubes...
...Tubes is a classy and glitzy show, and a very successful one...
...122 Field Trips, they called themselves simply Blue Man...
...and there are tubes that they can play like vibes, contributing to the deafening sound level which the combo provides whenever voice-over is not needed...
...They flash large cards full of platitudes, challenging the audience to try reading just one as the three keep turning over their message boards...
...The three very funny men who make up the group are painted blue, which emphasizes the largely expressionless way in which they perform their grotesque routines...
...paper unfurled from the back of the auditorium...
...The appeal now is an occasion to release one's rigidities and what, after all, is carnivale for...
...Yet the onstage combo, the more visible assistants, the female voice-over on a mock science film suggest group in the sense of company...
...There was something a little scary about Blue Man when I first saw them, but OffBroadway has made them likable...
...In "Doing the Beast," he appears in bed, raunchy and alone, where his attempts to masturbate are regularly interrupted by phone calls...
...The program runs almost three hours...
...These are only samples to whet your appetite for predigested Twinkies and flying marshmallows...
...The pieces are detailed, repetitious in a way that indicates a good ear for ordinary speech, sometimes funny, finally exhausting...
...When I first saw Matt Goldman, Phil Stanton, and Chris Wink performing at Philadelphia's Movement Theatre International, as part of one of the P.S...
...Go if you want to loosen up...
...They and a volunteer from the audience stuff themselves on Twinkies and, then, through a tube in their overalls spew a disgusting looking mess that they proceed to eat hungrily...
...At its best, Pieces suggests that, without his ambition and his tsouris, Greenspan might have been a natural for revue sketches...
...And its integrative function...
...At the end, the tubes are released at the bottom, so that they hang down, waving madly, and the audience is covered with unrolling (toilet...
...One of them throws food—a candy full of cake coloring, marshmallows—across the stage which the others catch in their mouths and then spit up to create works of art—a painting, a statue...
...But, then, there is not much call for revue sketches these days except when they are transformed into performance-art pieces...
Vol. 119 • March 1992 • No. 5
