by Leigh Witchel
Like a distantly orbiting comet, “THEM” has returned periodically to New York, leaving a trail of searing performances. It was first performed in 1986, conceived by Ishmael Houston-Jones to Dennis Cooper’s wistful text accompaniment and Chris Cochrane’s guitar playing. Its revivals in 2010, and now this year, have formed a marker of what’s passed in the time intervening.
In 1986, the AIDS crisis was whipping through New York’s gay community like a hurricane howling outside a window before it shattered the pane. Houston-Jones was in his mid-thirties. During the 2010 production he was much older than the rest of the cast, but still seemed within the group. Houston-Jones, Cooper and Cochrane are still doing the piece. Eight years have gone by and now Houston-Jones is 67. The AIDS crisis is approaching 40, protease cocktails can now drink in any state. Performing a solo, Houston-Jones stood still and brought his fingers to his mouth or waved his hands in a negative motion. He is a figure talking about his past. The men onstage are no longer there with him, but shadows.
In contrast, even in 1986, Cooper’s dialogue was always about memory, looking back at the fumbling or ecstatic encounters of coming out as a young man. So reading it at age 33 or 65, it had a similar effect.
There are some interesting parallels in the opening of Cooper’s monologue to the opening of William Forsythe’s 1984 masterpiece mixing ballet and text, “Artifact.” Both revolve around how memory affects narrative.
Artifact: “I remember a story and it went like this.”
THEM: “ . . . I remember certain things, like what they wore, which wasn’t anything special.”
In “Artifact” memory is as slippery and treacherous as quicksand. Cooper’s memories in “THEM” are a demon lover that teases him by seeming clear even as he knows how changeable it is: “I thought about love. I think I confused what they did with it.”
Opening the work, Kensaku Shinohara stood with his back to us in the glow of a single light source. A low ambient noise rumbled like a small aircraft buzzing overhead. Houston-Jones approached him, sizing him up and started to unroll something – a narrow piece of thin cloth. He blindfolded Shinohara and delicately secured the knot, nuzzling him, maneuvering him to face front. Shinohara touched him, trying to read his features.
Houston-Jones started an embrace, but was pushed away by Shinohara. Another man, Jeremy Pheiffer (apart from the creators, the only returning member of the 2010 cast), came up to fondle Shinohara and foreplay morphed into wrestling.
Part of the power of “THEM” is how well the medium matches the message. The language of improvisation slides right into the language of a sexual encounter. Hentyle Yapp and Michael Parmelee raced into one another and recoiled as if punch drunk. To Cochrane’s guitar static, they tore or tumbled out of their embraces with the casual intensity of an intimate but random hookup.
Pheiffer entered with a wooden 2×4, dropping coins and batting them away in frustration. Cooper launched into a monologue listing deaths, at first suicides of men, then expanding into deaths without cause and including a woman. All tragic and pointless, but threatening to become a Gashlycrumb Tinies litany of morbidity. But it was quickly counterbalanced by another soliloquy, this one a list of happy, casual encounters. It was the flip side of dangerous random sex, the boys who discovered each other and for a few hours weren’t alone. During that talk, the group slowly exchanged positions, one man moving to another in embrace.
Yapp now had the wooden stick and slammed it against a mattress laying in the middle of the stage again and again, grunting in exhaustion. As Cooper spoke again, Yapp leaned against a wall, waiting. Johnnie Cruise Mercer slammed him up against the wall and they had sex. Later on, Parmelee got pushed again and again on to the mattress while Michael Watkiss watched.
In the most fabled section of the work, Pheiffer led Shinohara onstage. Shinohara was clad in white, still blindfolded, and gently tethering himself to the back of Pheiffer’s shirt. Over Pheiffer’s shoulder was a slaughtered goat, snow-white except for the red line down its belly where its entrails had been eviscerated. The moment was as beautiful and terrifying as any sacrificial rite. Pheiffer pushed Shinohara down on the mattress, and dropped the goat on the bed as well.
Shinohara started fucking it. He rubbed it madly, ground his crotch into the carcass, even spread its legs. And yet it could have gone farther. The work is shocking and it needs to be shocking to work. The cast on the first night wasn’t completely there yet. Shinohara stuck his foot into the cavity of the carcass. If you saw “THEM” in 2010, it would have been impossible to forget Arturo Vidich sticking his head all the way into that bloody crevice. Like Vidich, when he was done, Shinohara was covered with a blanket by another dancer and lay there with the carcass for the rest of the piece.
In the darkness the others returned, looking at us, but not seeing us. They were looking in imaginary mirrors: scanning their torsos, feeling their armpits for lumps, at their necks for enlarged lymph nodes. That’s what happened in the era of Kaposi’s Sarcoma, when AIDS was the “gay cancer” and if you found that lump, it was a death sentence of slow, lingering debilitation.
Pheiffer reread Cooper’s opening monologue, slowly, as if in a daze. Cochrane’s guitar loudened as one dancer collapsed, cradled by another. Parmelee slammed at one of the men, half assault and half encounter. Then he moved to the next man, like an infection. He left him lying there and played a game of catch with another man for Alvaro Gonzalez Dupuy’s debilitated body. The lights went out as Parmelee approached Yapp, the last man standing, still feeling his neck as the guitar feedback howled to silence.
As powerful as “THEM” is, it was still in first gear on opening night. It’s hard to talk about consistency; it’s the kind of work that will be different every night and also build up steam during the run. Yet Mercer tearing into a solo with a wild sustained attack, touching his face or scrambling on the floor, was a marker that the rest of the cast hadn’t yet made it to the commitment or energy level of the 2010 cast.
Even PSNY is no longer PS122. It’s the same building, but after a huge renovation and rebranding, the space is now larger and unobstructed. A duet that moved back and forwards nearly careening into the first row of spectators in 2010 was now safely contained on the stage. Other times, the architecture of the new space worked better than the old one. When Yapp and Mercer were grinding one another at the back of the space, lighting designer Michael Stiller flooded an alcove behind with incandescence to reveal the same thing happening with another couple.
If you came of age as a gay man in the 80s, the feelings “THEM” evokes are like a time warp. It encapsulates what cruising for sex, while entering an era when sex could kill you, was like – the risky heat, the horniness, the frustration, the boredom, the fear. It’s one of the most telling dances from the AIDS crisis and though this comet seems to be visiting at a time of ill omens, it’s hard not to be in awe of its return.
copyright © 2018 by Leigh Witchel
“THEM” – Chris Cochrane, Dennis Cooper, Ishmael Houston-Jones
Performance Space New York, New York, NY
June 21, 2018
Cover: Jeremy Pheiffer and Michael Watkiss in “THEM.” Photo © Rachel Papo.
Got something to say about this? Sound off here
[Don’t miss a thing! We’ll send you a notification of every article we post if you sign up with your email. (The signup is right below, scroll down). We promise you won’t be deluged and we won’t spam you either.]
