It has been said that I am too critical, and while I am certainly highly critical, I would not agree to excess. High standards are always important to the elevation of quality, and low standards will always breed mediocrity, or worse, decadence. As an audience member, to say nothing of being a fledgling critic, it's my job to react honestly to a performance. I would rather dislike 80% of Bay Area Theatre than blindly applaud everything like a trained seal. My applause, though it means nothing to the art and everything to the artist, must be worth something. In this failing economy, I refuse to let it devalue. Besides, at least four times a year I am lucky enough to have my standards met and my faith in the arts restored.
That said, "S.O.S.", the new techno-heavy and aggressively fast paced performance by Big Art Group at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, filled me with enough faith to begin speaking in tongues. Its vigorous and surprisingly creative attack on pop culture's vacuity, egoism, and cannibalism delighted me so much that I spent half the performance with a manic grin, and the other half of the performance waiting for a quiet moment to let out a laugh. Its spectacle of camp and bald-faced critique was smart and refreshing. The relentless pace of the piece and its honey-thick density of language doubtlessly alienated some (it may have alienated me if it had gone on for another ten minutes), but the explosive energy of the performers, the creativity in use of technology, and the profundity of it's message overwhelmingly spell "see this show... again and again and again."
At its core, "S.O.S." exposes the constant reinvention of popular culture, and the paradoxical lack of novelty therein. Some characters complain of emptiness, of lacking fulfillment from their constant consumption of shows like "Realness" or beverages like "Diet Pretty," while other characters claim to be staging a revolution, a creation of a "new emptiness." The macro-consumer characters buy into the propaganda of the would-be revolutionaries, follow them to a trash dump, and witness the creation of their new emptiness: a blow up balloon Frankenstein made from Halloween and Christmas iconography. And here we understand the biggest joke of the performance, that this new culture is represented by a balloon, an object that is all surface and no substance other than hot air. The revolution ushered in a paradigm that is just as empty as the last.
But of course we should have seen this coming. The play is saturated with foreshadowing manifested in the form of the technology used in its staging.
Perhaps the most noteworthy facet of "S.O.S." is its use of technology in telling the story and giving texture to the theme. The performance uses no set in the conventional sense, but rather large screens for projecting and filming in front of. For example, the macro-consumption characters perform in front of a black screen and behind a camera. The camera films them interacting with cardboard representations of 3D objects, such as phones, keyboards, knifes, and "Diet Pretty." As the camera films them in front of a dark screen, it projects their image instantly to another screen and imposes a kaleidoscope of mass media imagery behind the filmed characters. Nothing in the resulting projection is 'real' except for the actor, not the props, not the background, not even the fake hair they put on as costume. The use of this technology is not only visually engaging, but further articulates the superficiality of the characters.
Meanwhile, the revolutionaries are presented through multiple cameras, which are then projected on multiple screens. Each projections is a different composite image mixed together from various camera feeds. For example, the background layer image of a projection may be that of a city street, which is taken from the camera where an actor is holding a printed image of a city street in front of the camera. The next layer may be that of an actor standing and pretending to speak on the phone, but the hand in the projected image that holds up the phone is actually being filmed from a different camera and is in fact a different actor's hand. The resulting projection of a city street, a talking head, and a phone-holding hand is created from three different cameras and three different actors. The resulting projection is a composite of images that are not what they seem, just as their “new emptiness” is a balloon creature composite that is not what it seems.
The most lasting impression left by "S.O.S.", like all good performance, is not in the technical or craft creativity, but in the poignancy of its message. Not yet discussed here is the part of the performance that deals with the story of several animals whom escape a lab or city for the promises of a better life in a forest. But these animals quickly die of starvation; they are unable to find food or water. Is "S.O.S." arguing that we cannot escape the inertia of pop culture reinvention? That to do so would throw us into a harsh world where we would not survive?
I'm not sure, and I don't want to believe so. I like to believe that a paradigm shift is possible, and I'm sure the message of "S.O.S." is not as fatalistic as I interpret it to be. If I could, I would return to the theatre to see the show again. Multiple viewings of this delightfully dense piece are likely to resolve my current quandary, just as they are likely to elicit new ones. But that is the hallmark of all great art. I would rather be consistently challenged than disappointed.
