1 October 2006: Mee, bobrauschenbergamerica
American Repertory Company, Loeb Theatre, Cambridge. Created and performed by the SITI Company. Directed by Anne Bogart
We aren’t told in the program what SITI stands for; perhaps it’s just a way to sound out “CITY.” In any case, this company, founded in 1992 by Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki to revitalize contemporary U. S. theatre, still keeps a base in Saratoga Springs, New York, at Skidmore College. The core company of nine actors, four designers, a playwright, a stage manager, and administrators, has been augmented by another actor; all are members of Actors Equity. They come close, in their notable variety of body and personality types, to correspond to a traditional repertory company that, given enough rehearsal, could perform almost any play. They are confident, experienced performers who can dance and sing as well as act.
In this piece the playwright Charles Mee has put together a kind of pastiche (the term is used by Robert Orchard, the ART Executive Director, in a welcoming note in the program) based on the art of Robert Rauschenberg, who came to prominence on the American art scene in the mid-twentieth century (and who, to judge from my efforts at Googling him, is still alive and living in Florida). In some ways it is a tribute to the artist and a fragmentary retrospective of a kind, but it is not mere nostalgia that drives this production. On the contrary, as the Internet-address-like title of the work seems to suggest, what we are to see cannot — could not — be aptly described by a more conventional title such as Bob Rauschenberg’s America, which would perhaps suggest a fond looking back , fifty years or so, to a time when New York was taken, or overtaken, by pop art from such rebellious artists as Andy Warhol. As I think about it, Rauschenberg has proved to have more staying power than the painter of the Campbell soup can. That all-in-lowercase-no-punctuation title would have been possible only in the last few years; and so it puts us on notice that what we are to see about Rauschenberg, whatever it is, is going to be viewed through a contemporary lens, perhaps noticeably out of time and space.
The setting is a huge replica of an American flag, folded so that the left half of it is a straight-up-and-down backing, while the right half continues to run down stage almost to the edge. A bicycle is brought on and ridden across the stage at one point, reminiscent of a white ghost-like bicycle in one of Rauschenberg’s paintings. There is a human-sized chicken (did he paint a chicken? Probably). One of the female actors is on roller skates for much of the performance — which lasts for an uninterrupted hour and forty-five minutes. The fictional setting varies, but the most frequently recurring is a Midwestern small town, where you could “walk to the end of your block and right away you were in the country, surrounded by rows of corn.” One of the female characters is “Bob’s Mom” (Kelly Maurer), in