The Many Unique Struggles Against Oppressive Rationality in My Onliness

 

What happens to a petition after it reaches its required signatures and is sent to the official authorities to be verified and considered?  Do they print out the list of signatures and tear it to pieces?  And maybe roll around laughing while they do it?

 

My Onliness, written by Robert Lyons, directed by Daniel Irizarry (One Eighth Theater / Soho Think Tank / IRT Theater), finds humor in calamity.  We already know what’s going wrong - all we can do is bring our dreams and emotions to the surface, in all their grotesque forms, and let them fascinate us. Once we let go of the narrative thread, the absurdity makes sense and allows the forms to come together in unpredictable and astonishing images.  We lose our hope for a better world, not in our emotions, but in the tangled logic of our inner monologue.

 

In this world, politics unfolds like a comedy, served with popcorn.  King Ludwig’s consciousness is a combination of all living and dead dictators, a “uniqueness” reincarnated in every absolutist or totalitarian regime preying on a new country.  The entire play unfolds as a role reversal fantasy: the king (a true alter-ego of the native Red Emperor) becomes a jester - who sits with equal ease on his raised throne or on the knees of the audience, who are equally implicated in the game.  Once Morbidita (the petitioner who never laughs) understands that her personal suffering is shared by the entire kingdom, she reinvents herself as a leader and becomes the king's ruthless puppeteer.

 

Despite the character’s oppressive and desolate lives, the audience laughs.  The show’s carefully calculated surprises emphasize both the pure randomness (of theater) and the most delicious nature of the human experience - that the only way to survive is by fighting to the end for a gram of meaning. In this subjective understanding of meaning lies the key to salvation.  The spirit of the “carnival” not only highlights the aristocracy’s fragile value system throughout history, but also its devious use of fascination to capture a person’s attention and beliefs: just as a mechanical chicken becomes for a few seconds the most important (and unique) character in the play.

 

In addition, the play’s richness lies in a reinvented materialism, a collage of objects and colors gathered from the wildest dreams of childhood, by adults who rediscover their deepest meanings in a completely unconscious state of raw emotions and fleeting thoughts; what begins as a small leak in the cognitive amniotic sac ends in a complete rupture by our enraged maturity.  Childhood precedes the conscious (and perhaps illusory) assumption that we are each unique.  Children express themselves without filter, selfish motives, or comparing themselves with equally unique others (in spite of the attempted influence by surrounding adults).  The admirable choice to reproduce this childish “uniqueness” through cabaret captures the child’s uncensored candor and intuition, as close as it can ever be to the adult ideal.

 

No character on stage is only themself.  A shadow (or double) always accompanies them, viscerally translating their words, and especially their emotions, into movements, expressions, and sounds, emphasizing the sincere and vulnerable humanity behind every grotesque or reckless action.  Each person contributes, in their own unique way, to the definition of humanity.  But when some become more unique (or more equal) than others, that unique quality becomes a mirage in the desert.  With one eye open instead of both, Narcissus' reflection in the lake destroys our image of ourselves, as we search for our own moral compass.

 

At the same time, the unique characters in this fable also represent a category of people in the kingdom, who indirectly reiterate their messages through two silent shadows, intentionally dressed in a cacophony of colors and clothing emphasizing their status as servants of the powerful.  Perhaps the fantasy of reversal continues here?  Perhaps the speakers and singers in the play are, in fact, those who give a voice to the characters whose only remaining freedom is their own bodies.  Or perhaps we just want to believe this helps place the play in our near future.

 

Although My Onliness offers the audience a wide range of tunes and refrains (from a wide range of musical genres) sung with great emotional power, there are still questions to be explored.  The resignation that the “mystery of life” will never be illuminated is not only accepted, it is used as a springboard for brainstorming the creative ways we fill the gaps at the limits of human knowledge.  For the curious, play is the most natural form for questioning and testing one's luck, and the fluid playfulness of the piece is evident not only in its content but also in its design.  The costumes in the show’s promotional image are not exactly the same as in this production, as My Onliness is not a singular uniqueness, but instead adapts to each new context with a renewed originality to enhance its essential ideas.

 

The atmosphere remains tragicomic and absurd, without contradiction, including the full range of emotions the social struggle between classes arrouses: not idolatry, but the simple desire for one's own uniqueness to be affirmed and accepted by the community.  The play also mimics the intellectual with long experimental discourses, while the writer sublimates his abstract knowledge into a bodily sensuality, challenging yet another hierarchy - the phallocentric hierarchy, dominated by verbosity and rigid reason.  Each hierarchy is unequivocally overturned by this unique, random, fragmented spectacle; far from the towering heights of the ivory tower, and hard to forget.

 

- Alexia Carson