Landmarks/a Mass of Muscle and Bone
There’s a lot to be said on the subject of women’s relationships with their bodies. Yet that thought in itself ought to be ludicrous: how alienated do you have to be to develop a “relationship” with yourself? On the other hand, women’s bodies often seem separate, lumpish, and recalcitrant to their owners, like donkeys we ride. Hence it was a big deal in 1971 when a feminist health book asserted that our bodies were ourselves. A landmark, you might say.
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Unfortunately Pyewacket’s new play Landmarks/a Mass of Muscle and Bone leaves the personal strictly personal, squandering every opportunity to talk about issues that might matter to anyone but playwright Kate Harris. In the piece, directed by Kerstin Broockmann and Kenneth Lee, Harris and two actresses (Lynne Hall and Deborah King) deliver monologues masquerading as conversation about the life and work of artists’ models. They also run through a series of poses for two artists standing at easels at the corners of the stage–as well as for any audience member who accepted the invitation to take a sketch pad on the way in the door. Yet Landmarks fails to say a single interesting thing about the meaning or power of body image, instead spouting cliches of confessional feminism. And the work’s occasional comic moments have the flavor of the 1970 movie What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, purporting to comment on prurience and squeamishness while actually exemplifying it.
Hall and King wear diaphanous gowns; Harris is naked. This might be a comment on the relative eroticism of partial versus total nudity, but it feels more like Harris’s determination that everyone in the audience look at her all the time. She confirms this conjecture by making a focus-stealing cross during one of Hall’s few speeches, and again by choosing to remove a briefly donned dress just at the climax of King’s.
Revealingly, Harris describes those sketching her–including audience members–by saying, “They are the mirror.” Though some of us imagined that theater artists were in the business of holding a mirror up to audiences, apparently it’s the other way around.
