Super Duper

Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Ghost Road Company at Los Angeles Theatre Center
Through July 26

RECOMMENDED

There’s a core idea running through Ghost Road Company’s new theatrical installation, Super Duper, devised by the company, and conceived and staged by Katharine Noon. It’s an idea that also emerged in The Dry Years. the troupe’s prior production staged in February of this year. In that play (by John Guerra) a writer of history was compelled to wrestle with the conundrum of whether she could tell her young daughter the truth about her (the writer’s) complicity in the death of a family member.

The truth. It sounds so simple. Try to tell the truth. Just try.  

Super Duper is an ambitious, immersive exhibition that transits the audience in small groups from installation to installation, investigating how that notion of truth, and telling it, is anything but simple. Super Duper, like The Dry Years, uses an artist as its anchor — though not a writer but a visual artist. Furthermore, The Artist doesn’t appear in any of the rooms, but is spoken about obsessively by everyone else. 

Creating an artist as the central character runs the risk of an event that’s bit precious, and there is some of that.

However, the central issue is intriguing. The Critic (Ronnie Clark), a New York Times art critic, reviewed a piece by The Artist called “Stolen Identity.” The review isn’t in the show, though we’re led to believe it’s harsh. This is because The Critic, in one of a series of solo vignettes, each featuring one of the principal characters for an audience of three of four people, tells us that he values being honest more than he values being kind. He also asks members of the audience to chime in with their views on how to render verdicts on the artistic creations of friends and neighbors. 

David Offner’s set (spread across a rehearsal hall, a hallway, and a former office space) includes a carousel of open, decorated cubicles, each occupied by a different character, each of whom asks their small cluster of roving witnesses to chime in on a conundrum faced by the character. I generally find such audience interaction imposing and annoying but not here, mainly because the questions serve to remove the show’s underlying ideas from the insular world of art and attach them to the worlds of people actually living very different lives. In the performance I attended, the group I’d joined felt at liberty to chime in with contradictory and intriguing responses. 

At issue is who actually authored the harsh review, because shortly after its publication, The Artist claimed it was ghostwritten by himself and published under The Critic’s name. This was, in all likelihood, a publicity stunt by The Artist, aiming to “control the narrative,” — but it had other ramifications.

Each small group of audience members (selected before show’s start by the color of a button distributed at check-in) observes a soliloquy by each character — in isolation, in a separate cubicle — punctuated by a small discussion between the character and the audience. The mini-group then moves on to the next character in an adjacent cubicle, so different groups of audience absorb the story in a slightly different sequence.

My first encounter was with The Warrior (John Guerra), an attorney newly graduated from law school, who felt compelled to defend his “little brother” from a charge of defamation. Only later did I realize that this litigation was likely brought against The Artist by the Critic, based on the Artist’s insistence that the Critic had not actually written the negative review of “Stolen Identity” that was published under the Critic’s byline. For a New York Times critic, that would be a job-terminating breach.   

“Would you lie in order to protect somebody you care about?” asks The Warrior of the audience, in an echo from The Dry Years.

How the litigation transpired, we never learn. Rather, we’re invited to forge connections among the characters from hints they all drop. With the steady accrual of evidence, it’s a bit like a murder mystery without a murder. Rather, we become increasingly cognizant of a spider’s web, ties that bind with sticky rope, connecting a kind of extended family.

We hear also from The Ally (the sensual Camila Rozo), The Artist’s sister engaged in quasi incestuous (if not fully incestuous) support of her brother. We never know for sure where the truth lies, which is the point. This is not spoon-feeding, this is spoon-flinging.

Christine Briehan brings an endearing turn to The Lover, a woman addicted romantically to The Artist whose interests lie elsewhere, and who shows up for her in fits and starts (so she reports). Zachary Bones portrays The Rival, an artist himself, seething from having to work in the shadow of a brighter star (and publicity hound).  We find The Caretaker (Jen Kays, oozing with gentle yet stoic compassion) in a hospital room, describing her care of a man dying from lung cancer. Too much smoking. With a bit more evidence, it becomes clear that this is The Critic. Alan Corvaia weighs in as The Artist’s strung-out friend, The Jester, whose main topic of conversation is mind-altering substances. And Brian Weir serves as our Docent, a flaming (his word) impresario, brimming with anecdotes and witticisms, who lays out the ground rules.

Across the hall is a third space, a gallery of land-line telephones, lit with Brandon Baruch’s ominous fluorescent strips attached to the walls like insects. The entire audience sees all of the characters gathered there, each on a phone, speaking to voices from the dead. In a moment we’ll be invited to pick up a phone and listen in.

Super Duper does indulge in some antiquated tropes, i.e. The Artist (who never appears) who’s personally a jerk in some noble pursuit of “the truth.” Most artists I know are actually pretty nice people, including the producer and director of this show. Similarly trope-ish is the chain-smoking critic who’s a bit of an ass, in some noble pursuit of “the truth,” or at least honesty. I can’t think of a single critic who smokes anymore, let alone chain-smokes. Similarly, most of the critics I know are pretty nice people in their pursuit of honesty, partly because so many of them are also artists who know what their peers are enduring, and largely because arts criticism has become mostly an avocation and labor of love. So the question is whether such critics write more from compassion or from resentment. My observation leans to the former. The jerk-ness also comes from the mirage that one’s opinion is loftier than it actually is, from self-importance. True, that crap is all over Yelp, but there’s scant evidence that it’s a staple of arts criticism anymore, that critics are sad parasites sucking the lifeblood from artists. That’s from an age when newspapers actually covered the fine arts, when critics’ opinions carried commercial weight. Power corrupts. For arts critics, a power outage has dimmed, if not extinguished, the lights of fame. 

The story’s ambiguities, however, are a virtue, as if to say, “No, this is not CSI, this is not The Mousetrap, this is not an ancient Greek tragedy, where a final comprehensive truth emerges.  The vision of this exhibition is that some truths can’t be known, only pondered, and in that regard it feels like a more authentic representation of our age, and our dubious sources of information, and misinformation, and disinformation, than a story that traffics in certainties.

It’s well worth a look.             

Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., Dwntwn LA; Sat.-Wed., 8 pm; thru Aug. 23. https://ghostroad.org Running time 100 minutes without intermission.