C.J. Merriman and Amanda Blake Davis
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
A Hollywood Fringe production at The Broadwater
Through June 30
Jonas Oppenheim, the writer, composer, lyricist, and director of this facetious/earnest cabaret featuring a dying star, or planet, Earth (Amanda Blake Davis), has a storied track record of creating discomfort in the theater. In my view that’s a rare and to-be-treasured tenet of bringing a crowd to a performance space and letting things rip.
Ten years ago, Oppenheim’s guerilla satire, I’m Going to Kill the President!, invited audience who had reserved a ticket to meet at an “undisclosed location” in L.A., where they were met and guided to some unsigned warehouse-like stage. That part was titillating. At some point, after a strategically meandering and stupid sketch, an actor pulled out a cellphone and had everyone shout, in unison, “I’m going to kill the president!” which everybody did, dutifully — audience participation and all that. Within minutes, LAPD cops, or what looked like LAPD cops, burst in, demanding everybody’s IDs, saying that a federal crime had been perpetrated by everybody in the room. Talk about a chilling effect. That was 2014, and Oppenheim, prophetically, had creeping authoritarianism on his mind. “You are required to carry ID on you at all times,” one of the police (an actor, actually) lectured the audience. That was/is not true, though it’s getting creepingly closer to reality should non-White audiences be subject to legal status checks by local authorities in places such as Arizona and Texas. Oppenheim’s satire was as chilling as it was precise, in targeting the source of its wrath.
In his Planet Earth Farewell Concert, Oppenheim uses a jocular cabaret frame to address and redress the causes of climate change. All the culture wars and issues of bigotry and opportunity and social justice world-wide are mere distractions from the looming, urgent threat posed by oil companies trafficking in choking the planet, and the climate change deniers who enable them. In Oppenheim’s concert, doddering Mother Earth, in a hoop skirt emblazoned with a map of the world, wheezes and coughs and sputters her way through a sequence of ditties in her honor. It’s hard to laugh, which is the point, the discomfort stemming from complacency.
A number of clever, Tom Lehrer-like musical rags punctuate the show. Talk about laughing at death. In fact, there’s an audience participation riff that asks one audience member to demonstrate her laughing skills in front of the crowd. This may be an old-school device, but it’s still potent.
Oppenheim won’t leave it at that. Rather, he has the cast divide the audience into groups, where they create a poem, or a puppet show, or a song, dedicated to climate change, each of which is performed. Later, they guide the audience onto the stage from which, in an imagined future, they may retake their seats based on their income. “How many people earn $200,000 or more a year?” an actor asks. One guy raises his hand and is guided to a seat in the center of the audience and invited to sip on a glass of wine, like a Business Class traveler on American Airlines. “How many people earn $45,000 to $200,000?” A number of people raise their hands to applause. “Don’t applaud that. That’s no reason to applaud,” an actor chides the crowd. The majority of this audience who earn under $45,000 must remain standing. That is the allegory for our global future, and for much of our lives at present. The suggestion is that income inequality, and its consequences, are destined to become ever more dire. Score!
When it comes to audience participation, I’m a bit of a crank, preferring to sit in the dark. This is not necessarily a good thing, but I’m guessing I’m not alone in this. The theatrical devices employed by Oppenheim felt to me a bit like a racial sensitivity workshop: doctrinaire, peppered with truths and half-truths, and slightly condescending in its attempt to get us all on the same team. We know the oil companies are as benevolent and well-meaning as the tobacco companies of yore. We know that billionaires are not our friends. In its own, well-meaning way, this advocacy cabaret actually tells us, directly, that the remedy for climate change is to vote: vote moderate democrats out of office and vote in AOC for president.
Really?
Rather than be invited to join an amiable, save-the-planet club, I’d rather have the crap scared out me, as in I’m Going to Kill the President! Show us the realities of life in 2080 if we sit on our asses, in the dark, like me. Please don’t lecture about doing something meaningful, getting us all to sing along. That’s just another, gentler version of the authoritarianism that Oppenheim ridiculed so effectively in his earlier show. Compel me to do something with truths that blister, as though there’s no alternative, as though life itself depends on it. Because it does.
The Broadwater, 6322 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd.; through June 30. Check website for schedule. https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/10769. 75 minutes without intermission.
