nonreviews with Rachel & Merkel
Merkel and I have been sharing our “non-reviews” with each other for the past few months. We’ve written these reflections from a mysterious place. Sometimes, it was because we loved something and it just came out! Sometimes, because there was no other review, or because the review was so bad that we felt we needed to make a correction. Should we email these to the artists? To each other? To….you?!
“for a moment, i thought of starting a substack for non-reviews of things i love......” Merkel wrote to me in an email after sharing her reflection on Kate Berlant’s latest show, KATE. After, I kept thinking about her review. It didn’t feel right to keep it all to myself. So I texted her:
So we’re beginning a substack experiment!
Below is Merkel’s reflection about KATE. Below that is my reflection on Pure Colour by Sheila Heti.
We’ll see what comes next. Here’s what we know: we’ll only write when we feel the need. (So maybe this is it!!!)
With love and a lil new energy, even on this cold weekend,
Rachel & Merkel
MERKEL:
Why Did I Cry Watching Kate Berlant Try to Cry?
I am realizing there is a larger joke about my anxiety about not having anything to say. I don’t have anything to say. It’s the semiotics of theater without the content.—Kate Berlant
Leaving the show, I heard people using the word “irony.”
Critics used the word “skewering” (as in, “a skewering of the tropes of the solo show or even theater itself”).
I kept thinking of the word “clown.” The way a clown’s mockery can make and maintain the sacred. I left KATE feeling that theater, the solo show, the revelation of self regardless of content (regardless of “having anything to say”) was more sacred than ever because of having laughed about it.
Though, imho, there was content, and it was content that I feel surrounded by, but haven’t often seen depicted or heard discussed: vulnerability as currency. Kate must cry before the show can end. Otherwise, it wasn’t worth the price of admission.
As an actor, particularly as a young, feminized actor, I’ve received near-constant messaging about the value of vulnerability: “we want to see you vulnerable,” say the teachers, directors, decision-makers. It’s a neat trick of this world to turn the thing that makes you precarious – that allows others to maintain power over you – into currency. (I love that as I write seriously about this show, there is a part of me that wants to mock myself for writing so seriously about this show!)
Kate flirts with the “power” of vulnerability throughout: “I have a secret,” she says. Is she going to confess sexual assault at the hands of a family doctor? If you know her, you know “no, of course not.” But do you? She plays with proximity to confession because it’s impossible not to. A woman doing a solo show begs the question, “what happened to her?” which is really the question, “why should I listen to her?”
Why isn’t “look at me!” enough? Why do I have to have something to say? I’ve been told to put more of my “lifeblood” into my work. What if my lifeblood doesn’t actually have to do much with vulnerability, but rather with imagination, romance and vanity?
I don’t know. Maybe you do have to be “vulnerable” to make great art. But the possibility “Kate” graciously allowed me to consider was – maybe you don’t?
RKN:
Thoughts around Pure Colour
-I could feel this book shaping me, the way books mold you in college or high school, but rarely do as we get older.
-It was an ecstatic experience to read a book that is both original (so apart from everything else out there!) and aware that to write is to tap into a collective intelligence and cultural history. This book knows that we are not the sole authors of anything.
-While reading Pure Colour, I never thought about how the book fits into a career path or personal "brand." How rare. To step out of one’s own way.
-Some reviews have described Pure Colour as creating an original and even “bonkers” cosmology. I wonder if these critics have ever sat with death or done psychedelics or spent prolonged time in silence.
-Writing about Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, critic Stark Young mused, "But only now and then in the theatre can we hope for something of the quality of the thing in nature (a tree, a melon, a sheet of water, a flight of birds). The point in such a case is not that it is beautiful or not beautiful, but that it lives in itself." This reminds me of how my friend Jerry once said that it would be preposterous to “write a review of a tree.” I would say this applies to Pure Colour.
-Before seeing live theater, the most enticing summary of a show to me is that it cannot be described. Because if it can be described, why should I get on the subway and see it? Pure Colour also resists summary. If I were to try to tell you anything about the plot, it would do a disservice to the way that the book is unexpected, sentence by sentence and as a whole. When I tell people about the book, I say almost nothing.
(Lastly, I want to tell you how the book came my way. My housemate, who is a psychiatrist-in-training, received a copy as a gift from her supervisor, who I view as a kind of guru. My housemate lent her gifted book to me (it had clearly spent some time in the bathtub), which I read and then lent to my sister. Even though it is only a few weeks old, the book already looks ancient. And now I'm on my way to buy a copy for my cousin.)