One word best describes Self at Hand, the New York-based Eavesdrop theater company's trilogy currently in production at Theatre Project: mindfuck. You can take that in the very literal sense. In one memorable scene one of the characters, a gay flamer with a platinum wig, strips off his tighty-whities and implants his male member in his female best friend's cerebrum.
The playwright who came up with this somewhat extreme take on neurology is sitting quietly in the St. Paul Café with the three other members of the Eavesdrop ensemble on a Tuesday evening, drinking a Corona and waiting for the evening's tech run. For a playwright with a somewhat, well, bizarre streak, the dark-haired, thirtysomething Jack Hanley has a pretty modest, even self-deprecating, demeanor.
"I really wasn't involved in theater until I wrote this," he says. "I considered myself a poet. I got my MFA in poetry at [the] New School. I worked in my garret. And then there were the day jobs." He takes a deep breath and comes up with a partial list--"marketing and sales, party planning, academic publishing, dot-com."
Then director Christopher Eaves steps in. "I looked at those poems and I told him, `You've got to turn these into plays,'" Eaves says. The founding artistic director of Eavesdrop is bespectacled with traces of a beard. His roots are in Maryland, where he grew up and studied theater at Towson University. And given that he and Hanley are long-term partners--they've been together for 10 years--he had plenty of opportunity to expose Hanley to theater.
So in 2004 Hanley submitted one of his three one-acts to New York's HOT! Festival, which features the work of cutting-edge playwrights. Eaves became the director. After an initial reading in 2005, two other actors, Cary Curran and Willie Mullins, hopped aboard.
The blond Curran says she was won over quickly by the plays. "I was at a party at Jack's house in New York, getting drunk, and I asked him to bring me a copy of his plays," she says. "And they were great. I was touring with Big Art [movement theater] around Europe but I'd be reading those plays aloud to myself at night between shows." She adds with a laugh, "You could say that these plays got their start in Europe."
Another Big Art alumnus, the wiry, exuberant Mullins, says he became a fan after watching the first reading of Tastes Like Robot at the HOT! Festival. The one-person play, essentially the confessional monologue of a man who has to take a chunk out of his own thigh to figure out whether he's human, floored him. "And when I heard he wanted me to do it, I jumped for joy," Mullins says. "I loved that play."
As the four trade anecdotes and buy rounds of Corona, they sound a little like an indie band--at least one where the members don't hate one another yet. They don't discourage the comparison. "Indie" is a modifier that they say is being pushed in New York's burgeoning experimental theater scene.
"Reviewers at the Village Voice or New York Times haven't caught on to it," Eaves says. "But if you have indie film, why not? Off-off-Broadway sounds a little like it's taking place in the shadows, because it can't make it on Broadway. These plays wouldn't work on Broadway. Plays like this wouldn't exist if it weren't for the way we put them together."
Stripped down to essentials, the plots of the three Eavesdrop plays in Self at Hand could be extreme Mad TV skits. The Myth of Not to Be features a pregnant 36-year-old man who imagines he is giving birth to his dead father while actually taking a crap. The second, Tastes Like Robot, basically, takes place in a world of androids where Oprah Winfrey is the supreme leader and humans are defined only by the taste of their flesh. The third, Self at Hand, features someone who has cell-phone connections implanted in her neck and a video implanted in her forehead, which gives her the ability to see herself being seen. And her rear skull is opened up so she can manually stimulate different sections of her brain.
In production, Eaves puts his aesthetic stamp on these somewhat bizarre plots, using his experience in mime theater and visual storytelling. As the plays progress, the actors interact with offstage voices, video images, and understated but precise physical choreography. Somehow the unstagable finds itself incorporated into physical movement. Eaves' conversation is sprinkled with influences: Marcel Marceau, Etienne Decroux, John Cage, Robert Lepage, Wassily Kandinsky, et al.
Whenever the conversation starts moving out into the aesthetically pure realm of movement theater, Hanley, the poetic one, appears to be intent on keeping it grounded in contemporary American life, with a few extrapolations. If the world that his plays take place in sounds displaced, that shouldn't be a surprise--we are. "Our sense of who we are today has changed dramatically," he says. "In the biological and physiological sense we have developed the ability to chart out different creative functions in the brain. Someday, they may even find a way to map out the soul. People may say it's sci-fi, and that's fine. But most of what we're dealing with is metaphorical. Is technology causing us to lose our sense of self?"
Grounding is the struggle of all the characters in the Self at Hand trilogy. And the audience might share in it, because some of the conceits are a little out there. But as Hanley makes clear, the predicaments are real. Tastes Like Robot is funny, almost farcical, but it brings up a central issue. For Hanley's gay zombie character, pop culture is his only reference point.
And Hanley grows thoughtful as he talks about his character's situation. "This has something to do with the predicament gay men face today--their obsession with fashion and culture," he says. "Do they gravitate to pop culture because there's nothing else to ground them in? And what happens when all you have is pop culture? What does that turn you into?"
A streak of paranoia and rampant insecurity runs through the worlds of Self at Hand. To Eaves, it's funny at first, but eventually a point arrives when characters are faced with a world that appears to be guided by the abstract functions of cell-phone chatting and emotional multitasking. And Eaves responds to the challenge of juggling the absurd scenarios with a twist of harsh realism. "You really have to do two things at once," he says. "So we use video in this as a sort of metaphor. As the character speaks, he's gradually being overwhelmed by a rising pool of his own blood. There is a tragic element to that, and what's happening physically supports what the character is talking about."
And if to make sure that we understand that his mind doesn't merely concoct bizarre takes on popular culture taken to near-apocalyptic extremes, Hanley insists that his next play, The Ledge--with Eaves directing and premiering Nov. 27 in New York--is based on a much more conventional short story by Lawrence Hall, featuring a drowned sailor reliving his last hours. At the very least, since it's based on an O. Henry Award-winning story, The Ledge contains something akin to a conventional plot line. "Yeah," Hanley laughs. "I'll be returning to some of the more classical themes."
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