Stolen Chair Theatre’s Kinderspiel @ Under St. Marks

It seems that the Stolen Chair Theatre Company, along with the NY Times, has found some contemporaneousness in the Weinmar Republic. I can see it. There does appear to be a similar apocalyptic mindset, where people have an easier time imagining the world coming to an end than meaningful change occurring. Also, everyone knows there is something glamorous about debauchery, something tempting about that place where nightmare and fantasy are fused in a moment of shameful delight. Apparently, people like that sort of thing. Particulalry when the world is falling apart and beauty without horror inevitably rings false.

If meaning is dead, hope is obsolete, and the capacity for human cruelty seems to expand daily, why bother making art? Why bother constructing or deconstructing anything? Except if you take a perverse pleasure in the useless. Which is precisely what, at least according to the questionably accurate back story presented by our narrator Heinrich, the Kinderspielers are doing.

Child’s play has no point. Louisa the whore, whose body has never been anything other than a means to someone else’s end, revels in performing a purely selfish action with no use value. Max the rich bitch, likewise, revels in the opportunity to perform an action outside of market exchange. Or maybe this is just Heinrich’ s fantasy born out of reading, believing, and then not being able to live up to his little pocket copy of Marx and Engels. Because despite his communist zeal, he reveals that he is selling the Kinderspielers. As it turns out, people with nothing to live for will pay good money for the opportunity to waste there time on meaningless frivolities. It also turns out that a thorough grasp of dialectical materialism can be more useful to the seller than the sold.

Then the dutiful worker arrives on the scene, is dutifully appalled by the hollow entertainment, then dutifully enthralled, then dutifully tries to “clean it up” by participating in it. Inevitably, later on she will be dutifully fervent in her support for the Third Reich. Her sense of duty is pathetic, revolting, and entirely believable. It’s easy to feel sympathy for her until you realize that all of her good intentions will soon turn into justification for genocide.

The intellectual, Sonja, tries to explain away all the pathetic uselessness. She transforms shoddy pointless amusement into high art with all sorts of radical negotiated meanings. The intellectual attempts to justify the stupidity that the public so eagerly consumes by imagining it as a revolutionary critique.

Towards the beginning of the play Heinrich says that it is where you heart is that matters, not how you earn your money. There is something poignant about an off off company producing a play about the bored and the burnouts entertaining the masses by pretending to be sniveling children at play. Perhaps even more poignant is that these lost souls, who never were able to take heart in anything, lose interest in their child’s play not when it begins to generate a profit, but rather at the moment that it becomes contextualized into an act of art.

Brave and beautiful downtown theatre artists, please take heart. But don’t be foolish enough to hope.

Discount tickets for this show ($12) are available through this link.

http://kinderspiel.stolenchair.org/