A Rave Fable Without the Rave

Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell that Once Was Her Heart (a rave fable) by Caridad Svich. Son of Semele Ensemble. 11/10/06.

I had strong hopes for this show. A Greek play set in a rave, that is also a critique of political power and corruption juxtaposed with the maquiladora murders of the women of Juarez. It had so much potential. When Son of Semele did a reading of the play, I was totally excited about what was possible.

The production Son of Semele staged, directed by Matthew McCray, is, as the LA Times states, "overwrought and under-thought" and I don't know at this point whether this could be fixed by a better production or if its weaknesses are inherent in the script.

This play asks for such a specific aesthetic, a gender-bending desert rave, and Son of Semele gets it almost write, but it feels very much the simulacrum of a rave style, with none of the noise and danger and heat and heart. A rave of four people isn't much of a rave, and I feel this could have been easily fixed with noise and video if they'd wanted to. The look wasn't loud or fast enough to get people to want to dance, and if you don't feel the driving beat and the danger, what's the point?

While the set and the integration of technology in the production was impressive, the show was too slow and too wordy. They were so afraid that a snip of dialogue would be lost that there was often no action whatsoever.

And boy did this show have identity issues. It's hard enough when 4 of the characters are supposed to be some sort of genderqueer or transgendered, but they didn't even try. The murdered women or Juarez were played by men, as caricatures, with no sympathy for biowomen or transwomen. It was just bad drag, which eliminates the policial point. The whole idea is that these people, young people, women and transpeople, poor and disenfranchised, are killed, disposable, overlooked by those in power. They are mistreated, forced into the borderlands, and disappered. When Iphigenia vanishes it's national tragedy and pornography, but these women vanish daily and no one cares. If you're going to conflate biowomen with transwomen as groups of people who get murdered, you have to do so respectfully. This is one of those cases (which I'd say are rare) when bad drag really is a travesty of women.

Similarly, the gender politics of the role of Achilles, played by Doug Barry, were suspect as well. Achilles is written as an androgynous glam rock star, supposed to be Iphigenia (played by Sharyn-genel Gabriel)'s twin. Somehow, this production missed out on what makes androgyny sexy. And I'm a sucker for a boy in eyeliner, so it doesn't generally take much to impress me with sexy androgyny. But Achilles' simple black dress, highlighting the masculinity of his shape rather than playing with signifiers of femininity, made him look out of place and uncomfortable rather than rockingly confident. He looked more like Eddie Izzard (who I love) than a sexy rock star.

Similarly, all of the sexiness was taken out of Sharyn-genel Gabriel as Iphigenia. Her character was flat, playing innocence and desolation but nothing young and rebellious and exciting. She is a beautiful, beautiful woman, but she looked to be about 12 years old in this play with her wide eyes and sweet party dress. There was no sense of physical attraction between her and Achilles, no sense of the danger of her burgeoning sexuality, very little sense of character at all considering that she was on stage for the whole darn show. Like the occasional flashes of her in a garden on one of the sets of screens, this show was trying to make her Alice in Wonderland when it should have been her driving the plot, not wandering through it.

I'm not sure whether the play itself is all flash and no substance or if the production just misaligned the style from the substance, but the show just didn't work for me. It was slow and confused and not nearly queer enough.