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A captive junkie artist repeatedly flashes a camera into his own face, trying to take "psychic photographs" of the memories floating in his head. From a huge video screen, a white-coated scientist observes, bribing him with drugs, explaining his behavior to the audience, and praying for the talented but unreliable artist to produce that uncharacteristic "hit".
Both sides of the creative personality -- one live, one prerecorded -- are played with passion and humor by Frank Green in his tour-de-force interactive multimedia performance "Science Gets Serious", currently running at Cleveland Public Theatre.
For years, Green has been one of Ohio's most challenging performance artists, using startling images and dense, allusive texts to explore the relationship between the vulnerable body and the penetrating gaze of science in the age of AIDS.
"Science Gets Serious" is easily one of his most accessible and memorable works. Memory, addiction, and creativity itself are its intertwined subjects. Green uses two trickster characters -- the heroin-addicted photographer Ted Serious and his alter-ego, renegade parapsychologist Suoir Esdet -- to blur the line between subject and object, and to mine the memories of his own years as an addict in New York's East Village.
The interplay between the two is clever, often hilarious. The artist-addict careens around the stage, whining for drugs, posturing for the audience, shuddering with the shamanic shakes that nevertheless mostly produce boring "normals" -- grotesque self-portraits -- instead of the precious few "hits" of real transformation. Meanwhile, looming from his video screen, the mad scientist/internal critic is controlled, droll, and viciously attentive, sometimes hectoring, sometimes rationalizing, always pushing the addict for just one more image, while he flops sweaty and exhausted on the floor. Oh, yes, this is exactly what making art feels like sometimes.
Green, who typically works alone, is extremely well-served by his many multimedia collaborators -- the additional energies infuse the piece with a layered precision he rarely achieved in the past. Lester Shane's direction has lent structure and allowed Green to concentrate on creating compelling characterizations. The omnipresent video by Javier Ruiz and Gilberto Alvarez is mesmerizing. Jordan Davis's sound mix is full of ominous rumbles and oceanic hisses, while Leslie Moynihan's lights are starkly effective. Black and white photos by Green & David Newlin bring memory into the frame, sometimes fuzzy, sometimes painfully sharp.
The piece spills over with images, beautiful and unsettling. Green wanders in a set bounded by empty picture frames and a mirrored wall, down corridors painted by light, trapped in prison-bar patterns. He hangs upside down from a bar in gravity boots, a reflection of the Tarot's Hanged Man. In one amazing gesture, his video image blows a blizzard of heroin into the camera's lens, and powder falls from the ceiling, bathing him in a fine dust.
The evening is long and intense, in three sections lasting over two hours -- but there is a steady build, and the third act, after intermission, is well worth the wait. The final plunge into repressed memory is harrowing and cathartic, a desperate replay of the addict's world that provides the evening's most moving moments.
"Science Gets Serious" is a metaphor-laden psychic voyage that tacks between past and present, creator and critic, addict and healer, trying to make us realize they are one. We are all addicts, Green persuades, addicted to repetition, anchored to memory's dark pull. "Hoist the sails, midshipmen", he urges, "make the anchor lighter". It's a daring, deep, and often thrilling voyage.
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