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| Truth and Beauty Reviewed By Kristina Mannion for Backstage West presented by Rude Guerrilla Theater Company at the Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. Fri.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 2:30 p.m. Sept. 6-29. $12-15. (714) 547-4688. There may not be much beauty in this cynical commentary on the corrupt nature of American media and the growth of consumerism, but there's definitely an abundance of truth. Focusing on the negative, irresponsible aspects of our media-blitzed culture, this collaboration by Ping Chong, Michael Rohd, and Jeffrey Rose presents a dark but honest portrayal of the evils bred by a materialistic, image-conscious society. Violence, greed, skewed family values--these are the truths that glaringly characterize this series of loosely tied sketches. |
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| How much 'Truth,' how much 'Beauty'? Rude Guerrilla's West Coast premiere of the Ping Chong play shows the ugly truths about corporations, mass media and gun violence. By ERIC MARCHESE Special to the Register It's no secret that consumerism is rampant in the United States and that the nation's corporations have become, in effect, a shadow government. Subversive thoughts? Hardly. Common knowledge? Barely. And playwright and performance artist Ping Chong knows this. In his "Truth & Beauty," in its West Coast premiere at the Empire Theater in downtown Santa Ana, Chong makes a convincing case for truths so chilling, they're difficult to acknowledge. He presents a society dominated by the mass media; a culture steeped in violence; corporate heads who are America's secret power elite; and alienated loners whose only recourse is the building and deploying of pipe bombs against innocent citizens. In Rude Guerrilla Theater Company's new staging of the 1999 play, Chong's depiction of American society is of a sterile environment in which the lives of individuals are sublimated to the desires and demands of both the elected government and the surrogate controlling forces of corporate power. Monitors are everywhere in Eric Eisenbrey's bleak staging, further bolstering the Orwellian, "1984"-like flavor. Snippets of mindless television ads are played and replayed on each screen. Coincident is the showing of advertising slogans on a screen along the theater's rear wall - phrases that flash by so rapidly, they're nearly subliminal. Chong's technique is to deluge us with a variety of scenarios we might not otherwise be privy to, then allow us to connect the dots. Using a two-man cast (RGTC regulars Jay Fraley and Andrew Nienaber), Eisenbrey takes us from the morning ritual of shaving (as TV ads fire off all around us) to the monotonous commute to an NRA meeting to a private corporate boardroom to the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., where foreign nationals are trained in counterinsurgency. The fragmented method of storytelling is the perfect metaphor for American society's many disconnects. Scene: An NRA advocate (Fraley) touts the "safe" use of guns in society. "A gun is a tool, just like a hammer, or a car." Scene: Democratic governments, a voice-over informs us, exist only to protect corporations, which in turn must shield themselves from government intrusion. Scene: Fraley and Nienaber dance to rhythmic music, each cradling an AK-47 in his arms. Nienaber espouses the many advantages of the School of the Americas to graduates, and current and prospective students, in a pitch so similar to legitimate college commercials that it's eerily comical. Mass-media brainwashing and gun violence are the two sharpest swords at Chong's disposal, and in the last several scenes, the two seemingly parallel tracks converge. Advertising, a voice-over tells us, "has colonized our minds." In concert with this, an ad man (Fraley) tells a colleague that his biggest single professional hurdle is in answering this question: "How do we get you to think of consumerism as the single most important thing in your life?" Using prop weapons, both Nienaber and Fraley present Chong's convincing commentary on the pervasive effect of guns. In one scene, Nienaber, wielding a gun, is about to shoot a rabbi (Fraley) in the back of the head, execution-style. Fraley's monologue, where the rabbi is worked into a hysterical frenzy before his imminent murder, is one of the show's most compelling. The evening's most evocative scene, though, depicts two little boys playing with an empty handgun they found in a drawer. They create a game in which each takes turns wielding the weapon and describing the scenario in which the other boy is being faced with death. In the scene's climax, Fraley makes Nienaber beg for his life - a heart-wrenching scene of escalating tension and emotion that reaches a feverish pitch, more frightening than if the gun were loaded. The scene's coda, in which the boys brush off the brutal playacting and decide to treat themselves to fast food, isn't just a clever release, but a harsh condemnation of how gun violence is so routinely trivialized. If Chong's technique is didactic, and even blatantly polemical, it's still nevertheless mesmerizing, offering a view of our culture that those inculcated by its many forces - we, the people - aren't likely to recognize for ourselves. |
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| The Ugly Truth Ping Chong uncovers Lefty ideals! Critic yawns! by Rich Kane - OC Weekly Somewhere out there is a great theater piece waiting to be written that incorporates the lefty scrawlings of Noam Chomsky, Neil Postman, Ben Bagdikian or Howard Zinn. With Truth & Beauty, New York playwright Ping Chong makes a nice attempt, but the problem is his schizoid inability to pick a cohesive message and stick to it. More performance art than play, Truth & Beauty is a series of brief vignettes (finely acted by Rude Guerrilla regulars Jay Fraley and Andrew Nienaber) that touch on everything from consumerism to religion to guns to terrorism to television to family relationships to corporations to the news media to third-world garment workers. It’s a wild, herky-jerky, multimedia mélange, flowing from one quickie scene to another, and that’s the trouble: Chong doesn’t give his audience enough space to really wrap their heads around his ideas. Watching the piece is almost like watching TV as somebody else annoyingly channel hops with the remote. It begins with a man picking up nails off the floor and putting them into a metal bowl, cleaning up as if a pipe bomb has exploded (this rather neatly comes full circle by the end). We then move to two men engrossed in their morning shaving ritual, rattling off various scenes of titillation they’ve apparently memorized from TV commercials. Behind them, words and phrases flash by on video screens and monitors that seem to have been lifted straight from an advertising exec’s playbook (if not from artists Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, who have been using manipulated advertising-slogan verbiage in their works for years): "Some have the pain, some have the champagne"; "Image is nothing. Thirst is everything"; "Time goes better with Coke." From there, we encounter tension-wracked father-son phone calls; a police interrogation of a teenager who has blown away 17 classmates; two men taking turns holding guns on one another, one begging for his life, their intensity melting away as they morph into little boys at play; a father-son fishing trip, with AKs used as poles; several driving skits, one with a harried "family man" who has the body of a girl he raped and killed in his trunk; a pair of business execs yakking about the "beauty" of low-cost prisoner labor (not prisoners, actually, but "trapped consumers"); a Salvadoran factory worker who must fill her daily quota of Disney shirts or be fired; a man who rants about God and belief systems while pointing a gun at a rabbi’s head; and a fake ad for the U.S. Army School of the Americas, the real-life Georgia assassin academy, where you can learn "skills that will help you in the corporate world." Much of Truth & Beauty, especially its more political layers, plays out as if Chong suddenly came across a secret history of the world—or accidentally tuned into KPFK—and the knowledge was such a whopping revelation that he felt the need to get as much agit-info out there as he could. As scripted, though, with its quick cuts, Truth & Beauty just doesn’t make very good theater (does Chong think the soundbite approach is the only way to hold our attention? If he does, he’s got as much contempt for the public as the ad execs he’s mocking do). It also feels redundant in a time when far-left thinking has finally broached the mainstream, with hit books like Michael Moore’s Stupid White Men, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation and Noam Chomsky’s 9-11. Really, Chong would’ve done us better by just handing out a reading list. Truth & Beauty at the Empire Theater, 200 N. Broadway, Santa Ana, (714) 547-4688. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2:30 p.m.; also Thurs., Sept. 26, 8 p.m. Through Sept. 29. $12-$15. |
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| Truth and Beauty A Wallfour.com Review Rude Guerrilla Theater Companyat the Empire Theater Written by Ping ChongDirected by Eric Eisenbrey Can a Beautiful Show make Beauty an Ugly Word? Is this a play or a performance piece? Does it really matter? The truth is, Rude Guerrilla Theater Company has again come out with a show that is thought provoking in its message and still beautiful to behold. Truth and Beauty, a piece written by New York playwright and performance artist Ping Chong, has been tackled by director and Rude Guerrilla company member, Eric Eisenbrey. Stepping in to the theater is like stepping into a club. The music on the other side of the door is pumping, and you have to wait in line for a bag search and a metal detector to make sure you are not bringing in any no-no's. Inside, you will find yourself audience to a mixed media staging that looks like it could have once been an installation piece at the Guggenheim. The multiple video screens play perfectly into the opening section of the piece, setting up a visual overload of commercialism and consumerism that is the foundation for the entire show. In discussing with Eisenbrey after the show, I learned that the video being run on these screens were the very same that ran in it's original production in New York. The show is performed by the duo of Jay Michael Fraley and Andrew Nienaber. The pair is able to play very well off of each other in the various roles they create and return to throughout the entirety of the show. Where the two really seem to come to life is during a piece involving two characters who exchange their fascination with guns. On stage, they role play varying scenarios that require a pistol as its centerpiece, and in the process, with the gun pointed at each others head they portray a fair exchange that displaying the role reversal between dominant and submissive that is granted by whomever is ready to pull the trigger. The script is strong and could carry itself based on the scripted lines alone. However, Fraley and Nienaber take the lines to levels unseen--their performances are moving and successfully they give to you what Chong intended: an illustration of how the mentality of a normal person escalates into something horrific when given the power to kill. Furthermore, the most startling aspect of these transformations is how the actors succumb to unfolding their nature when they are in the position of the submissive. The performances from this side of the barrel are the true success, because empathetically, they are able to capture the audience's imagination, and therefore, empty handed, are able to move the audience to the edge of their seat. The scenes in this show are broken up with an industrial feeling choreography, given to us by choreographer Amanda Murphy. I found these moments to be well suited and well timed in the show. Their factory-like repetition truly captured the unending grind of industrialism. The show makes some other interesting points, such as never really knowing who else is on the road with you, in the cars you only see in your rear view mirror as well as showing that when parents keep their children in the dark they are only leaving room for commercialism to take its place. In the end the script points to how these various subject matters are the basis to the terrorist mindset. Well, I don't know if that is exactly true, but Eisenbrey has certainly done a terrific job in captivating his audience into certainly having to think about it. |
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