Do you remember the board game "Chutes and Ladders," where players take turns climbing the rungs of a ladder, only to slide back to square one over and over again? The makers of the game illustrated the board with children who, for good behavior, were shown climbing the ladder, and for bad behavior were sent sliding down the chutes. KILL FLOOR, the new play that just went up at LTC3, depicts modern poverty, where the ladders are missing the lower rungs, and the gleaming steel chutes of modern America provide the blind and driving illusion of progress all the way back to square one.

Marin Ireland delivers a star turn as 'Andy,' a newly released ex-convict. Desperate for a job, she signs on as slaughter-house employee, where she's quickly sent to the kill floor. Every thirteen seconds a bolt gun kills a cow, while another machine lifts the fresh carcass out of the pen and skins it--sometimes while the animal is not quite dead. Accidents are common, sometimes leading to more pain for the cattle, and sometimes injuries for the workers. The kill floor itself is kept just beyond our sight, but its implications bleed out into every aspect of Andy's life.

Rick, Andy's affably manipulative and dangerously amorous boss (played by Danny McCarthy), ​ tells her not to worry: her co-workers are Mexicans ("good workers...reliable") but because his bosses are "racist as hell," she's likely to get promoted above them and sent upstairs to do office work. As the Bard says, "All [wo]men have some hope," and some hopes are higher than others.

Andy's desperation to find a job is rooted in her desire to provide for her biracial teenaged son, B, who is simply embarrassed by Andy's reemergence. B is understandably more interested in surviving high school and first-crushes than he is in bringing his estranged and needy mother back into his life. B remembers too well his mother's arrest, and Marin Ireland provides subtle, nervous gestures that suggest that Andy is still struggling with past addictions, though she insists otherwise to her boss.

Instead of loving his mother, B reaches out to Simon, a white schoolmate and self-fashioned rapper. Simone lays out "sick rhymes" for the benefit of B. B helps Simon score weed. More importantly, the two are caught in an unequal and entirely believable sexual awakening. 'Coming out,' which is getting easier in much of America, seems a nihilistic social choice in their world, and their relationship stands tensely at the edge of discovery. The two young performers, Nicholas L. Ashe and Samuel H. Levine, fully own their characters; under the guidance of director Lila Neugebauer, they create the play's most dynamic, topsy-turvy moments; even if Koogler's insights on race, sexuality, and high school politics are not radically fresh, they are truthfully delivered with wit, grace, and daring.

With B avoiding her, Andy hesitatingly looks for connection elsewhere. She first turns to Sarah (played by Natalie Gold), an outgoing woman from the right-side of the tracks; the relationship allows the play to show that the two women face similar emotional trials, but with such wildly different economic resources as to not be speaking the same language. Sarah thrives (and perhaps even applauds herself) for keeping Andy company, but Andy is unwilling or unable to broach her own past, and so their friendship is stunted. As that relationship stalls, Andy takes a turn into another dead-end by consenting to her married boss' request for a date.

Abe Koogler, showing his chops for modern drama, begins many of his quick, short scenes in media res, with the relationships already established and understood by the characters, and the drama centered on each person's peculiar verbal strategies as they drive after their meager, vulnerable (and often funny) desires.  He expertly writes in the staccato semi-fluency that thrives in America's small black box theaters.

(Why, in American dramas about the economically disadvantaged, is there a shortage of eloquent, rhetorically powerful people saying stupid things? It must be a two-hundred year carryover from the imprinting excellence of Charles Dickens. But Mark Twain is our man, and he had plenty of characters who earnestly believed in the tomato paste they were selling.)

At any rate, as with David Mamet and Annie Baker, each broken and partial sentence leaves room for our sympathies. The less the characters say, the more we root for them; the more they open their mouths, the more we know they lack the resources to thrive, and dash the hopes we have invented for them in their quiet moments.

The set by Daniel Zimmerman (wide, shallow, and grey) works with Ben Stanton's lighting and Brandon Wolcott's sound to deliver the audience into an icy world where a slaughterhouse and budget apartment share the same colorless walls. Prison and slaughter are never seen, but always present. The actors dart in and out of the wings like cattle through chutes, and neither they nor we have much idea of what's coming next. The simplicity of the design invited the imagination into the world of the play, and ties together the disparate threads of the story, so that the voices and themes from one scene echo into the next.

It is a play that disposes with an obvious ending, or a well-made play's denouement. Unlike in Annie Baker's THE FLICK (or Oscar Wilde's THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST), there are no craftily hidden pieces of paper that cause the play to burst into a climax and a resolution. Most of Koogler's characters could struggle on, nearly unchanging, and constantly caught off-guard, for years and years. Rather than forcing a neat cap on the play's final moments, Koogler brings it to a close at the ninety minute mark, like the closing shift in a warehouse; the lights silently dim on an evening of open, honest, and throat-catching performances. KILL FLOOR depicts characters living in poverty; they prove likable, but they will not win.

This play is a necessary stab in the eye to the Group Theatre's optimism at the end of the Great Depression.​

If the playwright senses hope, but sees little way out, then we should take his word for it, and thank him for his honesty: we should not request that playwrights invent neat little plots designed to satisfy our complacency. ​

Visual art pursues a quietness of purpose rarely afforded in the theater. A piece of theater dies without an active artist vocally and physically sustaining it. A piece of formal visual art expects to stand without its creator's immediate presence.

One of the most interesting recent sightings occurred at the MOMA. It was a piece that put me in mind of the playwright Leegrid Stevens' The Dudleys! A Family Game.  Stevens' piece was a theatrical satire of family drama that injected color into domestic conflict through Nintendo Entertainment System escapism. When the characters stumbled into a crisis point, their world collided with projected pixels, and they had to beat, bash, and dash their way past local cops, lost relatives, and the like. The emotions were deeply personal, but the modes were Brechtian.

A similar (though I think more political) attempt is on display at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. It is the 2008 piece 'The Long March: Restart" by Feng Mengbo. (Here's a MOMA link.)

The title takes its name from the Red Army's fighting retreat of 1934. The installation assumes the form of an NES style video game projected on the parallel walls of a long, dark hallway. The interaction between the viewers/players and the video game generates the piece's artistry and political vibrancy. At the opening of the hallway is a small table with a video game controller, labeled with the sign "Please be considerate of others waiting to play." For a game about a violent retreat, the sign is oddly ominous. 

The game itself is a side-scrolling kill-them-all adventure; the avatar of the game is a Maoist soldier wearing a blue uniform, who can either crush his enemies by jumping onto them, or blow them up with exploding Coca-Cola cans. On one wall, the entire 'level' is projected cleanly and comprehensibly, but on the opposite wall, the image of the avatar is magnified, and the details of the level are impossible to discern. Every time the hero reaches the end of a level, the projected image reverses, so that if the player does not turn around, they are faced with the blocky, indecipherable super-sized avatar image, rather than the clean image of a side-scrolling game. 

What's odd and wonderful to watch is the interaction between the viewers, the gamers, and the installation. Young men (and some women) grab the controller with confidence and familiarity. After a few seconds of destroying everything they could find, they would turn to strangers in the room and sheepishly admit that they "have no idea what's going on." And then they would go back to blasting. When the player reached the end of a level, they would often refuse to look around and take stock of the situation; instead they would just keep blasting. Occasionally, a player would figure out the relationship between the shifting projections, but this was rare. 

If the player asked his or her companions "Where am I?" his or her friends would respond solely within the context of the game with "You're all the way over here," or else they would refuse to answer the question and say something like "Jump on that pipe" or "Blow them up--you missed one." Discussion of the wider context, or the purpose of the game, were inadmissible, naïve, or impolite.

As the placard suggested, the players gladly handed off the controller to other audience members. But with old 8-bit NES games in particular, there is not much of an expectation that we need to "understand" the game; there is no particularly interesting plot, or unspoken rules. And so the players proved entirely interchangeable. If the controller was put down, the game would 'restart' and launch into a fifteen second piece of pixelated Maoist propaganda. 

The relationship between the game's theme (revolution) and the installation's action (confused tedious violence) proved rewarding. I observed the game for about fifteen minutes, and at times I was tempted to 'explain' that the magnified avatar switches walls when you complete a level--as if that would really bring any clarity to the game. 

I often view violence in terms of status and reward, and my own work details the links between sexuality, violence, and strategic decision-making. But the Mengbo game is largely uninterested in status, rewards, and sexuality, and shows the glowing attraction of repetitious task-completion within a familiar medium. Many people would prefer marching onwards, rather than questioning where they are going. I would love to see Mengbo's work within a Chinese context; it would be a great cross-cultural study...and maybe they could explain why the Maoist soldier is chucking explosive cans of Coca-Cola. I also wonder how Mengbo describes the work to Chinese audiences. Does he demonstrate an underlying challenge to capitalist assumptions? Or does he refuse to reveal his intentions altogether?

Kehinde Wiley is one of America's most intriguing artists. His  work often pulls subjects of African descent into ornate, romantically inspired fusions of organic pattern and fluorescent color. Sometimes his subjects walk through a snowstorm of wrinkled dollar bills, and other times they walk out of a wall of flowers. Kehinde often paints his subjects in 'street clothes,' as opposed to the polished formal wear often found in French romantic painting, and it seems a determined bourgeois insertion into a style that--at least in my mind--I associate with French power, French confidence.

Wiley is about to receive an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, which I would like to see if I get the chance. But you can find his work in museums all over the country. 

Here is a jpeg of his painting at the Blanton, though computers poorly communicate the effect of seeing his paintings in the context of a museum:

MCCULLOUGH THEATRE, TEXAS PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, AUSTIN, TEXAS:

Three years ago, Texas Performing Arts Center (TPAC) brought us BLACKWATCH, a stage-play that explored how the history of the famous Blackwatch Royal Highland Regiment unfolded in the killing fields of modern Iraq, and how that history ultimately came to an due to a bureaucratic cost-cutting decision back in London. The show proved spectacular, and brought big-city virtuosity to Austin. 

Texas Performing Arts has now followed up on that success with the outstanding debut of BASETRACK LIVE, produced by Anne Hamburger and En Garde Arts. Created by Edward Bilous, directed by Seth Bockley and adapted by Jason Grote, this new play combines battlefield journalism, live performance, and disturbing interviews, and then exposes and explores the strange deprivations, honors, and hopes of the 1-8 Marines, a unit that has deployed and redeployed (time and again) since 2001. 

The play opens with short snippets of interviews with Marines in Afghanistan in the year 2010; each Marine says his name and names his home, and then his image falls into the distance and another Marine takes his place. Their voices rumble together (a cacophony of youth) as the onstage band, a four person unit, suddenly displaces the remaining silence of the auditorium; the music, directed by Michelle DiBucci, grants the multimedia images a sense of enduring strength. The exact mission in Afghanistan remains vague and purposeless, but the band's presence underlines the intention of the play: to honor the experience and challenges of the men and women serving in today's armed forces, often in wars that began just a few years after those men and women were born. 

The multimedia interviews slice back onto the stage, and introduce a new theme: the intentions of 'the few and the proud' who choose to become Marines. The interviews then give way to a live performer, Tyler La Marr, who portrays AJ, a Marine corporal that seeks to explain his own decision to join the Marine Corps, as well as his decision to become an infantryman, and his day to day experience of life in Afghanistan.  

The actor Ashley Bloom then enters the stage-light. She portrays  AJ's wife, Melissa. Her face appears as a projected image in the heights above the stage. She tells her story to the camera of a laptop computer.  A gauze curtain divides Melissa and AJ, just as the script divides their stories; AJ talks exclusively of war, while Melissa talks of AJ and the experience of his presence and absence in her own life. 

AJ mourns the death of a friend, while Melissa fears a knock on the door that may announce her husband's own violent death. AJ describes firefights and Oakley sunglasses, while Melissa describes giving birth to their only daughter. Painfully, AJ never mentions his wife, while Melissa's every word centers around her husband. 

A bullet puts an end to AJ's deployment, as it rips through his bicep and sends him home; the journey ends in a matter of days. Suddenly estranged from his unit, he disparages (and disdains) his estrangement from his wife. He seems to miss Afghanistan more than he ever missed her. Melissa recoils from AJ's violent outbursts, his drinking, and his destructive obsessions with handguns and rifles. The Marine Corps ends AJ's young career with a medical discharge; he carries with him memories of a painful past, an uncertain present, and a future with little hope. 

Melissa and AJ attempt couples' counseling, but it fails; the once happy couple can remember all the reasons that they hate each other, but not the source of their love. Melissa eventually leaves AJ. AJ finally drags himself to therapy for PTSD. The play concludes with hope, as the therapist tells AJ that "the hard part...is over, as of right now."

BASETRACK is a superior example of 'verbatim' theater, wherein the artists lift the script from interviews conducted with real people. In this case, the real people are combat veterans from 1-8 Marines, a unit deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, and their wives. The show smartly centers on AJ, with a small cast of video interviews orbiting his experience. AJ works as a main character because he is smart enough to laugh at his own foibles, and honest enough to detail the challenges he has faced. 

The peculiar brilliance of the show stems from intersection (or lack thereof) between the narratives of AJ and Melissa. The script highlights the awful distance between spouses during a military deployment, especially for the very young. 

And so the play universalizes the story of AJ and Melissa by tracing the similarities between their experiences and those of their peers; BASETRACK LIVE presents a sort of multimedia triptych of live performance, music, and viscerally assembled videos and photographs. (The video designers were Sarah Outhwaite and Esteban Uribe. Their work represented the best use of video I have seen in Europe or America.) The voices of the women prove especially important. The play presents clips of interviews taken from Skype or Google Chat. Each woman, painfully young, describes the experience of waiting, day after day, for news both good and bad about their spouses deployed to Afghanistan; unfortunately, the journey of these young women does not get easier upon the unit's return. 

Medi, one of the wives, dances around the challenges she has faced: "You really have to be careful of what you say and how you present things. You know, like I said...[their] innocence is gone....Their whole way of thinking is completely different over there. That just affects how they respond to you when they come home." 

One of the limitations to verbatim theater is that it can only use the language that comes up in the interviews. If the interviewed veterans and wives avoid certain topics or perspectives, then the show must necessarily also avoid those topics. Verbatim theater holds a mirror up to nature, but cannot completely control the quality of the nature that enters its frame; just as the academic disciplines of ethnography and political theory often stress different dimensions of the same problems, so verbatim theater and 'regular' theater differ in their outcomes, though not necessarily in effectiveness.  The use of multimedia and music helps BASETRACK LIVE overcome the limitations of verbatim theater, as these cinematic elements transform everyday language into poetry through the use of echo, repetition, and underlined sound. The band, which consists of the outstanding quartet of Trevor Extor, Kenneth Rodriguez, Mazz Swift, and Daniele Cavalca, elevates the play with relentless intensity--Schiller and Goethe would be pleased. 

If there is room for refinement, it might lie in the combat scene. AJ, the lead character, remembers a sudden unleashing of 'chaos.' But an American infantrymen, when pressed, can reveal a precision to a combat that consists of casualty reports, air support, covering fire, and fire commands, the sum of which grants combat the frightening (yet empowering) quality of a testosterone and adrenaline riddled blood-sport. This 'precision' in midst of seeming 'chaos' helps explain the willingness of soldiers to return to the fire time and time again. American soldiers, backed with taxpayer equipment, feel that they can win any firefight they stumble into (more often than not). And so the combat scene could use further exploration (but not too much). In regards to content, the play might also consider pointing out that an American soldier's pay increases dramatically when stationed overseas, thus enabling the purchase of expensive Oakley's, new pickup trucks, new tattoos, and guns, guns, guns once a soldier returns home. There are a also a few moments of humor that may require a little more direction in order to cue the audience that laughter is acceptable in a war story.

But my complaints are mild, and my praise is strong. BASETRACK LIVE provides an intelligent, graceful way to empathize with the twenty-first century military experience. For a veteran like myself, it brought back surprising memories and shadows. It is a painful, sad place to go. The passages in which the soldiers contemplate suicide are particularly haunting, and open doors I prefer to keep locked and closed. But it is worth opening those doors to remind oneself that the war in Afghanistan, though perpetually 'winding down,' continues instead with perpetual cost. As it was in 2001, so it continued in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. 

The BASETRACK LIVE project must continue. One hopes the creative team might consider asking the Afghans, who have now fought against (and alongside) the Americans for thirteen years, what they think of us. With the exception of Hamid Karzai, it often feels that we have thought painfully little of them. BASETRACK LIVE shows us a video in which an Afghan woman screams at the presence of a video camera in her family home; I walked away from BASETRACK without much of an understanding of her pain, but that seems fitting in a portrait that emphasizes the 1-8 Marines and the struggles they face within their own homes upon returning from combat. The play is now on tour. Seek it out.