Orgy of Tolerance Actually Featured Orgy, Social Critique
Jan Fabre may be direct, but he's not didactic. In Orgy of Tolerance, which played last weekend at On the Boards, he avoids becoming just another European leftist railing against capitalism and instead delivers a nearly two-hour exploration of the fear and loathing that underlies Western liberal capitalist society. Starting with proposition that consumerism is a form of autoeroticism--that it's masturbation, basically--his theatre troupe Troubleyn delves deep into the anxiety and self-loathing of people who consume to self-realize.
As the audience entered the theatre, four extremely fit performers in their tidy-whities were warming up onstage. As soon as the house lights dropped, a troupe of four more performers dressed like insurgents, in balaclavas with rifles slung over their shoulders, charged onto the stage and forced the first four into a competition to see who can masturbate to climax the most times. And it sort of goes from there.
Men, smoking cigars and talking about their stuff, wandered around as women jacked them off. One even began anally penetrating himself with a rifle barrel. An aerobics instructor helps you come to terms with your money anxiety. Three pregnant women gave birth to their shopping in grocery carts. Groups of middle-class consumers perused the hangings of an art gallery with dildos for noses, snorting coke and talking about the profundity of colors. The gallery owner went into detail explaining her masochistic sexual fetish--paper cuts. The threat of physical violence was everywhere onstage. Consumers were beaten and tortured, in a scene based on the Abu Ghraib photos, for failing to consume. A woman pleaded that she didn't buy a new flat-screen TV because her old one still worked fine, as a soldier brutally stripped her nude, dragged her across the floor, and kicked and abused her.
Fabre's vision is visually harsh; it was sometimes just hard to take. But Fabre strings the audience along with healthy doses of (black) humor, keeping them just seduced enough to blunder straight into another shock-and-awe attack. It is aggressive theatre, and Fabre has a point to make, but strangely it never felt heavy-handed (above descriptions notwithstanding). That's because Fabre stays true to one of the central rules of theatre--you have to actually like your characters, care about them, and whatever their particular circumstances, Fabre and his actors clearly sympathize with the people they present. They're victims, seems to be his point, and victimizers. Consuming to be happy is like sex without love: fun in the short term, but the joy is transient and ultimately empty. Characters are constantly breaking down into tears. They're lost souls, desperate for fulfillment, but unable to manage more than the odd orgasm. As the joy fades, they return to the process of consuming, trying to achieve the next climax and to stave off the void a bit longer.
But the void's always there, and they can quickly swing from happy to bitter and mean. Their anxieties are projected onto the world around them, often in terms of sexuality, wealth, and ethnicity. Fabre identifies the source of anti-immigrant sentiment, contemporary racism, homophobia, and a host of other social ills as the outgrowth of our own sense of instability, our fear of the world around us. This play came off as extremely timely--nothing's more threatening than economic instability for the average American. In good times we spent like it could never go bad, even as we did so on credit, which obscured the fact that, in reality, our wealth was a perilous house of cards destined to collapse under its own weight.
