Helsinki Syndrome Remixes Oscar Wilde

The two started Helsinki Syndrome back in 2006. Before that, both had tried for more traditional theatre careers before burning out on the constant stream of rejection (both admit they don't fit the types directors look for in casting) and, even when they landed roles, not particularly enjoying the work they were doing. So they decided to work together, doing whatever it was they wanted to do, which, as it turns out, is nothing like traditional theatre.

For Helsinki Syndrome, things like "plot" and "character" are totally extraneous, unnecessary conventions that you don't need and which, frankly, probably just get in the way. In fact, their work is easier to describe in terms of visual art than theatre. The two operate as collage artists of performance, mixing and mashing texts, music, movement, and imagery to create works that, much like Robert Rauschenberg's assemblages, jut out in multiple directions while maintaining some sort of cohesive whole. In the case of Earnest, that takes the form of contrasting Wilde's signature play with lesser known works, interspersed with bouts of rapping, dance, the songs of Prince, and monster movies.

The idea for the show--their first adaptation--came to them as a joke back in 2007. At the time, they were doing a show called I Feel Fine, a riff on the end of the world, while Taproot Theatre was doing a production of Wilde's play, which gave them the idea of re-naming their own work The Importance of Being Earnest.

"It was like, 'Ha ha!'," explained Pham. "Wouldn't it be funny if our show was called The Importance of Being Earnest and everyone came to see our show and instead they got I Feel Fine?"

The idea stuck around, with the initial intention of just re-naming whatever their next show was after whatever was playing in town at the time. But in 2008, Helsinki Syndrome went to New York to perform their first work, True North, at Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre (where they're taking Earnest next week). At the same time, they got invited to perform a short piece in Portland the week after, as part of an after-party for the TBA Festival. Not wanting to bother lugging the entire show back from New York and then to Portland, they put together the first workshop version of Earnest.

The choice was also in part due to Pham's increasing interest in doing an adaptation, and although other texts were tossed around, eventually they decided Earnest was what they wanted to do. "It's very popular, very funny, hilarious," Pham explained, "and those are the adjectives that people immediately come up with. 'It's so witty!' and 'bitingly vicious'...all those catchphrases. And I kind of felt there was more to it than that. And nobody could go beyond that surface, the initial veneer of the show. And so I wanted to go deeper into, and then we found we were more interested in the De Profundis text."

De Profundis is, in terms of genre and style, about as far from Earnest as Wilde could get. The title references Psalm 130, a psalm begging for mercy for the dead. The text itself is a 50,000-word letter Wilde wrote to his ex-lover Lord Alfred Douglass while Wilde was serving the prison sentence which ruined his life. The exposure of his affair with Lord Alfred during a libel suit pressed by Wilde himself, in 1895, led to his imprisonment for homosexual behavior. The letter, by turns bitter and petulant, catalogs all the ills and mistreatment Wilde saw himself having suffered at Douglass' hands.

"It's not funny. Everybody loves something that's funny and light," Hynes said of the contrast between De Profundis and Earnest. "Here's the thing for me," she continued. "They are two texts, where--whether they're saying it in a light and witty way or they're saying it in a deep, literary, convoluted (he's a master of the parenthetical phrase, the long parenthetical phrase) way--these are two texts where people say what they mean. And they say what they're thinking. Like balls out, even if it's covered in something light and fun. So I think the bravery of unmasking what's actually in your head and just putting it out there--for me, there was something really attractive about that."

The juxtaposition of the two texts formed the backbone of project. From there, the show was built up through an accretion of details and concepts. Pham and Hynes actually make lists of seemingly disparate ideas when building their shows, and through intuitive leaps and gut feelings, they sort the list down to the elements that work. In this case, those included the songs of Prince, cross-dressing (which had always appealed to Hynes, but had never fit a show before), the Capezio dance-wear line, and, finally, monster movies.

"Old fashioned, black and white monster movies somehow came into the picture," Hynes said, "and so we knew that was going to be part of it. And that's an intuitive connection I don't even think that at this point I could very well explain."

Explaining isn't something either of them are particularly interested in doing, but Pham actually continued on about the choice of monster movies. "In a way, it's just kind of been that intersecting point, not really a tangent, but that intersecting point in the piece that sort splinters this entire world that we're creating. And for me, it's been personal...I've been having a lot of..."--he sort of struggled to find the words--"feelings about monsters and people."

Hynes went further: "Well, sometimes these really intuitive connections come about. And Mike made this really brilliant observation about it. He said, 'I really love that the monsters are just themselves.' And you think about it, and in monster movies, no one ever explains why the monsters are doing it. People don't ever go into the psychology of it, the monsters just sort of like are who they are, do what they do."

It's an odd connection, but in performance it works brilliantly. Pham, as Godzilla, reads a letter to the people of Tokyo as though to a jilted lover. Like De Profundis. It starts as comic genius, but a comic schtick would be too simple; Pham performs it with painful, heart-wrenching sincerity. It's a brilliant moment in a brilliant 75-minute show. Helsinki Syndrome isn't easy on the spectator, but it's also not purposefully off-putting (as Hynes and Pham were discussing above). They simply produce work and leave it to audiences to sort through to make of it what they will. In Earnest, meaning keeps coming into focus then slipping away before you can make heads or tails of it, but it's never boring, never arty and abstract for its own sake. In fact, in the end, Helsinki Syndrome's show comes off as sincere in a way Wilde never managed in his own work.

Or maybe it's not. With these people, it's hard to tell. Misunderstandings are just more grist for the mill for a performance group who's named after a misnomer.