The Brooklyn Rail

Growing up in New Jersey was an education in maximalism. At Sunday dinners, grandma sent relatives home with enough leftovers to repeat the same dinner and still send relatives home with leftovers. I once saw a high school classmate and her mother order a bottle of wine at Matthew’s Diner; I’m still not sure which option on that menu pairs well with Cab Sauv. McMansions stretched for miles, and a gossipy realtor told me a pair of new-money buyers had purchased a house out of their price range—they staged it with ornate furniture for Christmas, invited the whole family over, and, low on funds, returned all the furniture by New Year’s. The story breathed like a myth, its own Garden State cautionary tale.

As The Sopranos made clear, northern New Jersey is a carnival of tragicomic excess, and perhaps no location epitomizes that notion better than the suburban mall.

I can’t count how many malls were within a fifteen-minute radius of my childhood home; there were the “chicer” outdoor strip malls (Boulder Run, Tice’s Corner) for moms whose surnames didn’t end in a vowel, and then, down Route 17, the highway megamalls (Paramus Park, Garden State Plaza), where parking was an Olympic sport. Within thirty minutes, I could cross into New York State for Palisades Center or shop for chintzy Christmas ornaments with grandma at her preferred mall, Willowbrook. I feel so connected to these malls it mirrors an umbilical attachment; when my mom was pregnant with me, her biggest craving was Cinnabon.

But, full of people, are these malls alive? With all the exuberance of a Black Friday shopping spree, CHILD Performance Company insists they are.

The company, in association with Immediate Medium, is presenting 1-800-3592-113592 at the Gowanus venue MITU580 through March 16. Consisting of fifteen dance, design, and interdisciplinary artists—Angel Acuña, Catherine Brookman, Ampersand Paris, Eriq Robinson, Hannah Mitchell, Emma Orme, Lena Engelstein, Lisa Fagan, Kirsten Harvey, Maya Simone Z., Miles Toth, Matthew Antoci, Shannon Yu 余香儒, Nathan Repasz, and Suz / Murray Sadler—CHILD is its own mall of theatrical offerings. Through experimental vignettes, company members employ unique talents to physicalize, and pen a berserk ode to, malls.

CHILD’s company members are also all millennials (or thereabouts), making 1-800-3592-113592 a nineties-coded performance. (The company name also points toward youth.) Before the proliferation of chat rooms and the dawn of social media, nineties kids gravitated toward malls, which, despite being a hotbed for consumerism—something CHILD skewers throughout its show—were also a strange hub for community.

Inside 1-800-3592-113592’s fictional Jersey mall, director and choreographer Lisa Fagan has performers create a centerpiece fountain out of Dunkin Donuts cups, spilling water from one cup into another. A sales lady in leopard-print heels clops around, touches every surface, and pretends to know how to connect with customers. Elsewhere, a soft rock band forms and jams out.

These artsy mall rats and gal pals with their first retail jobs were the freaks (complimentary) I spent high school Fridays with, milling around the mall in search of high-fantasy books at Borders, whatever movie Kate Winslet was in at the AMC, and free Panda Express samples. (In one bit, a CHILD performer exaggerates the painful ecstasy of eating at a food court Taco Bell.)

Malls created a social nucleus, a capitalist playground to roam, and 1-800-3592-113592 understands how irresistible these places were: the title is the phone number for DiFrederico’s, a mall jewelry store, but also a jingle. Just try saying the too-long phone number without falling into a musical cadence.

The use of a jingle further revisits a time when such advertising techniques were more common. Sung throughout the show, the phone number becomes an absolute earworm; many malls are decaying, but they remain with us like a giddy ghost. In the Atlas Obscura article “The Life and Death of the American Mall” from January of this year, Matthew Christopher wrote that “the very size of malls became a liability: dead ends, darkened storefronts, and vacant corridors created eerie, lifeless pockets—and a death spiral.”

Customers became wary of such areas, malls’ dying limbs, even as they attempted to maintain a bouncy mood and, like in Las Vegas casinos, the suspension of time. Underneath blazing fluorescents, it’s always shop-o’clock. 1-800-3592-113592 nods towards this disorienting feeling; in one scene, a news anchor reporting on the mall chimes, “Today is Wednesday and Thursday March 9.” No matter which mall you’re at, there is a bland sameness that blurs all the stores, and their days, together.

Time is broken up in one funny, antiquated way. In an increasingly secular culture, many New Jersey malls still abide by Blue Laws, closing all retail on Sundays. There is reverence yet, and CHILD gives its mall a sacred, beating heart.

As the ragtag band creates an ethereal soundscape, a video of an escalator plays. Romantic, sweeping, and shot as if by Victor Fleming, the escalators and their rhythmic motion beckon. Take a step onto the moving stairs: what waits up top? A mall, like a theater, shimmers with possibility.

Also like theaters, malls only exist when people inhabit them. The sales lady in leopard-print heels is, in a goofy way, fighting for her life: if she can keep customers in the store a moment longer, if she can entice them into conversation, and if she can facilitate a sale, that is one more day DiFrederico’s survives. In a cut-throat shopping complex with dozens of stores to pop in, the saleslady makes sure everything, everything, in hers is marketable. That includes the floor. Yes, the one beneath your feet.

Because, as the demented sales lady says, beneath the floor is the earth, and beneath the earth is the earth’s core, which holds our “core values,” so what could be a more wonderful product than this floor?

Something else may lurk beneath the mall’s floor. In an impressive feat, Fagan has performers remove clapboards from Normandy Sherwood’s set; they place long planks atop their heads, and then place purchases—shoes, necklaces, shopping bags that descend from on high—atop the planks. Oh, and the performers are wearing zebra onesies, also a Sherwood contribution.

What’s going on? Is the zebra design a costume choice exemplifying New Jerseyans’ comical proclivity for animal print, or are actual zebras taking over the mall? With these shopping centers competing with and losing to online retail, perhaps the wild has come to reclaim its land. As millennials grow up with but then leave behind malls, perhaps nature is healing?

It might be. In a final coup, an enormous, pristine, periwinkle shopping bag from above opens and releases dirt onto the performers. Inside the mounds are bits of cheap jewelry, like fossils, relics from a previous geologic era. The band remains to play us out, but the dirt-smeared performers leave for the lobby. As seen on the video feed, the performers, sweaty from balancing planks and crusting with dried earth, pick dirt out of each other’s hair and brush it off their neighbor’s body. They giggle.

The gesture—childish, communal, primordial—deeply moved me. It was intimate, not at all sterile. Walking out of the theater, the lobby reeked. It smelled like the opposite of a mall.