The Brooklyn Rail

Target Margin Theater’s This Is Real counts among its influences the Declaration of Independence, “Home on the Range,” the Aeneid, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, and the writings of Jean Genet. All of them, improbably, are present in the opening scene while audience members mill around the lobby of Target Margin’s Sunset Park warehouse-cum-theater. In each of four vignettes beneath a curtained awnings, a couple roleplays a scene of uniquely American sexual masochism—the Statue of Liberty tantalizing one of those tired, poor, huddled immigrants, or an “injun” woman on her knees in front of a cowboy singing about where the buffalo roam. All of the players, who were naked when they came onstage, then don burlesque costumes of the powerful and powerless.

This arousing start is a contemporary echo of Genet’s 1956 play The Balcony, which begins with men playing out their sexual fantasies as bishops, judges, and generals while the women they pay are sinners, criminals, and horses. This Is Real, now running until April 4, is based on Genet’s body of work, using his writing as a launchpoint for a company-devised piece. The sizable company, in this case, extends beyond the nine actors to designers, technicians, and even administrators, all drawing on Genet’s legendary class consciousness and obsession with performance. As David Herskovits, the play’s director and Target Margin’s Artistic Director, makes clear, however, This Is Real is not an interpretation: it’s a response. What, in Genet’s world, was a man pretending to be powerful now must be escalated to an entire country looking for domination.

The Balcony is clearly one of the most direct Genet inspirations for This Is Real. Both take place (if, in This Is Real’s case, only momentarily) in a brothel with a revolution raging just outside its doors, machine guns firing amid the fantasy. Target Margins has, understandably, made the revolution more of a central focus of this production, scaling back the sexual situations after the first scene. The script, inscrutable as it is, calls on the hysteria of the modern sociopolitical world, bringing Genet into a postmodern state of rebellion. There are assassinations, a strange transfer of power, and a violent and oppressive authority lurks over all (at one point, a drone flies menacingly from Target Margin’s lobby up above the stage). It’s as if the company is saying that in this day and age there’s no way for the revolution to wait in the wings.

This, at least, is one narrative throughline you might be able to pick out of This Is Real. Herskovits writes in his Director’s Note that his work is not trying to make sense or meaning, and, instead, aims to free his audience from interpretation. This much is clear from the work, which, after its opening sexual vignettes, becomes an impenetrable piece of experimental performance. There are a few characters—mostly, the performers use their real names, blurring the line between reality and performance—and a few plot beats (the revolution, some songs) but, beyond that, the piece is a series of unusual situations and enigmatic declarations. “I shall go back to my rooms and continue the quest for absolute dignity,” Daddy (Daddy Ho), says at one point, followed by TANSY’s “Woulda, coulda, shoulda.” Next, Susannah MacLeod asks, “We all have to fulfill our functions, don’t we?” and Merlin Whitehawk, out loud, says the words, “Nervously in parentheses.” It’s ten seconds in total, filled with lines that are individually dense and downright nonsensical together.

This Is Real’s script, however, never manages to hit the highs of its first twelve minutes again. Part of that must be about its destabilizing effect on the audience—standing, walking around, being invited to watch many things happening at once—but much also lies in nakedness itself. So much of Genet is about costuming, and the way that someone wearing the robe of a bishop or mistress becomes what they pretend to be. Here, with all the cast stripped down to skin, there’s no possibility of artifice. This, then, is real. It might be the only thing. The company has used nudity to understand authenticity, and it’s essential to the performance. There’s a reason why Target Margin, on its Instagram, called its first show an “undress rehearsal,” getting rid of the dress in all parts of creation.

When students read Genet for the first time, it can be revelatory. Each of his plays—dreamlike, surrealist, mind boggling—feels innovative enough to have been written today (and that’s not even considering his anti-authority, anti-capitalist themes). Target Margin hasn’t quite explored what it would be like if he had, and the script leaves a bit of Genet to be desired. They do, however, create a fever dream that he would be proud of. This work, metaphoric and surreal as it is, is real, right down to skin and flesh. In our world, that’s revolutionary.