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'Asylum' impressive study of physical, mental oppression

'Asylum' impressive study of physical, mental oppression image
Parent Issue
Day
4
Month
March
Year
1994
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Donated by the Ann Arbor News. © The Ann Arbor News.
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'Asylum' impressive study of physical, mental oppression

By CHRISTOPHER POTTER

NEWS ARTS WRITER

REVIEW

The black-brick walls of Performance Network’s playing space couldn’t be more visually conducive to the dungeon-like atmosphere of Malcolm Tulip’s “Asylum/Asylum.”

Yet as with any work of Tulip’s Prospero Theatre Co., there are incongruities. Much of “Asylum’s” prison cell is covered with green simulated grass. Adorning the walls are windows with church-like arches, through which three-dimensional faces gaze sadly through bars.

Off in one corner is a cell-within-a cell, harboring a pair of musicians who seem equipped with every instrument under the sun plus a few from the dark side of the moon.

“Asylum/Asylum” deals with incarceration, perhaps of the mind as well as the body. For 90 minutes three bald, barefoot, mustached “inmates” cavort in a wordless, death-rattle ballet mingling slapstick, violence, power struggles and imaginative fakery.

In fact, the entire 90-minute show might be called “Let’s Pretend.” There’s no factual explanation given for the presence of prisoners Tulip, Jonathan Smeenge and Eric Black. All we see is their strung-out participation in endless, exhausting mind games.

Early on Black assumes the role of jailor, his authority symbolized by a pith helmet and whistle. For a time he forces his companions to do his bidding, mostly in the form of a mad musical shuffle-dance.

Newspapers play a major role in “Asylum’s” ongoing fantasy-playing, substituting for cigarettes, flowers, teapot and cups, food, bottles of booze and a gun, among other items. They’re employed mostly by Tulip and Smeenge, who whirl and contort their way through everything from fall-down vaudeville to Grand Guignol horror.

If these manic machinations help to stave off the unbearable boredom of isolation, the inmates succeed admirably, even if the price is their own sanity. Eventually rejoined by Black, they squeak, wail and scream, often to the accompaniment of caged musicians Frank Pahl and Marko Novachcoff. They chase one another, wrestle, fight, occasionally bang desperately at their cell’s impregnable door.

There’s assorted punishments including choking with chains, electrocution, rape (followed by pregnancy and birth!), garroting, even a simulation of Christ’s crucifixion. Both funny and blood-curdling, It’s all carried out with the exhilarating precision of performers who, deprived of speech, prove superb physical actors. The show is a masterwork of graceful ungainliness.

“Asylum’s” controlled mania is aided immeasurably by its musicians, who can play anything and whose largely atonal strains provide wicked black-humor symbiosis with the actors.

“Asylum” could probably be cut 10 or 15 minutes, as the inmates’ antics, however creatively ferocious, pale at bit near show’s end. Yet writer-director-actor Tulip has created a knife-blade probe into the agony of entrapment, as well as an astounding exhibition of purely physical acting. If “Asylum” is a show about iron discipline, it must have demanded a comparable self-discipline to bring it off.

Eric Black, Jon A. Smeenge and Malcolm Tulip (left to right) in 'Asylum/Asylum.'

"Asylum/Asylum" will run through March 13 at Performance Network, 408 W. Washington St. Curtain Thursdays-Saturdays is 8 p.m., curtain Sunday is 7 p.m. For information call 663-0681.