DAVID LEVINE at OCADU (100 McCaul), as part of Luminato, to June 19. luminato.com. See listing Rating: NNNN
Into its mix of high and popular culture, Luminato drops Habit, David Levine’s peculiar theatre/performance art hybrid.
The New York-born, Berlin-based artist has given up directing theatre for gallery-oriented projects that explore aspects of the actor’s craft and the performing industry.
For Hopeful, he exhibited his archive of head shots discarded by casting agencies for Bauerntheater, he hired an American actor to portray a farmer from an East German play and set him planting potatoes in a German field.
For Habit, he had New York playwright Jason Grote write what Levine calls an “average American play,” a mashup of Mamet and Rabe conventions that probably couldn’t cut it as a proscenium production.
In Marsha Ginsberg’s realistic suburban house set, three actors (two casts on alternate days) perform the 90-minute drama repeatedly over an eight-hour period as audience members, who can come and go at any point, watch through window openings, from above or in another room on live video.
Though the performers don’t take a break or a bow, the play has a dramatic structure. A depressed slacker, a macho drug dealer and a college student play out a love triangle as they reveal the personal crises that lead to the denouement. The actors, who stick to the dialogue but subtly change elements of staging (in one run-through the slacker might masturbate in the den, in the next the living room), give it their all, absolutely without irony, and draw us in despite our doubts.
Levine cleverly leaves us pondering the role of spectator and performer, time and narrative, and how an art gallery or theatre context changes them.
In the spirit of his fascinating experiment, maybe I should conceive of my next review as a text-based wall piece or a song.
art@nowtoronto.com
