Last Days of Mankind

ADSA Conference Paper presented 2011.

Theatre company Red Mole Enterprises spent the first five years of its existence touring New Zealand, performing its own particular brand of cabaret, cum children’s apocalyptic circus in theatres, pubs, marae, beachfront motor camps and community halls. In 1978, after a national tour, faithfully recorded in The National Film Units 50 minute documentary Red Mole on Tour directed by Sam Neil, the company culminated four years of relentless activity with a season at his Majesties theatre Queen Street Auckland. The Four central members of the company travelled to Mexico and then to New York. The first production in the USA was at the Westbeth Theatre, January 1979. There followed a number of intermittent appearances in other less theatrical venues and then in April the company presented a new work at The Theatre for the New City on 2nd Avenue and 4th Street. I was with the company. We were New Zealanders travelling upstream to the cultural flow. We had all been inspired by Ken Kesey, Bread and Puppet, Teatro Campasino, Mabou Mines, Bob Dylan, William Burroughs, John Gage, Merc Cunningham, all the usual suspects whose work had influenced us. The American culture of Avant Garde theatre, Beat poetry, protest singing and what was in 1970’s called anti-establishment protest art all flowed south, and now we, with our own Kiwi version of these trends went north. North to New York City, already for us an exile homeland, a refuge from small town no tall poppies New Zealand parochialism, into the heart of theatrical innovation. This is my account of the First Theatrical Expression of our Encounter with New York City.

The Last Days of Mankind.

Red Mole

Theatre for the New City

April 1979.

At 4am on March 28th 1979 there was a partial core meltdown in Unit Two of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in the state of Pennsylvania near the city of Harrisburg, 249 kilometres east of New York City. This meltdown was due to equipment malfunction, design failure and worker errors, and remains to date the most serious commercial nuclear accident in the USA.[i] 12 days prior to this accident The China Syndrome, a movie about an accident at a nuclear reactor, had been released. The sceptre of nuclear meltdown haunted the streets; images of reactor cooling towers glowed from newstand displays and in the core of the Big Apple there was suddenly the menace of nuclear rot.  Red Mole had been in New York for three months; our opening gambit Goin To Djibouti, seen at the Westbeth Theatre had won us enough kudos to secure a booking in the basement of the off off Broadway house, The Theatre for the New City.  With our visions of mutant nuclear holocaust survivors and deformed victims of dissident herbicide warfare, we descended the gloomy basement steps.  I mooched through the stale air of the pokey backstage and turned on a tap. Out gushed in coughs and shudders acrid rusty water, ‘contaminated coolant from the nuclear reactor’ I thought to myself. The stage itself measured approximately five metres square with an odd upstage room which I made use of to undertake a costume change. The audience numbered approximately 90 seats, and it being a basement all was over hung with a low grimy ceiling. The band, Red Alert, occupied part of the audience space and part of the side entrance to the theatre. The feeling was claustrophobic, stale and dingy; it suited our themes.  This production was our first About New York piece, and the events of Three Mile Island, the violent ejection from the Peacock Throne of The Shah of Iran and the moral corruption and artistic splendour of New York was all griss to the mill for our new show, The Last Days of Mankind.   

The inspiration for this new piece was not only New York City and the upsurge of fundamental Islamic jihad, but also a theatrical scenario from earlier in the century by the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus. Appearing under the same title (Red Mole, infamous thieves always sought to ‘poosle’ from the best) Kraus began the original Last Days at the outset of the First World War. In it he predicts the unravelling of the world as he would witness it in the five years to come, and the establishment of an economy of war that would drastically and forever change humankind. [ii] The structure of Karl Kraus’s original The Last Days of Mankind chronicles the development of the war through the daily and faithful quotations of “voices and rumours,” of street conversations, newspaper headlines, official speeches, and military reports. It is constructed as an assemblage[iii]. This is familiar territory to Red Mole who have long since utilised a cabaret format into which they can release songs, choreography, satirical skits, spoken-word jive and any other form or style the company chose to explore.  In order to give you a sense of the how the Red Mole production appeared I will run through the sequence of scenes, the troupe employing the same dramaturgical device as the original.

Prologue

A bare and revealing portent of what was to become. Claire Fergusson, a New Zealander living in New York appeared naked and poured paint over herself, colours red and black. Her diffident on stage nakedness and the casual enlistment of her own body as a canvas spoke of simultaneous objectification of herself but also a profound ownership and reverence of her body. She appeared twice, as our opening and later with a landscape self painted on her body backstage during the performance onstage. She stood on a sheet in the corner of the dressing room…painting.

Scene One

Lights lower on the paint adjusted body-scape to allow the muted ensemble to take the stage and then become illuminated in the time honoured opening of a tableau with piano accompaniment. We actors arranged ourselves into a live approximation of Monet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe.  In this impressionist painting from 1863 we see two fully clothed bourgeois men reclining upon the grass in the company of a naked woman; one other is in the background washing in a small lake. The atmosphere is post coital and a beguiling mix of innocence and pleasures taken; on stage none of the players were naked. After a moment the first words are spoken, those most deliberate and dreaded words. “That’s mine!” These two words deliberately chosen as they signal not only the companies regard for the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau but also a perceived mythical kinship between nature and the land of childhood. All of the actors on stage that night grew in small town New Zealand, and the association of innocence with nature and happiness, at least for me, always leans close when I think of my formative years growing as I did on a King Country farm. In Rousseau’s treatise ‘Discourse on Inequality,’ written 100 years prior to the painting Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, he postulates;

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying "This is mine," and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. Humanity would have been spared infinite crimes, wars, homicides, murders, if only someone had ripped up the fences or filled in the ditches and said, "Do not listen to this pretender! You are eternally lost if you do not remember that the fruits of the earth are everyone's property and that the land is no-one's property!"[iv}

The opening line of ‘that’s mine” is the beginning of the Last Days, from that moment on all is to be contested for and squabbled over. It is the rupture of harmony and the alpha heartbeat of our agonising separation. It is the flag of doom. However the squabble which then ensues on stage is not a political stoush of sophisticated posturing and contention but is a ribald children’s game. The Moles are playing children, precocious innocents playing the fall.

Precociousness seems at this point to underline the entire enterprise. Precocious to call the play after one of the great literary satires of the century, precocious to set children in a mock semblance of Monet’s astounding association of female nakedness and bourgeois male assumption, precocious to have all the ‘characters’ that appear in our play speak with American accents which vary wildly from close to authentic to outright cartoon-speak, precocious and audacious; yet in this Red Mole busts through to what was for us the beacon of our endeavour. Here but three kilometres from Wall Street, one level below ground in the belly of the beast we pointed the finger and the joy in doing so emptied precociousness of its malice and set us free. We were nothing, with everything as our possibility.  These onstage children that open the play are there to reflect the world as we saw it with all its influences and attractions. Their interaction is competitive, edgy and manic. They roam into possessiveness, space travel terminology, Vietnam war crimes, sexual buying. These children feel like victims already, what they have soaked up is cruelty, competitiveness, side taking and disposal of the weak or accidental.  Advantage is gained by aggressive posturing, deal making and being the first with the next activity. Then the child that trilled ‘that’s mine!’ is left, the separation now being felt and lived.  By turn’s she moves through whimsical self amusement to frustration and boredom, then finds her way out with an imaginary friend, and makes her exit.

Scene Two

Three young men, one with a guitar, execute a song and dance routine about their ambition to make it in New York

One last Philadelphia Cheese-steak in New Jersey,

Before I cross to the distant shore

 3 oclock in the morning and there’s no light on me

The wind is cut with ice and there’s snow outside the door[v]

The song is strident and wild in its delivery, ambition and resignation hold hands ‘we gonna make something happen on the streets of New York’[vi] and ‘no unfinished symphony just a half finished commercial melody’.[vii]  There are road signs, out of state plates, pimps and hotel porters, like walking into a jumbled pile of treasure and rubbish.

Scene Three

This is followed by a naive street walker who takes the audience into her confidence,” can you share a secret?” She, it seems is another recent arrival.  Her cat-call of “come-on come-on” builds as the band kicks in and another woman covered in bells emerges from the shadows and together they dance importuning the audience and the entire city to ‘Come-on’. It builds in its delirium to when suddenly the same woman announces “The Madmen at the Gates, Imitate the Loyal Burghers of Isfahan”. Enter the remaining members of the company, all wear flowing cloaks and each carries and/or wears a mask featured by large noses and leering expressions. They take up exaggerated poses for another announcement “Now the Loyal Burghers of Isfahan Lament the passing of The Shah of Iran.” This tearing satirical romp into American foreign relations and the new age of the Ayatollah in Iran leaves none untarnished; all are implicated. The CIA, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shah himself “Whose wand of authority has grown short.”[viii] and is now “lying somewhere on his back in the Bahamas.“ [ix] Whenever a player speaks the mask was lowered, the ‘madman’ peering from behind it. As each one takes their turn to pronounce they jostle for prime position on the stage. These ‘madmen’ embody a western media informed point of view of the downfall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran who had been ushered onto the Peacock Throne with the covert aid of the British and Americans in 1941. His fleeing from Iran preceded The Madmen at the Gates by some eight weeks.  This is Red Mole at their best; topical, furious, biting and funny.

“Oh Shah-n-Shah, I am the slave of thy desire. Dust on thy throne ascending foot am I.” 

“Oh Shah, we are glad you have a billion dollars to ease your pain and real estate on 5th Avenue.”

 “The Shah, who has not wisdom in himself nor has he a wise man for councillor, especially not the pie-faced ambassador from Washington. [x]

The performance technique for this skit is not entirely unique to Red Mole but over the years became perfected as a delivery mechanism of Alan Brunton’s verse. It’s a technique called stichomythic and is;

An ancient Greek arrangement of dialogue in drama, poetry, and disputation in which single lines of verse or parts of lines are spoken by alternate speakers.[xi]

The characters are all in the same world but they do not speak to each other; what they say is not a conversation but a series of pronouncements, by turns poetic, vicious, sad or funny. In rehearsal the lines would be divided up amongst the players and we would begin to move as we spoke. At times tableau would appear, the players interacting physically but always allowing the one about to speak the best stage position. There was always an element of improvisation in the movement so it was always loose, unpredictable and odd, but the text would not vary, nor the order in which the lines were to be spoken. In this instance with the flowing capes being maximised for theatrical display and the grotesque masks forming line-ups of ‘houri faced’ madmen, the effect was theatrical and entertaining.

Scene Four

Lord Galaxies Travelling Players. The MC for this troupe is The Ordinary Vernon and now he takes the stage and introduces the players and then delivers a postmodern diatribe lurching from a lament for the recently deceased Captain Video to the dying gasps of Voltaire.  

Each of the ‘Players’ does a turn, Hank Ballad and his ‘Gimmie a Dollar Stranger’ is a tuneful lament for a dying mother. Krapotkin the Clown mimes a touching romantic interlude, the tale of Quasimodo who so loved Esmerelda. Chelsea and Bristol the singing, joke telling twins present family entertainments.  The bell rings. Something sinister encroaches upon the Players. They each now represent a collection of street weirdos trying to sell useless stolen goods, shrieking and pleading. The routines are a collection of laments and apocalyptic verses. Crippled Cockroach, a blues lament, an elegy to a dying man alone in the wind and  grime of New York City streets.

‘Crippled Cockroach is taking his last walk

Past the cinemas on the fantasy circuit a dead dollar bill in his hat band

 From the sisters of Mercy

 And a twitching in the back of his skull.’

The requiem concludes with Crippled Cockroach stepping into the hole of his eternal death , but with a final  gesture to  fickle gods of the streets he ‘throws salt over his left shoulder’  and we are left with a ‘dishevelled woman complaining loudly’.

Then the precocious child relates an adventure between spider man and the Incredible Hulk, as they scale the towers and gaze down into the melting core of a nuclear reactor. The child invites her super-heros home to meet her ‘my mom, Agent Orange” Now one of Red Moles signature hits the infamous Agent Orange as spoken word rock-n-disease. Descriptions of mutations from Agent Orange herbicide “birds falling over without wings” the sing out on “I’ll be around for 99 years,” casting a prophecy few could challenge the efficacy of.

Two voices with musical accompaniment read from the ‘Personal Column’ citing pleading notices for human contact whilst onstage, in the dull glow of a suburban TV screen we see a bored and indolent couple release pagan impulses and animal desires to transform themselves into people ablaze with animal passions, the choreography builds to a climax the image of Pan complete with goat mask and naked torso. The passion breaks, dissipates and they re-embody the repressed, the judged, the ashamed, the timid and they resume their obtuse resignation to drabness. The Last Days indeed, the gods have left us, praise, release, personification of the base human instincts is now subjugated to that symbol of control, the ubiquitous television, and the public plea for private human connection.

Scene Five

This leads on to a racy instrumental from the band over which a sex for sale conversation is negotiated, the male admonishes the woman for her offers of champagne and ‘a good time’ asking for a ‘live sex act’ to which she replies ‘I am a live sex act!” The disco beats with nonchalant heat, the conversation becomes increasingly lewd as it veers away from a possibility of human contact into the wasteland of animal cravings. The final demand of the man is for the two women to kiss each other, “on the mouth” his need for intimacy totally servile to his inability to enact his own craving, and so he pays others to show him, yes we are indeed in The Last Days of Mankind.  Just as this final point of depravity and perversity is made the act shudders to a stop, the music cuts to allow a French  impressionistic film noir piano  change the mood from ribald to reflective and quietly disturbing.  This ushers onto the stage a parade of Lord Galaxies Players, all mutated and dressed in white.  The Ordinary Vernon has no hair, the singing twins Chelsea and Bristol have become Siamese and joined at the hip, Hank Ballad Junior has only one leg and is blind, and Kropotkin the clown has shed his clothes, donned a gas mask and ascends to the unknown up the aisle of the auditorium. Only the semi-naked figure of the artist, self-made, real and altered only by her own hand survives, surreal flesh amongst the deformities. The self-adjusting artist survives. The apocalypse has transformed them. The fire of performance has lifted the players into survival, unrecognisable, burnt, scarcely human, but living. The Ordinary Vernon, ring master of Lord Galaxies travelling player’s huddles against the wall, waiting for the phone to ring. He expects God to call, for who else would?

[i] US. NRC Website retrieved Feb 4th 2010.

[i] Website All About Jewish Theatre . Retrieved Feb 4th 2010.

[iii] ibid

[iv] Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Discourse on Equality Part 2. Website Modern History Source Book. Retrieved Feb 4th 2010.

[v] Brunton, Alan. Song lyric. Davies , J. music.

[vi] ibid

[vii] ibid

[viii] Brunto, Alan. Playscript The Last Days of Mankind.

[ix] ibid

[x] Brunton,Alan. Playscript The Last Days of Mankind.

[xi] Dictionary.com Retrieved February 5th 2010.