The title of Asher Hartman’s latest play—Sorry, Atlantis: Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge—has a madcap quality to it. At once arresting in its demand on our attention and disarming in its flirtation with absurdity, the title does for the play what a good movie trailer should. It makes one want to go see it. Seeing the play, however, does not guarantee a secure grasp on it. The conventional way of experiencing a dramatic work has a lot to do with the brokering of access—to the visual and spatial representation of a playwright’s ideas, the emotional landscape actors inhabit, the narrative trajectories they chart, and, finally, to the meaning all of the above is intended to convey. Hartman’s play, however, is far from conventional in the kinds of access it grants and withholds. The notion of convention is, of course, a cheat. Theater has always been an internally transgressive art form, frantically tentative about its own traditions and innovations. And while twentieth century playwright/directors like Richard Foreman and Tadeusz Kantor were rightly branded “experimental” for their time, even the most ostensibly traditional dramaturgy is likely to redraw the limits of the medium. Shakespeare is as good an example of this as any—while firmly ensconced at the center of the Western canon, he was also a restless innovator who authored plays within plays, coined multiple words, and scrambled the genre taxonomies of his day. Experimentation in theater, then, is not a threshold concept but rather a continuum of variable intensities. Near the more conservative end of this scale we find plays that tinker with what dramatic expression is supposed to be. At the opposite end of the scale we find dramatic expression that tinkers with what a play is supposed to be. Sorry, Atlantis is a brilliant example of the latter extreme.
Asher Hartman, Sorry Atlantis, Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, 2017. Performance at Machine Project, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Machine Project. Photo: Haruko Tanaka.
To attempt to describe Hartman’s play is to fail on terms other than the play’s own. While anything one says can be accommodated by the play, a great deal of it is likely to run afoul of the world outside it. For example, one can say that the play is vibrantly political or resolutely apolitical. That it tackles gender or only tickles it. That incest occupies its narrative center or lurks in its swampy margins. That it all happens underwater or, equally convincingly, in the driest of heavens. This radical condition upends accepted terms of spectatorship and criticism: if we are able to say just about anything about the play, how intelligible and informative can what we say be? Both intelligible and informative, as it turns out.
Asher Hartman, Sorry Atlantis, Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, 2017. Performance at Machine Project, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Machine Project. Photo: Gema Galiana.
Upon entering Machine Project, the experimental Echo Park venue that produced and hosted Sorry, Atlantis, audience members are greeted with an offering of three unconventional accommodations—a shot of whiskey, a bite of bizarre food, and, for those who would consider seeing the play from above while wearing a curly white wig, the opportunity to ascend to the “Bitch Balcony.”1 These accommodations create an instant sense of intimacy that is vaguely conspiratorial, because it demands nonchalant complicity with the conceits of theatrical intoxication and culinary hazard, and a cavalier attitude towards gender slurs. Hartman is comfortable stacking the odds, and, as someone who has followed his work over the better part of a decade, I am comfortable with his way of doing it. It actually does not take prolonged exposure to realize that the unique entertainments he stages are always, among many things, exercises in dynamic trust. Hartman lodges his wager between the generosity of trusting his audience and the trust he expects from its members in return. This bargain is driven by devices of variable subtlety—from the placement of his audience on stage at the Bing Theater for The Silver, the Black, and the Wicked Dance (2016) to the subjection of viewers to the licks of a giant inflatable tongue in Purple Electric Play (2014). The Bitch Balcony in Sorry, Atlantis is a device of a similar order. It establishes trust by suspending our common expectations of decorum.
Asher Hartman, Sorry Atlantis, Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, 2017. The Apex Bitch Balcony. Performance at Machine Project, Los Angeles, September 21–November 19, 2017. Courtesy of the artist and Machine Project. Photo: Gema Galiana.
The play’s mise-en-scène is just as idiosyncratic in its defiance of expectations. The defining aspect of the staging is an architectural feat that boggles the mind: the entire ground floor of Machine Project has been lifted diagonally across the building’s street level. Upon walking in, the audience apprehends a slanted stage that starts at its feet and vanishes towards the upper edge of the opposite wall. The surface of the resulting giant slide is pierced through with apertures, trap doors, and tiny crevices, which are variously activated throughout the performance. This spatial intervention is rich with symbolic possibility. Like a sentient touchscreen, the diagonal floor plane adjudicates between the seen and the unseen, the realized and the repressed, the living and the dead.
Asher Hartman, Sorry Atlantis, Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, 2017. Performance at Machine Project, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Machine Project. Photo: Gema Galiana.
As a test of the limits of perception and intelligibility, the staging is richly matched by the dramatic material Hartman supplies us with. Of the actors, Paul Outlaw and Joe Seely spend the longest on stage, as the Lizard Twins. Their speech emerges from a monosyllabic sea that occasionally curdles into casual profundity. Their kinetic dispositions, exaggerated enunciation, and facial contortions convey the persistent immaturity that family members beat each other into. And beat the Twins do, utilizing limbs, tongues and, most unforgettably, the misshapen puppet penises that burst greedily out of their undone flies. Another character, the snail Sledgeweed, as played by Zut Lorz, delivers the irrepressible discomforts of pre-pubescent sexuality—her voice pitched high, her every movement a tumble, her body padded with protrusions of vague erotic interest. Two other characters—Freebird and Harry Who Tomato Face—carry the symbolic torch of failure, the former through action, puppetry, and song, the latter through parables of error and loss. The hardest working actor may be Philip Littell, who is harnessed with the Russian roulette game of switching between two outsize roles. As Poseidon, he flaunts his svelte physique in a slow dance of narcissistic reminiscence. As Hairy Hairy Woman, he combines the excesses of old-world glamour with the illicit seductions of incest. That Littell manages to inhabit both roles while being only a tiny yellow Speedo shy of nude is a rare feat of dramatic believability.
Asher Hartman, Sorry Atlantis, Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, 2017. Performance at Machine Project, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Machine Project. Photo: Haruko Tanaka.
Instead of a traceable plotline, Hartman and his coterie of inimitable characters deliver a feat of narrative excavation. The play starts with a tableau of tentative innocence. The Twins, like two magnets perpetually drawn together and apart by the implied dysfunctions they share, engage in light banter. Sledgeweed interrupts them with her baby talk, painting a picture of doom. By the time Freebird and Harry roll through the first act, it becomes clear that all of the characters share a past. The Twins’ clingy bond and enactments of verbal and gestural paranoia imply that they are culpable of prior misdeeds. Sledgeweed is at turns playful and accusatory—a dichotomy mimicked by the way her padded costume and her infantile crawling about the stage create contradictory impressions of concupiscence and disgust. Freebird is possibly the oddest of them all. She wears a clown-like wig and makeup, often appears and disappears into the stage floor, and teases incomprehensibility with her squeaky, high-pitched enunciation. Her general attitude teeters between amused alarm and exasperated spite. If this were a family, Freebird would be the sibling whose development was arrested by larger issues and even larger personalities. Somehow, the raggedy puppet she operates in some of the scenes seems to undermine Freebird’s agency instead of granting her a morsel of control. The same goes for the little melodies she sings—they register her presence but seem to stop short of stirring her into personhood. Harry, in turn, seems to exist in a different kind of limbo. He is, on the evidence of his torn attire and general disfigurement, a dead man. The accusations he hurls at the Twins and his lamentations about his life of mediocrity make Harry sound like a ghost of male victimhood. This impression is heightened by his palpable weakness for crude poetics and sea shanties.
Asher Hartman, Sorry Atlantis, Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, 2017. Performance at Machine Project, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Machine Project. Photo: Haruko Tanaka.
The excavation is as physical as it is cognitive. From the early scenes of the play, a subterranean world churns with activity below the stage’s slant. The breaching of this diagonal plane, and the traversing of it in every direction, is bound up with the storyline’s veering from revelation to mystery and back. It is from beneath that Littell’s two characters, or rather their distinct voices, first make themselves known. By the horror these interventions cause above the floorboards, it appears that both Poseidon and Hairy Hairy Woman bear the mark of violence and may even be the cause of it. When Poseidon finally emerges, he is a picture of vanity and carnal desire. The other characters’ amazement at Poseidon’s antics—the rubbing of an invisible lotion into his skin, the ogling of his reflection in a phantom mirror, the condescending stories of sexual conquest—is laced with the sinister possibility of his immortality. Several lines from Harry, Poseidon, and the Twins suggest that Poseidon is supposed to be dead and might have lost his life at the Twins’ hands. That the latter two refer to him as a “dad” and a “father” might mean that he has been the victim of patricide or, were he really a god, of a much graver crime.
When Littell starts juggling between Poseidon and Hairy Hairy Woman, Sorry, Atlantis achieves a signature Hartman height—the marriage of tragedy and farce. Hairy Hairy Woman peels out of Littell as the actor descends into a fur-lined pit mid-stage. The two characters take turns gnawing at tales of family strife, jealousy, and incest, and the magic of Littell’s body and voice anchors them into a shared narrative. These amplified caricatures—Poseidon, of imperious omnisexual masculinity, and Hairy Hairy Woman, of manipulative seduction—somehow cohere into a picture of original sin. The judgment of sin, however, requires the kind of rigorous cosmology that Sorry, Atlantis keeps at puppet-penis length. While tragedy is predicated on the pain we cause others, farce trades on how exuberantly enjoyable pain can get.
Asher Hartman, Sorry Atlantis, Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, 2017. Performance at Machine Project, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Machine Project. Photo: Haruko Tanaka.
This instability also applies to most other forms of normative sanction—while regret, blame, guilt, and redemption are all part of the play’s narrative currency, their liquidity is of dubious guarantee. On a post-Christian, post-Freudian reading, Hartman could be digging up the story of a family in which promiscuous parents (Poseidon and Hairy Hairy Woman) sexually molested their sons (the Twins), irreparably damaged their daughters (Sledgeweed and Freebird), hurt each other repeatedly, and visited collateral damage upon various other people (Harry Who Tomato Face), until they were finally murdered by their sons. But the power of Hartman’s play lies precisely in the intentional jumbling of normative narrative codes. The story, characters and mise-en-scène all exhibit a radical openness. While not exactly a “make-your-own-play” proposition, Sorry, Atlantis is a paragon of dramatic inclusivity. By the time some of the characters have addressed the occupants of the Apex Bitch Balcony variously as “clouds” and “judges,” it is clear that the audience is osmotically implicated not only in the play’s twisted ethics but also in its very creative impetus.
Philosophically, Sorry, Atlantis jibes with a rich tradition of deconstructive thought. Jacques Derrida’s famous pronouncement that “there is nothing outside of the text” attempts a double feat: to place textuality at the center of the human condition and, as a result, to posit a logic of inclusion that draws all things, concepts, and phenomena closer together.2 Hartman’s play accomplishes both of these things. Even though the proceedings on stage follow a script, the multitude of voices, inflections, points of view, and plot twists conspire to undermine any sense of textual hierarchy. The impression is that the play is being written, erased, and revised in stride—actors correct themselves and each other, lines and scenes are echoed in later lines and scenes, and aesthetic flourishes ironize the action like so many playful scare quotes.
Asher Hartman, Sorry Atlantis, Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, 2017. Performance at Machine Project, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Machine Project. Photo: Haruko Tanaka.
What this amounts to, at first look, is a hermetic mess. But, as one continues watching (and listening and smelling and trying to pay attention to a hurricane of staging devices), what becomes clear is that the denial of a total meaning does not entail the refusal of meaning altogether. On the contrary, once the audience eases into the realization that no unifying structure presides over the multiple moments of vagrant poignancy, it becomes easier to follow and enjoy the work. What helps one care about how these moments are strung together is the fact that they are often explicitly invitational across the fourth wall. When, for example, a mirror slides up through the floorboards for Poseidon to ogle his physical gifts, the audience sees itself in the fleeting reflection. A similar “you-are-here” effect is achieved textually by the mention of dating applications (“Grindr, Tinder, Blendr, don’t matter”) in Harry’s attempt to imagine another character’s back story. Such moments make Hartman’s work granularly relatable despite its deferral of total access. And this is where the deconstructive power of Sorry, Atlantis lies: by weaving a multiplicity of texts and lending them to perpetual interpretation, the play implicates the audience in the making of the work. This is the co-authoring that Derrida’s radical view of textuality enables. A reader is also a writer, an audience the maker of its own entertainment.3
The impression of co-authoring is just as strong when it comes to Hartman’s work with actors. When Nietzsche speaks of “the problem of the actor,” he makes it clear that it is not actors he has a problem with. Instead, he finds suspect the actorly nature of our everyday commerce, with its implications of contrivance and dishonesty. For thespians proper, he mostly has enthusiastic praise, especially for their “excess of capacities for all kinds of adaptation that can no longer be satisfied in the service of the nearest, most narrowly construed utility.”4 The qualifier “all kinds” suggests that adaptation here can be understood reflexively—as a blanket that covers both actors’ adaptability to different textual conditions and, at the same time, their ability to adapt texts to their own dramatic profiles. To say that the actors Hartman works with are Nietzschean in this sense would be an understatement. Their contributions are starkly responsive and boldly interpretative at the same time. They operate in what Tzachi Zamir identifies as a “dialogue with the work”—a conversational availability that transforms the script along the lines of personal idiosyncrasy.5
Asher Hartman, Sorry Atlantis, Eden’s Achin’ Organ Seeks Revenge, 2017. Performance at Machine Project, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist and Machine Project. Photo: Haruko Tanaka.
In his essay “Theater and Philosophy,” Tom Stern says that the text of a play “isn’t a set of necessary and sufficient conditions which can be plugged into a machine, resulting in a perfect, text-determined performance.”6 Sorry, Atlantis confirms this observation plentifully, and it does so knowingly, with one eye defiantly fixed on the frontier of perfect interpretation. Hartman is much more interested in perfection as a perversion of reality than as an object of aspiration. After all, he stages a play whose conditions (script, actors, props, puppets, staging) are plugged into a machine (Machine Project is an art space that has a history of utilizing robotic and mechanical processes as creative prompts), resulting in a performance that is, on the evidence of its consistency across multiple viewings, text determined.7 The conditions, however, are not presented in the neat bundle of necessity and sufficiency that perfection requires. Quite the opposite—they are open-ended invitations for actors, the space, and the audience to interact with, and ultimately co-create, the play.
A critically generative practice such as Hartman’s seems to rely on the notion that reality can only be reverse engineered. Whatever we take our world to be is bound up in ideologies and generalizations whose purpose is to enable delusions of clarity amidst total and systematic obfuscation. This is why Sorry, Atlantis proudly fails the intelligibility test: it refuses to lend itself to clarities of the common delusionary kind. The only way to see reality is to back our way into it, retreating from convention into the recesses of complexity and insight. It is not by chance that Hartman scaffolds the play’s devious attractions around family dynamics—from the Oedipal strife suggested by the title to the pageantry of boiling bloodlines that permeates most of the action. The familial is, after all, the lowest denominator of the familiar. But the familiar is not a destination here; it is the point of departure toward an unregulated space of common interest. This is a space where, as Sorry, Atlantis proves, we can make sense together.
Rossen Ventzislavov is a philosopher specializing in aesthetics, architectural theory, literature, popular music, and performance art. He has been a member of the Encounter performance art collective since 2014 and is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at Woodbury University.