![]() ![]() The police are after Betty Bam for killing somebody - she isn’t sure who and neither are they. This is a surrealistic ‘murder mystery’ in which both the killer and the solution are up for grabs. The fun comes from the playwright’s determination never to be pinned down - he serves up absurdity with whiz bang purity. Once you figure out what Kharms is up to, this is a delightfully satiric excursion into genre meltdown. He generates uncertainty by twisting literary conventions to the breaking point and then some. It is only about an hour long - most of his other theatrical pieces are what Beckett would call “dramaticules.” Now comes Betty Bam!, a second evening of Kharms starring his longest play, 1927’s Elizaveta Bam. First, the company staged a collection of Kharms playlets, stories, and jottings entitled Knock! The Daniil Kharms Project. Still, the imaginary beasts are determined. Making good sense means dollars and cents in today’s market: stagings of Beckett come along now and then, but Ionesco and Genet have just about vanished. American theater is committed to reassuring Hollywood realism, didactic empowerment plays, feel-good formula musicals, and new-circus spectaculars - the very kind of rote entertainment Kharms was dead set against. Worse, the imaginary beasts are staging Kharms’ illogical work at a very bad time. Kharms was perfect for academics to pour over and expound upon - there is much buzz about how he anticipated deconstruction - but it was too late for him to become part of the literary mainstream in the West. But Kharms’ texts were pulled out of the Soviet vaults (or the safe-keeping of friends) during the ’60s and by the time they made it into English they looked exotic and/or antiquated. If skillful translations of Kharms’ postmodern sketches and playlets had been available in the ’50s or ’60s, during the high tide of the Theater of the Absurd, I am convinced his minimalist works would be read or performed alongside those of Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestations.” His ‘crime’ was no more and no less than wanting the freedom to break all the rules: “I am interested only in ‘nonsense,'” Kharms wrote in 1937, “only in that which makes no practical sense. In the case of the luckless Kharms, during the ’20s he was active in an avant-garde group that attracted the attention of the authorities: he was first arrested in the early ’30s, told he could only write for children, and then, when those pieces were deemed subversive by the Soviet police by the end of the decade, tossed into a psychiatric prison where he apparently starved to death. Brilliant experimental writers such as Andrey Platonov (1899-1951) and Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) were persecuted, forbidden to publish, and finally silenced. The crimes Stalinism committed against artists have been aided and abetted by the brutality of time. William Schuller and Amy Meyer in the imaginary beasts’ “Betty Bam.” Photo: courtesy of imaginary beasts. ![]()
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