Cardiac Arresting

In the short history of the Redhouse,
artistic director Laura Austin has always favored the edgy and
convention-busting, often a hard sell in Syracuse. This time she has
imported a complete show: the writer-performers, director and setup
from The Eaten Heart, which was performed by the Brooklyn-based
Debate Company a year ago. That means the people who wrote the show,
Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, who also perform all roles, are appearing
here, along with original director Oliver Butler. 

Trucked up also is Amanda Rehbein’s
deliberately tacky-looking set with Mike Riggs’ often ingenious
lighting. At the center is a shabby, 1970s-style motel room, as one
might have seen in an earlier Sam Shepard play. Upstage at back is a
door to a bathroom, and next to it a large window, opening on the
suggestion of a swimming pool. At left and right are two more rooms,
which may be next door or at some remote location. Depending on the
lighting for the black screens on front of the rooms, we may see
nothing or we may see everything that goes on inside.

Things start simply enough, but they
don’t stay that way. A woman enters the motel room and prepares for a
shower by taking off her clothes, unseen, in the bathroom. Wrapped in a
towel and smoking a cigarette, she sits in front of an unplugged
television set that flickers to life before her. She then returns to
the bathroom when a man who has been crouching unseen behind the bed
suddenly stands up and begins to tell a story about a man who dreams
that his hateful wife, Margarita, is attacked by wolves. The man in the
story bears a strikingly Italian name, Anthony Omolio. When he relates
that the wife was indeed savaged by wolves he adds, smirkingly, “She
was no longer beautiful, but she was no longer contrary.”

The Italian names and a helpful program tip us off that The Eaten Heart is inspired by Boccaccio’s The Decameron (1353), one of the first works of narrative fiction in the Middle Ages. That same program note tells us that the tales in Decameron have
a penchant for “hilarious, erotic and occasionally gory twists.” The
Italian title implies the number 10 as that is the number of
storytellers who must tell 10 tales over 10 nights, making a total of
100. Your humble reviewer, even with notebook in hand, is not sure
there are 10 interwoven stories in The Eaten Heart, which runs a bit over an hour without intermission. But there might be.

Lickety-split wig and costume changes
delight throughout. Both Bos, compact and dark, and Thureen, gangly and
red-haired, are distinctive physical types, but they effortlessly glide
into many contrasting characters, perhaps as many as 10. A Renaissance
fair worker (Bos) draws real smoke from a bong shaped like a giant red
delicious apple. A neglected wife (Bos) of a radio evangelist gives an
extravagant tip to a perhaps guileless pizza deliveryman (Thureen), who
obligingly returns, saying he wants a dip in the pool. She takes off
her bra and joins him. A bragging salesman (Thureen) is convinced that
his magical bikini briefs make him invisible. Bos or Thureen may exit
rapidly at stage right and turn up again at stage left in a completely
different costume, sometimes more quickly than one could possibly do in
real time (a trick partially explained at the final curtain).

Among the actual borrowings of motifs from The Decameron
is the one from Book IV, of the woman who preserves the severed head of
a lover in a fragrant pot. Actually, this has already been borrowed a
half-dozen times, and English majors will remember it in John Keats’
poem “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” (1820). Here it’s a potted green
plant that is cherished and revered until she decides to take it to bed
with her. Within The Eaten Heart the preserved head is a signal that other body parts may soon appear.

Pop cultural allusions are a bit harder
to gloss. We hear repetitions of the banal, sweet Chock Full o’ Nuts
theme from the 1960s, as well as long-ago radio commercials for Kent
cigarettes and the defunct American Motors Corporation. More haunting
is the repetition of the Ink Spots’ falsetto rendition of the 1939 love
song, “My Prayer, “whose first verse ends, “My prayer is rapture in
blue/ With the world far away and your lips close to mine.”

Even though some of the individual narratives feel like bite-sized versions of Last Year at Marienbad,
we get the drift through links in parallel actions. The salesman in the
bikini shorts laughs at the voyeur who says he spied upon the salesman
and his wife having intercourse. “Joke’s on you, buddy,” he laughs, “I
wasn’t even home Friday night.” We learn the names of three ongoing
characters: a husband, Robert; a wife, Anne; and a best friend, Gill.
And the action will end with an extended dinner between a husband and
wife.

Although The Decameron has served
as the basis for two movies, the more notable by Pier Paolo Pasolini
(1970), it’s not one of those books whose outline is in everyone’s head
even if he or she hasn’t read it, like The Divine Comedy or Don Quixote. It is, however, an ur-text,
coming almost 50 years before Chaucer and stolen from by everybody. Bos
and Thureen cite no theoretical influences, but there’s a good chance
one was Tzvetan Todorov’s The Grammar of the Decameron (1969), a landmark of post-modernism that argues for comedy and fantasy’s liberation from the shackles of realism. It’s as if The Eaten Heart would start Western literature all over again from a riotous scratch.