Smashing the Watermelon: New Ohio Theatre's Anarchic Farewell
"Ultra Left Violence," by departing artistic director Robert Lyons, closes out the company's final Ice Factory Festival
The soon-to-be-demolished watermelon may or may not have represented the American theater.
As the doomed fruit made its entrance, a tarp was laid across the stage, extending to those seated in the front row. Director/performer Daniel Irizarry placed the watermelon at its center, then produced a baseball bat.
“This is fucking happening, guys!” he declared as audience members gripped the thin plastic over their faces, bracing for impact.
Smash, smash, smash. Juices everywhere. Irizarry bellowed: “KNOWLEDGE - PAINFULLY - ACQUIRED!”
This was Robert Lyons’ Ultra Left Violence, the latest evening of bedlam from One-Eighth Theater. It was also the final production of Lyons’ New Ohio Theatre, which ended its 30-year run this past weekend. (The West Village space will remain active, now handed off to Chashama.)
Lyons and Irizarry’s One-Eighth collaborations have never lent themselves to easy takeaways. Last year’s My Onliness, a parade of gleeful nonsense centered around a childlike dictator (Irizarry again), certainly conjured the feeling of living under Trump — but it wasn’t about him, or anything so direct.
Violence follows three loose threads: a rambling professor (Irizarry, unhinged) lecturing his students on “the complete and unwritten works of our esteemed author”; a poet (Pepper Binkley, luminous) wandering the world in search of meaning; and two young activists (Rhys Tivey and Folami Williams, relentless) free-associating a new anti-capitalist manifesto.
“What follows,” Williams explained by way of introduction, “is an ad-hoc theoretical prose poem, and so on and so forth ad nauseum!” Then she and Tivey mime-vomited at the concept.
Where My Onliness framed itself around a demented despot abusing his citizens, Violence (a work-in-progress) has no aspirations of narrative or throughline. Lyon’s script is a manic collage of theoretical debate, poetic reflection and random acts of mayhem. Questions of stifling bureaucracy, isolating screen-bound existences and data-driven approaches to diverse thought are hashed out – but as soon as a debate grows impenetrable (which is often), it abruptly ends, and the performers try something else.
Typically that “something else” is mild abuse of an audience volunteer. First the poet invited an audience member up for a drink, only to immediately flee and leave him alone onstage. Later Irizarry pulled up a dance partner who was, impressively, nearly as frenzied as he was. (“Avant garde, avant garde!” was the only dance instruction.)
Finally the show paused entirely, with two scenes left, for a New Ohio send-off. We were invited on stage to drink, shout out memories of favorite New Ohio moments and scrawl tributes on the floors and walls in chalk. (Lyons himself poured me a shot, an approach more ADs should emulate.)
Appropriately for a final New Ohio show, Violence is both a still-gestating new work, messy and ambitious, and a party, a communal event that could only happen at this theater, right now.
But what of the watermelon?
The two activists imagine an anti-capitalist utopia where the individual is valued over institutional profit or top-down leadership. Their ideas sometimes echo Monica Byrne’s recent Washington Post column about theater’s moment of financial crisis, in which Byrne argued for direct funding of artists to “produce their own work, rent their own venues and pay their own collaborators.” Byrne wrote partly in response to another op-ed, by Isaac Butler in The New York Times, which had chiefly argued for a bailout of American’s nonprofit theatrical complex through a significant increase in funding to the National Endowment of the Arts. (Butler pushed for direct funding of artists also, and has argued the two goals can co-exist, though he also warned that Byrne’s proposal would cost thousands of administrators their jobs.)
There is a frequent, perhaps inevitable disconnect between the aspirational visions presented on theatrical stages and the daily compromises of the institutions presenting those same works. It’s similar to the division reflected in those two columns: imagining a better way vs. working within what seems realistic. In both its ideas and its anarchic form, Violence pushes for a paradigm shift, a smashing of the watermelon. At the same time, this show bids farewell to a company that successfully subverted and challenged artistic boundaries while operating within the structures that the current systems made possible, and never figured out a way to break free of them.
That disconnect, though sometimes troublesome, is better than the alternative. Radical ideas take time to gain a foothold. A place like the New Ohio can, as Lyons said in his parting American Theatre interview, “keep doing the work, and expand what people accept.” Rachel Chavkin, Qui Nguyen, Alex Timbers and Tina Satter are a few early New Ohio artists who have pushed into the mainstream. And Lyons leaves behind a theatrical landscape far more open to a radical redistribution of power from institutions to artists. I hear about it from young artists all the time.
So, the watermelon. It is a necessary destruction, breaking apart the old to make room for the new. Or, it’s the devastation handed off by aging leaders who leave a crumbling system behind them.
Or, perhaps: It was their last show, and Irizarry and Lyons just really wanted to smash a watermelon.
You realize that what you think is the avant-garde action of smashing a watermelon was part of the act of the hack comic Gallagher for years. So much for the avant-garde.