Jet Bludgeons Senses, Convention With Meaningless Pretension:

Jet of Blood was the Loeb Ex's latest attempt at giving Harvard theater a good kick in the pants. An incomprehensible and highly derivative kick, but a kick nevertheless. The viewers may have wondered at times how so much irritating pretentiousness could be crammed into a seventeen-minute production of Antonin Artaud's play, but director David Gammons did it, and with considerable flair.

The audience members were ushered into a transformed theater. A mound rose from the center, surrounded by what appeared to be flexible silver stalactites with flat circles attached at the ends. These "decorations" turned out to be an innovative--if uncomfortable--form of audience seating. During the course of the play, cast members tended to brush past the swings, sending the audience spiralling around. The production definitely broke down the barrier which separates audience from performer, as this reviewer discovered when a partially dressed actor did his best to masturbate against her leg.

The play opened in a wash of romantic purple light, with lycra-clad couples embracing ecstatically. This initial, sugary sweet facade soon shattered into a whirl of violent, absurd and erotic images.

Cast members were poised in the middle of the audience with fog machines throughout the production, creating an interesting misty effect that enhanced the rather extra-terrestrial feel of the set. Several of the actors favored the spaceman look, with sliver shoes and ling-snouted plastic guns.

The only remotely plausible interpretation of this play--if there is one at all--is that is an old-fashioned tale of Love and Loss. There may even be an element of progression here, moving from the beatific harmony of the opening scene to the chaotic disintegration and orgiastic simulated sex and the final tangled mass of exhausted, motionless flesh.

The play was not really redeemed by the acting, for the simple reason that there was none. The cast seemed to spend less time acting than contorting. To be fair, they did not have much of a script to work with. It sprouted such inspiring lines as "I love you and everything is beautiful"--enunciated in various shades of monotone by a variety of people--and "I have lost her. Give her back to me." By trying to use such cliches for ironic ends, Artaud was created the worst kind of cliche--in effect, a self-parody.

The cast members are virtually indistinguishable from each other. The majority are dressed in diapers--the men's distended by suspiciously large bulges--in unflattering hues, yet another post-modernist denial of the Aesthetic.

Inexplicably, at periodic intervals, the actors chose to spin around the stage in a Lycra whirlwind, scuttling through the audience like roaches zapped with bug spray. Perhaps the audience is expected to draw a deep meaning from the sight of actors running nowhere. Perhaps.

It is, of course, unrealistic to hope for a developed plot in a plan that is over almost before it starts. But surely it is not unfair to expect some cohesiveness to all the fractured images of rackless dissipation and wild cavorting. Whatever deep symbolism Gammons was groping for was concealed in a fog of groundless cynicism and unearned world-weariness.

In any case, Jet of Blood is a perfect specimen of the self-indulgent dramatic productions of Harvard. It might keep you occupied for 17 minutes, but it does not accomplish much.