#Hillarious #Incredibility #2017 Goingfwd:
2ward a fMotherland under Deconstruction
Some Realtime Musings
Between Now and Then 119
After Cecilia Corrigan’s Motherland 2016
@ ISSUE Project Room, December 3, 2016, 8pm, NYC, NYC, USA, tbc
Kyoo Lee
>> “A Political Witch-Hunt” >>
“Lock her up” lock her up locker up & down there we go all the way this way here one says, all buttered up by some guy calling him a “genius” truly yrs like some wench GivingItToHim.
Her turn?
“Lock her up,” “FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT” (Tweeter, 5:19 PM, 10 Jan 2017), “Are we living in Nazi Germany?” (Tweeter, 7:48 AM, 11 Jan 2017). Camp T, Fire!
Now it is?
Or lOOk, see who turns up next. I mean, if we’re “living in Nazi Germany,” whoRthe Weimar children in that vaterland I mean motherland I mean on (mom&)dad’s property? You? Y’all whose “voice I am” (RNC, Cleveland, 21 July 2016)? Just listen to the queen, the fatherhand.
… Incredibility, Whose?
Confusing, I know. Whose fingers, who’s pointing at whom, appointed and disappointed? Broken-heart or not, the Queen of Hearts in all this, this slice of “American Realness,” does not seem amused. Could one be pre-pardoned in this wonderland of pointed wanderings? Excuse me, catch me if you can. Who has or would have this incredibility, this actu-realized capacity to derail or redirect the real, if not you dear, the one and only? Whence & whither this virtual certainty and sovereignty of yours, ours? In this electoral data war still going strong, and the President-elect of the United States of America now on about the inaugural address, some of you, especially the philosopher type, those post-factual ones, might still be scratching your head, wondering who won or is winning the battle. The war will tell us?
Of democracy, not over yet, the show must go on, at least for another few years, who knows. Use your nose. Smell the fart, when the fact is far too near to see, too obscene to be framed in any way, like that plain old Margrittean pipe, the parable, in other words, of a smoky gun just fired off. The show will show itself as time cheerleads itself in or out, believe me or not.
#Hillarity, Pre- or Post-Electoral
Such is the invigorating message of the chronopolitics of mortgaged hope and despair brilliantly timed & coded in the “millennial” tragicomedy of transAmerican restlessness by Cecilia Corrigan, a “post-internet” poet, who, just last month (already!), concluded, by reverse “premiering,” her yearlong screen-to-street-to-stage triple-hybrid four-part drama series, Motherland with the multi-allegorical mix of characters in a live performance, viz., a gendered pair of bratty or else over-stimulated Weimar Children, Gerta & Joel Grey (played by Cecilia Corrigan & Felix Bernstein), Mommy & Daddy that would be actually lovely Hillary (Cammisa Buerhaus) & Bill (Gabe Rubin) Clinton, the family therapist (Andy Ragni) who becomes too familiar with the whole set, the subservient servant (Sarah Krasnow), etc. including another crucial detail, a Chinese food delivery man who without “entering” the stage would return to it, whose (sort of) food glues both the cloistered Upper West APT scene on stage & later the lushly filmed “last supper,” the superb icing on this parody cake.
Stitching Brooklyn 2016–Washington DC 1992–Berlin 1931 with an oddly subtle campy obviousness, both referential & stylistic, sparing no critical & creative energy, this piece follows the psychodramatic twists & turns in the days of a virtualized super-(white-)mom Commander-in-Chief soon-to-be, (a/the/some sort of) Hillary Clinton competing against “the man with the little hands” out there to get this “nasty woman,” the queeny man whose offstage presence becomes increasingly palpable as the day of election draws near with literalized urgency, and now, shifting the gears, now that the day’s gone, what else could be worked out in and back into this set triangle of street-screen-stage? In my view, it is just this layered nodal and modal imagination that drove the plot forward in the first place, which means: the series remains, structurally, open-ended to-day, the last becoming a first.
“GREAT PARTY, ISN’T IT, MOM?” or Dad, you mean?—as the other, smart, feminist millennial daughter in the Father’s real estate & states of America might say, now with the Sino-invested son-in-law chiming in, supplementing the irony of it all: a picture-perfect all-American set. The intertextual poignancy of this black comedy, the surrealized Motherland featuring & unfolding against the family homo-heteromance of “American greatness,” is in such a hillarity of realtime resonance, “the mommy issue,” you say—with a double l (the “le” mirrored into each other, “elle”) and the addictive mm~, m&m, the instantly globalized echo & counter-echo of the psychopolitical motherf***ing glittering maadness maddness of it all, which is helping or hurting people or the people, depending on how one counts. All that hatred & love, if not love & hatred, dumped on, projected onto, the (m)other, who by the way wasn’t and probably isn’t going to stay home & bake cookies, is neo-retro, renewable.
As usual, Corrigan, the spacey tipsy woman, collapses, passes out on stage. Yet, remember: one does not simply dance into the night, as does the wild blonde in the Motherland, if there is nothing worth scrambling and screaming out for. Look, outside, the call, out the windows.
