Untitled Document
Stacey Robinson with an audience member performing “Blondell Is Businessfied” by Daniel Alexander Jones (2009).
I arrive at the first installment of Aaron Landsman's performance piece, Appointment, at the 2009 Prelude Festival, and follow the signs to a waiting room on the third floor of the CUNY Graduate Center. I sign in, take a seat, and send a text message to a friend. I’m one of the first to arrive for what has been billed as a private performance, and as I sit there I wonder if the other people scattered around the room are also waiting for an “appointment,” or if they are simply a part of the regular CUNY milieu. A moment later, my name is called and I’m introduced to “Julia” who leads me into a small office with two desks on one side and a few extra chairs on the other. Julia tells me where to sit, then opens her laptop and proceeds to ignore me. Nothing happens. I can't see what Julia is typing. I debate sending another text message so that I, too, am doing something. A woman wanders in talking on her cell phone, not noticing that Julia and I are in the room. She wanders out without seeing us. I debate asking Julia a question, but decide against it.
The woman who was on the cell phone returns, apologizing for the delay. She introduces herself as “Blondell” and proceeds to begin interviewing me for what I presume is an administrative job at CUNY. She compliments me on my shoes. "Those are nice," she says. "Are they...?" She fishes for a response from me, but I remain silent. She gives me a few tidbits of interoffice gossip and I deduce that I've already gotten the job and am merely suffering through a bureaucratic procedure. "You'll need a laptop," Blondell says excitedly. "PC or Mac?" "Mac," I respond immediately, without thinking. She looks at me knowingly, and I feel weirdly exposed, wondering why I impulsively declared my brand preference for a computer, but was shy about revealing it for shoes.
The interview quickly deteriorates. Blondell doesn't have the correct paperwork; she gets lots of personal calls; she berates Julia for being on Facebook all day. Office tempers run high. I’m feeling tense and awkward, like I’m trapped in the temp job I walked out of seven years ago. I don't want this job and actually, I want to extricate myself from this situation as soon as possible. But the two of them are now hysterically scrambling for missing papers, or a cover story to feed their boss. I finally get a word in and ask if I will be working with the two of them. "No," Blondell says, "you'll be working with the Dean." "But I haven't met him yet," I say. "Her," Julia curtly corrects me.
Landsman devised these Appointment sessions as a series of repeatable 12-minute pieces that take place in actual office settings. Designed for a single audience member who is put in the precarious position of continually making choices about whether or not, or how, to participate with the actors, Appointment turns the expectation of being a passive performance-watcher on its head. Working with three playwright/director collaborators—Brent Green, Sibyl Kempson, and Daniel Alexander Jones, (who created the Blondell/Julia piece, performed by Julia Jarcho and Stacey Robinson)—Landsman provided each of them with a short set of requirements: every appointment should include a question, a prolonged silence, etc., but left the writing and directing up to them. Landsman will alter aspects of Appointment as it travels to different locales—Norway, Austin, and Philadelphia are in the works—thus developing one kind of model for sustainable theater. "One of the only ways that work like this can be produced multiple times is if [local people] get to have a hand in the producing and the making," he says. Similar to Miranda July's piece, Learning to Love You More, where the artist posted assignments on her website and participants sent in their creations,Landsman ultimately wants to have a website where anyone can download instructions to create their own performances.
Audience members David Townsend and Morgan Jenness participating in Aaron Landsman's Appointment (2009).
There is something curiously timely about Landsman's concept. As contemporary audience members, do we expect more interactivity from a theater performance since we have that kind of access in our virtual, online lives? "I write plays," Landsman says, "but sometimes it seems silly to be in the same room and not [have the audience] be able to interact." Appointment is staged site-specifically in a familiar, everyday environment, and the lack of theatrical formality allows people to easily suspend their disbelief. The result puts both the performer and viewer on the spot and illustrates the question Landsman is most interested in: "What is the reality of two people in a room together?"
My second “appointment” at the CUNY offices is with Landsman himself. He chats me up in the hallway, casually waving hello to other audience members and colleagues as they arrive in the waiting room. Unlike the dysfunctional staffers from my first appointment, Landsman's character appears to be an affable professor, enjoying the social environment of a college, though something is slightly off about him. "Are you married?" he asks. "Are you partnered up?" I dodge the question. He playfully punches me in the arm. "You totally are," he says and proceeds to tell me a few too many details about his infant son's nipple preferences.
Later we sit in Landsman's private office. "Just so you know," he says, "officially, it's my choice to leave. ’Officially.’” I realize then that I am Landsman’s replacement. He expresses his inner conflict about this passive-aggressively, trying to convince me that leaving was what he wanted all along, but his underlying anger about this situation is evident. He's trapped by whatever "choices" he's had to make, and I feel strangely comfortable having a bit of power over him. He asks me questions and I ask him to skip over some of them. He reads a letter aloud and I interrupt and ask him to start again. Landsman reveals himself in a voice recording he has me listen to as he leaves the room. His voice has the calm confidence of a self-help meditation tape, and in this moment, when I am left alone and have no one to interact with, it is Landsman who is eerily in control. "We're getting older, aren't we? Doesn't this happen to everyone? And there's a lot to keep track of in life—home, kids, ambition, desire, little manipulations you do or are done to you...You know how people say every ending is a new beginning? What if this time it's not? What if it's just an ending?"
The next installment of Appointment will be created and performed in Oslo, Norway, with students of the TITAN theater school in March 2010. Keep your Appointments up-to-date at Appointment Blog. Aaron Landsman's new play, Special Tonight, will have a staged reading at The Performance Project at University Settlement on December 7, 2009.
Andrea Kleine is a writer and interdisciplinary artist. She was awarded a 2004 NYFA Fellowship in Playwriting and a 2009 residency at the MacDowell Colony. Her recent work, The Separation, was presented at The Walker Art Center and Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center. She is currently at work on Throttle (a novel), Worktape 1999 (a performance piece), and Doom Jazz (a collaboration with composer Bobby Previte).
Keep NYFA Current Alive! Click here to make a donation, and be sure to specify that your gift is for NYFA Current.
