Word: fakeness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Such questions begged to be asked throughout the play. Though there were moments of unqualified genius (having the audience fill out a fake survey, for instance, or putting the curtain call in the middle, for instance, or allowing "The Dry Salvages" to speak through the windbag New Bedford fisherman--again, the versatile Monteleoni), the intellectual demands # made on its audience took their toll on our sense of the pleasure of drama. Perhaps the discombobulation of meaning in # is only perceived, or at least fully deliberate--in either case one must report one's own failure of understanding. This...
...night finished up with an onslaught ofnoisy hardcore, samples and a distorted/amplifiedbaritone saxophone courtesy of This Is My Rifle.As the members of the band stepped on stagedressed in fake blood-stained lab coats andfrighteningly comically painted clown faces, theaudience knew this band was going to be like noother at the Battle. At first, Rifle sounded likean impenetrable wall of sound, but soon it wasapparent that complex layers of noisy melodyundergirded the deathcore exhaust with bitterintelligence. Guttural growls and digital snippetswere laid upon distorted sax honks, schizophrenicbass lines and chunky guitar attacks, all makingfor a healthy dose of electric chaos
Whenever Grandma Jaboti tells this story to Harlan, her mother tempers the narrative by explaining that Grandmother Jaboti wasn't really a turtle, but had simply been put in a fake turtle shell by evil carnival managers that had convinced Jaboti of her turtlehood when she was too young to know the truth. Despite her attempts to provide a rational explanation of Jaboti's surreal biography, though, Harlan's mother cannot help but be nervous about the influence of this story, worrying that such fantasy might render Harlan unable "to tell the truth from the truth...
...Starting from the Spirit of Scandinavia Sardines, Harlan's train of thought takes off and plows through an existence where there is no boundary between the real and the unreal, the true and the untrue. From sardines she jumps to the slave-ships of the Middle Passage, to the fake Moroccan leather of the bag of the woman beside her to the mosquito on the cover of the woman's Scientific American...
...imprison her, conventions that define heras wrong and prevent her from constructing anidentity of her own so that she might be moreeasily be made to serve. For Harlan, theestablished definitions of truth and realitythreaten to deprive her of her humanity ascompletely as her Grandmother's humanity wasobliterated by the fake turtle shell...