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After a series of plays in which live actors interacted with
film or video, playwright-director John Jesurun has returned
to the mode he developed in the long-running punk-club serial Chang
in a Void Moon: a single, propless but dramatically lit
theater in which a virtuosic company of actors race pell-mell
through dense dialogues replete with deadpan humor,
repetition, and references to rock lyrics and other
pop-culture detritus. In Jesurun's new play, the directors of
a scientific institute attempt to perform exploratory surgery
on a sunspot that has landed in the ocean as a tiny pinpoint
of magnesium. The spot mysteriously comes to life, though, and
inhabits first a mouse, then a table, and then one after
another of the increasingly hysterical characters, who also
include a visiting Czech doctor, her American interpreter, a
pilot, and a strange concierge named Loretta (as in "Get
back, Loretta"). As usual, Jesurun uses a pulp-genre
framework (here: the sci-fi horror movie) and a scrambled
narrative to mask some philosophical speculation: clearly,
whether it's a germ or a ghost or the devil incarnate, the
sunspot stands for Evil. (Jesurun recently directed three of
his works in Germany, which may explain the language-lab jokes
and the origin-of-Nazism theme.) Even at his most cryptic,
Jesurun makes energetic theater. The attempts to exorcise the
sunspot -- by pounding a white table with baseball bats or
dousing a frenzied dancer with water -- are as startling and
hilarious as the early plays of Sam Shepard.
7 Days, March 29, 1989
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