Confessions of a Conformist

One moment the total effect seems surreal, the next you’d swear the point is…other theatrical conventions, the thriller, say, or the soap or sitcom…[the point] may have as much to do with appreciation of alliteration or with a self-critical instinct (acknowledging a certain conformity to experimental mannerisms) as with a real concern with this one theme.

— Trish Dace • 1981

Confessions of a Conformist

March - April 1981

Ohio Theater, New York City
The production ran 120 minutes.

Special Thanks to George Ashley and Performing Artservices, Marvin and Janet Bailin, the voices of Charles Weir and Tim McDonough, Patti Justis, Jean King, Mr. and Mrs. Mailman (for the use of their piano), and Amy Lee Stewart

About

What was implicit in DISPARATE ACTS in the clear spatiality and weight of each line said and each bit of information used is made explicit in the form of the list in CONFESSIONS. And the primary list upon which the musical and visual processes are based is as follows:

1. A PLAZA: the monument in whose shadow they are standing, the grid of some gigantic game of tic/tac/toe. The caption: The isolated pawn is a very complex factor.
2. PATIO DINNER: (with the family) multiple exposures of private parts in public places, extra limbs and digits, and two additional dinner guests. The caption: There will be others later.
3. PLEIN AIR: birds in the trees, a desk littered with pieces of incriminating documents urging the naming of names, a layer of forgotten memoranda, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper. The caption: The background of a decision.
4. BETWEEN EMISSION & ABSORPTION: a large format photograph of a polaroid, of a life-size painting of a couple on a sofa in front of a mirror. The caption: An exchange of tokens of appreciation.
5. P0SING FOR A PHOTOGRAPH: (on the lawn of an estate) close-up of a rose, displaying the wounds (self-inflicted or otherwise) of a personal stigmata, slight blurring around the edges, the wind blows. The caption: Identification is masked by environmental factors.

This list neither establishes a raison d'être for itself or the resultant actions. But the dynamic actions of the play—the setting and unsetting of a table, a kidnapping, a woman leaving her lover, the rumination of a 'Hamlet-type'—have their roots in this list. Each broad body of musical, visual, or literary information has its own independent process distinct within a spatial/temporal organization of foreground and background events. Here the processes of accumulation are broken down into discreet elements. The. play pivots on the conformist, who attempts to find security in shifting contextual demands of his world without hesitation. It is a viewpoint tinted only by some blurred image (derivative, ultimate, and ideational) of himself and his world. He hides, as the audience does, in this saturation, secure in the knowledge that he still has options. These options he expresses in his final list:

1. CONSIDER THE CASE OF SUICIDE: business failure, unhappy love, physical illness, lost hope.
2. CONSIDER ADDING YEARS TO LIFE: correcting the minor defects, toning the muscles, relaxing the mind, letting off steam, establishing a pattern of life.
3. CONSIDER IF THERE IS NOTHING TO BE SAID ON THE SUB!JECT: that too is interesting, and the irony is not lost.

The audience is left with that irony as well.