Poetry New York

The closest parallel I can draw for Richard Foreman’s Deep Trance Behavior in Portland is spending an hour in David Lynch’s Black Lodge from his show Twin Peaks. They both appear to be worlds populated by manifestations of the darkest demiurgic forces summoned from the depths of Man’s troubled psyche. But in Deep Trance.. these characters are operated by, and struggle against the omnipresent voice (EGO? (of Richard Foreman himself)) that informs their motivations and actions, that controls them even as they strive to cast off the Ego’s yoke to which they are all subjected.   Musical and sound effect cues and the voice itself seem to prompt the actors onstage, who utter no lines except for the Man in Striped Suit who mimics the roar once posited by the Voice on Tape.  If these players are the manifestations of a psyche, then perhaps the video shows the information that filters in from the outside world during a vacation in the surreal country of Japan.  

But this interpretation may not be the case at all.  One can possibly assume that reoccurring actions and themes (such as the pill (with which a profound understanding between actions on screen and stage will occur “now”) that each character takes periodically, or the blindfolds) can provide hints to the playwright's intentions. But mostly any attempt at interpretation is quelled by the onslaught of light and noise and ritualistic/symbolic movements.  At best we can assert that we are witnessing an alternate state of consciousness that definitely leaves its mark on us, because when we are ejected from the theater into the real world, one cannot be sure if he was perhaps more comfortable back in the performance. Now, the real world looks ugly and bizarre. Richard Foreman effectively shows us that the strange scenes he depicts in the play exist in the real world, where everybody is blind to it, accepting is as if wearing a blindfold, and it makes as little sense as his play did.