"I hate talking about this show," sighed Matt Fontaine, director of High Kindergarten Performance Group. "Don't print anything I just said. I sound like such a ponce."
The "this" is Computer, HKPG's new show at On the Boards. "There are maddeningly lengthy sequences of no activity or drama or narrative," he said. "Acres and acres of nothing." Fontaine (with his wife and artistic partner Tamara Paris) makes radically contrarian theater, pursuing freaky extremes instead of the kinda-edifying, kinda-entertaining pap of the soft, liberal middle. Half the time, his productions are entertainment-driven, including one written and revised based on questionnaires handed out in malls. The other half of the time, Fontaine emulates the goofy excesses of 1960s performance art, barraging his audiences with violence or tedium. "We know performance art is kind of silly but we do it anyway," he said. "We like to mix art with mockery of art."
After all, consider Fontaine's resumé: Are We Scared? (written by preschoolers and performed for adults, featuring dinosaurs, superpowers, and chocolate pudding); Blasted (the catastrophic exploitation play by Sarah Kane including cannibalism, rape, and race war in a hotel room); Delaware (a theatrical concept album with the band "Awesome"); Meathook: A Melodrama (a blood-squirting musical adaptation of a 1972 backwoods splatter film); and the inimitable Spade Cooley's Nightmare (a HKPG performance-art nightmare of 1950s California cowboy chic, with messy orange eating, cigarettes extinguished on raw beef, cap guns, and an actor folding sheets in the background for 20 minutes).
"HKPG is a place where we can express our anger and resentment at the audience, our seething resentment," Fontaine said. "We tell the audience to screw itself—which is fun for us, but maybe why not so many people come to see the shows."
Fontaine said he wanted to do a piece about computers because there's nothing interesting or new to say about them—and that the show isn't really about computers. So what will we actually see? "I don't want to spoil anything," he said. "There are songs. Words that people say. And some aggressively antisexual nudity."
"Our favorite kind of performance art is where beautiful 23-year-olds get naked and talk about their body issues," Paris added. "This will be me, five months pregnant, and [actor] Aaron Allshouse, who's built like Santa Claus."
"And me," Fontaine said. "I'm built like Santa Claus." He paused. "I hate talking about this show. I just want people to come see it."
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