by Brendan Kiley
Citizens of Seattle are often disparagingly described as passive-aggressive. Dr. Freud described the condition as part of the second, or anal, stage of childhood development. Passive-aggressive personalities "resist completing tasks and chores, criticize and scorn authority figures, and seem negative and sullen." Sounds like home to me.
This weekend, director Chris Mayse and Open Circle Theater give Seattle an opportunity to get our "negative and sullen" on with The Passive-Aggressive Kingdom, an extravaganza of theater, visual art, music, and interactive installations on the theme of aggression. Promising exhibits include the disturbingly named Tickle Torture Room and the Smash Room, which Mayse describes as a "white collar cubicle hell" where guests are invited to beat fax machines, hard drives, and other office equipment to smithereens.
With questionnaires, graffiti art, video displays, and information booths tabled by anarchists and anger-management groups, Kingdom sounds like an engaging and possibly disconcerting intersection of performance, installation, and hands-on art. Like haunted houses and Catholic mass, it is in the best tradition of performance--a live event that depends on the irreproducible aura generated by artists and audiences flying by the seat of their collective pants.
A benefit for an April production of David Mamet's Edmond--which follows a respectable urban professional on his thrilling, vicious descent into an inferno of sex and violence--Kingdom will include a sampling of scenes from Mamet's famously snarling oeuvre.
Mayse, who curated The Passive-Aggressive Kingdom and will direct Edmond, said the event was inspired in part by a popular misunderstanding of theater's aggro king. "When we think of him, we think of the 'fuck, shit, piss, rah-rah-rah' angry guy," he said. "But a lot of Mamet's characters are actually very passive. Look at American Buffalo. Those guys don't do shit--just sit around a shop and talk all day."
