BIG BOSS or the Inner Life of Everything confronts the audience
in the very first scene: Guy (Erik Maahs) greets us with an extended musing on
the inequalities of the viewer-viewed relationship. This is the stylistic olive
before the one-act martini, alerting the audience to the tenor of Ki Gottberg’s
play: An embrace of poetic language and energetic performance over naturalistic
acting and narrative. Big Boss examines things, people, and how they negotiate
the distances between them.
Unlike many stylized plays, Big Boss has an easily discernible story.
An outsider, Guy, enters into the orbit of a family defined by its sharp disagreements.
Pearl (Kate Wisniewski) looks after her two daughters and complains about a
series of slight physical problems. She largely neglects dutiful Andra (Sarah
Harlett), an actress who splits her time between working as an office drone
and obsessing over the movie The Misfits. Pearl worries about sarcastic,
unmotivated Alice (Elizabeth Kenny), who can be found either on the sofa or
out meeting men. Guy works with Andra and later has a sexual encounter with
Alice.
The play continues for a time as a standard dysfunctional family comedy, leavened
only by absurdist bits between the actors and cast-off objects given the power
of speech. Andra encounters discarded underwear, Pearl soothes a phone, Alice
comforts a shoe, and oil is lovingly applied to a piano — all in a more human
and caring way than any character’s relationship to another person.
Gottberg uses various comedy tropes to introduce issues of great thematic
complexity. For example, Andra’s amusing devotion to The Misfits reinforces
the notion of actors-as-objects, willing to put their lives on display for the
service of art. John Huston’s film featured icon-challenging performances by
Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, and watching it with some know- ledge of the
actors’ lives changes everything: Montgomery Clift’s famous line about scars
on his face seems terribly sad, as does Monroe’s identification with the wild
mustangs in captivity. Andra’s obsession gives her a thematic depth that contrasts
sharply with her shallowness in the narrative. Gottberg makes similar observations
with other characters. Guy, the show’s innocent, never quite stops being the
all- knowing character from the opening scene. When Alice seduces Guy, she’s
covered her body with words, turning herself into a sex object and a billboard
— allowing Gottberg to hint at Alice’s intelligence and complexity.
Late in the show, the distances between things and people disappear when each
actor abruptly becomes one of the speaking objects introduced earlier. Gottberg
flirts with overkill here, as she links the objects’ evocations of a previous,
Edenic state (the piano remembers being a tree) to being human. Fortunately,
a narrative twist brings all of the relationships into relief: The niggling
illnesses affecting Pearl turn out to be real. The move makes little sense in
terms of story, but is a smart final exegesis of Gottberg’s theme. As Pearl
becomes increasingly aware that her body is slowly betraying her, she’s able
to separate her essential humanity from that vehicle. As she’s dying, the daughters
respond by sharing a memory of their mother’s voice. In doing so, they break
away from the mentality of the objects and become more human.
As Gottberg makes clear with her opening scene, an audience can interpret
a play any way they want to. That essentially superior position can often be
more important than the performers’ intent. Big Boss or the Inner Life of
Everything is a conceptually solid play that explores multiple thematic
avenues. Every reaction — including this reviewer’s wish that Gottberg had
reduced the stridency of some of her character’s short monologues, and avoided
altogether the unnecessary, literal conflation of character and object — results
from my thorough involvement with the show, an involvement almost guaranteed
by its clever, blank canvas.