The Importance of Being Weird

The first time Rachel Hynes visited London, she was hit by a bus.
The impact broke her jaw—among other things—and put her in
a brief coma. Princess Diana died in a different car crash on the same
day, and Hynes’s mother was unable to get a flight to London for a
week.

Hynes is living in London again, studying for her MFA in Lecoq-style
theater, but has returned to Seattle and her collaborator Mike Pham to
stage an adaptation of The Importance of Being Earnest. Except
it’s not an adaptation.

“It’s more a departure point than anything,” Pham says. “I don’t
even really like The Importance of Being Earnest. Other people
love it, but they can never tell me why. I get that it’s humorous, but
altogether I think it’s boring.”

“I love that play,” Hynes counters. There is a moment of
silence.

Their two-person company named the Helsinki Syndrome doesn’t make
plays. It makes spectacles in the tradition of Forced Entertainment and
Implied Violence: confetti, goo, stage blood, fractured text, grotesque
practical jokes. But its touch is lighter, its stage pictures more
dreamy than nightmarish. And while some experimental companies hew to a
rigorous—if opaque—code of hermeneutics, Helsinki Syndrome
works from the gut. Hynes and Pham make lists of what they want to see
onstage and string them together. Sometimes they fail, but, as their
mission statement says, they’re not afraid of failure. That
fearlessness is precious and rare: The world’s worst theater inches
forward with half-measures and timidity; the world’s best theater jumps
into the mouth of doom. Helsinki Syndrome is a jumper.

Hynes and Pham met during the American premiere of Sarah Kane’s
Blasted, in which Pham was cast as a young soldier who rapes a
rapist after race war breaks out in England. Hynes worked as a “company
advocate,” a kind of counselor to help the actors deal with the play’s
extraordinarily gruesome violence. Matt Fontaine and Tamara Paris, who
directed Blasted, went on to start an experimental company
called High Kindergarten Performance Group with Pham and Hynes and a
few others, which performed weird, occasionally tedious, and
occasionally breathtaking shows at Open Circle Theater and On the
Boards. Fontaine and Paris got married, had kids, and quit directing.
Hynes and Pham kept going.

They wrote down an inventory of things they wanted to
see—something about tigers, strange light sources, nostalgia,
obsession, a show that transformed the space where it was performed, a
polar bear walking and falling over—and made some shows,
including True North and I Feel Fine, which critics
described as “shenanigans.” Helsinki Syndrome builds its shows
intuitively and its reviews lean on aesthetic genealogy (“In the
boisterous, rebel spirit of such older experimental theater crews as
the Wooster Group,” the Seattle Times) and cataloging (“Plates
of appetizers served to the audience, karaoke belted out from the
platform of an electric chair, actors disrobing and rerobing onstage, a
UFO in the shape of a bell pepper that descends from the ceiling,”
The Stranger). Sometimes its shows feel too disconnected and
lack a center of gravity. Earnest will be the first time
Helsinki Syndrome has started with a script.

It began as a joke—Hynes and Pham thought they’d make a show,
then title it after whatever Famous Play happened to be showing at one
of the regional theaters. “We really just wanted to trick the audience
into coming and feeling disappointed,” Hynes said. “All our shows are
elaborate jokes to mock our own pain.”

But something about Earnest stuck, especially after the two
reread “De Profundis,” Oscar Wilde’s searing, heartbroken letter from
prison, where he was serving his sentence for buggery. The two
works—one that skips like a stone, one that swan-dives into the
dankest, most tortured dungeons of the mind—have an uncomfortably
close relationship. A few months after Earnest opened, Wilde was
arrested and sent to Reading Gaol where he wrote “De Profundis.” “I
find ‘De Profundis’ much more telling than Earnest,” Pham
says.

“‘De Profundis’ is there in Earnest,” Hynes adds. “Behind
gritted teeth.” They’ll perform their Earnest three times before
taking it for a run at Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater
in New York. (Helsinki Syndrome was granted a residency at the
legendary experimental theater last year.)

At a rehearsal last week, Hynes and Pham ran through sections of
their adaptation. They began with a solemn recitation of the title
(“The Importance of Being Earnest—a trivial comedy for
serious people”) and jumped into scenes from Earnest, sometimes
fractured, sometimes repeated (Pham, as Jack, shook the hands of eight
imaginary audience members, declaring “this is the last time I shall
ever do it” each time). They read from “De Profundis,” smoked, danced,
asked my advice about certain bits (“We forgot to tell you that whoever
comes to our rehearsals becomes a collaborator in the show”), and Hynes
grunted out a monologue as King Kong, stupidly contemplating the
heartbreak of being separated from Jane. She had trouble finishing that
bit without breaking down into sobs of laughter. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“This part is still new.”

They flipped on a boom box and worked on some stage
business—to “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince—involving a silver
tea tray, a bag of confetti, a hat, and a baby doll. “I’m just going to
stuff the baby in the fucking bag now,” Hynes says. “I’m trying to be a
little less than utilitarian.”

“Yeah,” Pham says.

“Maybe I’m trying too hard,” Hynes says.

Pham shrugs. “So what happens next?” he asks.

“We rap.”