There Is No There There in Joe Goode’s ‘Deeply There’

The trouble with category-busting performance art is that it requires a breed of category-busting performance artist currently in very short supply. Case in point: Joe Goode’s deeply flawed “Deeply There (stories of a neighborhood),” given its local premiere by Goode’s Bay Area-based company in the Freud Playhouse at UCLA on Friday.

In detailing the responses of eight individuals (not all of them human) to the AIDS-related illness and death of a lover-brother-friend of theirs, this multidisciplinary two-act collaboration allows us scope to mourn our own losses in the ongoing AIDS crisis and to confront what may be the one daring idea of the evening: the banality of survival.

Nobody is deepened or ennobled by suffering here--certainly not Goode himself in his usual role of resident truth-teller, ever ready with alternately arch or Delphic judgments delivered as if he expected us to be taking notes.

This style can become wearying over two hours. So can too many singers who can’t carry a tune and an overload of dances based on contact improvisation that always seem to involve somebody being thrown across somebody else’s back. Executed with a bland fluidity, these passages are not inherently expressive and, when periodically dropped into the story, simply mark the spots where genuine choreography should be.

However, weaknesses in the singing and dancing pale when compared to the acting deficiencies on view. The central image of the work is a rumpled, empty bed in which a character named Ben is supposedly dying. Everyone in the cast comes to say goodbye, but virtually nobody can look at that bed and see somebody in it. Ben is simply not real for anyone except possibly Felipe Barrueto-Cabello as his ever-silent son.

A week earlier, Fang-Yi Sheu of the Martha Graham company gazed across the audience at the Luckman Theatre and through her eyes we saw a vast Appalachian frontier; the choreography depended on her projecting that illusion. But most of the members of the Joe Goode Performance Group merely say the right words and make the right faces. And it isn’t nearly enough. If they can’t believe in Ben’s reality, how can we?

Goode’s love for Ben is also an emotion that we must take on faith, and Vong Phrommala’s performance of the flamboyant female impersonator Imelda never remotely justifies Goode’s extravagant praise of the character’s imaginative daring--not even in the big “Jackie O.” drag showpiece, one of several divertissements provided for no evident reason than a need for comic relief.

Similarly, in Act 2 Goode and the otherwise underemployed Jennifer Wright Cook as the work’s token lesbian recite the lyrics to “Kids” (from “Bye Bye Birdie”) while we watch a playful dance duet for Barrueto-Cabello and 10-year-old Willis Bigelow. Their dancing expands on the endearing opening interplay of Goode and Bigelow without adding anything new beyond the borrowed Broadway accompaniment and the chance for Cook to have one major moment, however irrelevant.

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Perhaps the biggest dramatic miscalculation, however, involves Ben’s homophobic sister, made to seem so wildly ridiculous and hypocritical by both the text and choreography that the only real conflict in the piece vanishes and poor Liz Burritt is left with nothing to play except nasty mannerisms.

Her drunk scene with Goode proves effective on its own terms but leads nowhere, like many of the work’s most entertaining sequences, and suggests that Goode may see Ben’s illness less as a narrative thread than a pretext for a mosaic of isolated character vignettes. Indeed, Robin Holcomb’s song-score parcels out little reaction-arias to everyone from an insistently upbeat, officious neighbor (Marc Morozumi) to Ben’s wistful pet dog (Marit Brook-Kothlow), but the sense of a family developing from all the distinctive perspectives on shared trauma is one more key theme that’s talked about but never, um, deeply there.

Had the production been mounted with the gritty authenticity of communal street-theater, the deficiencies in both the material and performances might well have been camouflaged. But the sleek production presented at the Freud--designed by Michael Brown and garnished with uncredited film sequences projected onto five mobile screen panels-- sets up expectations that the Goode company can’t fulfill. Ultimately, there’s something terribly wrong with a piece when audience members arrive with stronger feelings about the subject than they ever encounter on the stage.