Theater Review: "Blind in Time"by Linda Mussmann
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| Photo of Claudia Bruce by Linda Mussmann |
"Blind in Time"
Written and Directed by Linda Mussmann in collaboration with Claudia Bruce
Set Design by Jun Maeda
La MaMa E.T.C. (Annex Theater), 74A E. 4th Street
212-475-7710
Opened May 26, 2001
Reviewed by Emily Morris June 9, 2001.
There is nothing that frees the mind more to imagine than a white room, or maybe a white theater. In her newest work, "Blind in Time," Linda Mussmann has written a piece that looks into her mind for the material, then projects the images of her memory onto the skewered white walls of the theater. The multimedia performance is a montage of video clips from history, ones that have been replayed hundreds of times in history classrooms across the country. But the narration and reflections of Bruce performance as Mussmann lends a personality and sadness to the many disappointments and unfulfilled promises that history made to the baby boomers.
Linda Mussmann and Claudia Bruce have returned to New York from their theater, Time and Space Limited, in upstate Hudson, New York, after ten years with a performance piece described as Mussmann's autobiographical look at the past forty years. But it could also be called America's political memoirs. Opening with Eisenhower's farewell speech, the frightening prophecy of a Military Industrial Complex, it is followed by a youthful and hopeful Kennedy: a hope that Mussmann along with so many others latched onto.
"I was one of the Americans who watched and listened to the poet and president," says Bruce as Mussmann of Kennedy's inauguration and Frost's poetry reading. Her hopes encompassed all Americans', a country where democracy could truly exist. But the following images are the building of the Berlin wall ("a multidecker sandwich"), Kennedy's tragic assassination, and the Vietnam War. All events that Alan Shepherd's landing on the moon could not make up for.
Mussmann knows that the promises Kennedy and Frost made her never came true, but Eisenhower's did instead. She says she has not given up hope for the democracy that she dreamed of, but asks who made the money from the concrete used on the Berlin Wall?
All this is presented in a theater with three stations, with varying degrees of intimacy, for Bruce to move between. Her shadow on the images behind her make her seem appropriately small against the events, but using her and the years she grew up gives it a poignancy that history recitations don't have. There are added parts that focus on Mussmann's more personal experience, which puts the era in perspective.
The problem with the Mussmann entrance into the piece as more than a historical narrator was that it came after Eisenhower and the appearance of America's favorite couple, the Kennedys. Linda Mussmann's life is interesting, but it can never measure up to the Kennedys' star power and the fascination they will always hold for any audience. If one resigns oneself to the Mussmann's biography it is pleasurable. There is an interesting incongruity to Mussmann and her message not to forget the beauty of simplicity, even as VCR's, video cameras and monitors surround her. [E.M.]
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