Symphony of Rats

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Flags at theatres (if they happen to have flags) should have symbolically flown at half-mast on January 4, the day Richard Foreman, American avant-garde playwright and founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater passed away. Sadly we appeared to be in the midst of a resurgence of his work in the last year. Symphony of Rats opened in New York in the spring of 2024 before embarking on a tour of key theaters throughout the United States (and since January it has thankfully returned to The Performing Garage). His first new play in a decade, Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, premiered at La MaMa in December to great acclaim in a sumptuous production (for Off-Off Broadway production standards). NYU’s Skirball Center, as part of their Archives Onstage series, had an ongoing exhibit of the infamous Ontological-Hysteric poster art as a companion to their campus-wide celebration, Richard Foreman Wants You To Wake Up. Even Foreman himself would have agreed he picked a rather conspicuous time to die…to quote Lady Bracknell, “Have you no sense of occasion?”

The Wooster Group first produced Symphony of Rats at The Performing Garage in 1988, with Richard Foreman directing. To say we lived in a very different world then begs a better word than “understatement.” When directors Elizabeth LeCompte and Kate Valk approached Foreman about doing a new production of the play, he agreed with the caveat being he wouldn’t want to recognize it. Blessed with his permission, The Wooster Group has made an entirely new piece by transposing Foreman’s text into verse and setting it to a multilayered sound and video score. The work is now set in what appears to be a hybrid of spaceship and museum placing the technology front and center in what remains an interesting take on a totally unprepared President of the United States.

It may be fair to say that Foreman saw his play as a reaction to the Reagan administration, a presidency that was criticized for its slowness and inadequacy in responding to the AIDS crisis as well as a poor choice in political bedfellows in what became the Iran-Contra affair. Add to that the Department of Housing and Urban Development grant rigging that favored Republican contributors to Reagan’s campaign as well as the ignominious decision to bail out failing savings and loan institutions with $160 billion in taxpayer dollars. These are mere highlights in Reagan’s two terms. Compare and contrast those eight years with just the recent two weeks of Trump’s current implosion as the “Leader of the Free World.”

Ari Fliakos is not your cookie cutter President by any means. Dressing down in a well-worn tank top with sweatpants with sewn-in knee pads under a bright yellow all-weather windbreaker, he still manages to exude an edgy sexiness akin to actor Alan Ritchson in the television series Reacher. He’s never really speaking for the camera like so many other Presidents. His claim, “You’ll find this hard to believe. I’ve gotten messages from outer space” is said tentatively, and almost intimate in tone. “In my official capacity, these messages have come through to me. They reveal to me that the end of our world approaches,” and so we join him, an ingratiating leader, and the other six cast members for a very wild ride.

If you are looking for a play with plot and easily defined characters, this is intentionally anything but that. The focus shifts away from plot and centers more on the emotional experience of madness in the postmodern technological age. As a rat says to the President, “Don’t have a mind. Be mind.” It can be very easy for the mind to wander watching this, particularly if one tries to envision how a play like this was presented in 1988.

Foreman’s dramatic structure feels like an audacious attempt to stage the tumultuous workings of the mind itself. Neurons ignite, voices both internal and external whisper, scream, and echo through the chaos. Like a pinball careening through an ever-shifting machine, the sensory overload flashes, buzzes, and swirls, pulling you in with distractions that both enthrall and devastate. Yet, amidst it all, you may find yourself trying to self-convince that it somehow all makes sense…not perfect sense, but even nonsense has a layer of sense.

Jim Fletcher gives off clinical vibes in his lab coat and rat ears, but he’s more Dr. Brown in Back to the Future with a little bit of Dr. Gregory House mixed in rather than a real neurosurgeon. He does not spare us scatological references so that and a Presidential wheelchair with a trapdoor for specimens just adds to the freewheeling lunacy. Guillermo Resto as Didi functions as the oracle making pronouncements into a basketball hoop sans net in a baritone that recalls the iconic James Earl Jones as Darth Vader. Resto is suitably expressionless but solo voices of reason in a play have to be. Niall Cunningham and Andrew Maillet are the young hot dudes that act as the President’s assistants, and unlike Rosencrantz and Guildenstern they are allowed to live, and provide lush and serene consonant harmonies in the musical segments. Michaela Murphy and Tavish Miller’s characters function as stage management for the incredibly complex production.

LeCompte has designed the production to include constant motion throughout the vast Performing Garage space. Set pieces are fluid with some screens and tents moved via a line across the stage by actors. Murphy is on a laptop in the midst of action, and Cunningham and Maillet are ever present soundboards for Fliakos’ stream of consciousness while readying the President for his next segment. Eric Sluyter’s sound design and music are contributory in setting the tone for the pulsating sequences. Yudam Hyung Seok Jeon’s video design vibrantly captures the constant motion while the lighting design of Jennifer Tipton & Evan Anderson is an active player in the flux of overall mood to the piece. Antonia Belt’s costumes are imaginative jumping off points for who the characters are. Suzzy Roche’s new music compositions fit right in as if they were always a part of Foreman’s original plan.

Through Fliakos’ textured performance, the unquestioned center of this production, we are made privy to a nuanced harlequinade of Foreman’s commander-in-chief. It is a perfect blend of calamity, mental drift, and unconscious menace. His President is comically absurd, like the sad sack mindlessly moving piles of papers from one corner of a desk to another and back again, yet he also holds the fate of the world in his grip with the nuclear codes. It’s a darkly humorous juxtaposition, but Foreman raises an intriguing question: what if all people in power approached their roles with the unorthodox thinking and emotional depth of avant-garde playwrights? Would the world be any less chaotic, or just differently so? Foreman could not have posed this with something linear. Instead he gave us something much more valuable.

 Symphony of Rats (through February 8, 2025)

The Wooster Group

The Performing Garage, 33 Wooster Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.thewoostergroup.my.salesforce-sites.com

Running time: 75 minutes without an intermission