"I would like to help.  But I am afraid I will feel, and make things worse."                                                

                        -from Kommer

I’m having some kind of once-removed, yet parallel reaction to what Kassys did/does in performance. 

Listening to Patti Smith’s Gone Again, I daydream while biting my fingernails that the cuticles are attached to the skin of my hands, and I go to take a leak, and see in the bright bathroom that I’m dripping, bloody & stupid.  Later, Nick Cave’s The Weeping Song is playing in the cab I call to take me to a Geraldine Fibbers reunion.  I’m trying to put something back; return something that’s missing.  This piece has pissed me off and unsettled me in a way I cannot locate, or name, just yet.

These performers have an astounding ability to withhold, and thereby generate, feeling.  A rigidly enforced Fourth Wall — actors casually talking & drinking onstage as the house opens, yet utterly unavailable to the audience that is arriving & walking an arm's distance from them — establishes the pictorial, filmic ground rules of remoteness and dislocation that allow feeling to be treated here as a raw material; nothing more and nothing less.  This treatment aggravates a conceit that I can’t let go of: namely, that real feeling in our theatre is an aim & a goal.  Something to be fought for, because it is so shamefully lacking in Our American Lives, etc.  Kassys is far beyond such sentiment.

Kommer (Grief) has a dreamlike, floating quality—an absence— that inhabits the entire piece.  Kommer is not titled in the spirit of caustic deadpan that Todd Solondz embraced when he named Happiness,  but there is a similarly an-aesthetic, clinical cool that informs, and illuminates, both works.  It occurs to me, long after exiting the On the Boards studio, just how eerily accurate & truly evocative of actual grief this absence is. 

Kommer’s entire second act, the video that initially annoyed me with its here/not here ruse, is Kassys Director Liesbeth Gritter’s no-nonsense achievement of a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (or V-effekt), a way of intentionally discouraging an audience from identifying in real time with a character onstage, and thereby allowing a dispassionate, cerebral investigation of the topic at hand. 

I was glad for the smell of soil.