330434-155487-14There aren’t any noises to speak of in A Col­lec­tion of Noises. The play con­cerns the men­tal break­down of an awk­ward young woman and claims Lyn­chi­an influ­ence, so obvi­ously there’s lots of archly deployed old-time rock ’n’ roll; but every meta­phor is visu­al. The cent­ral image is a bank of black and white pho­to­graphs taken by the pho­to­graph­er prot­ag­on­ist, whose men­tal break­down revolves around a famil­i­ar cluster of gaze anxi­et­ies and moth­er com­plexes. Audi­ences expect­ing the aur­al engage­ment teased by the title adjust expect­a­tions accord­ingly.

Though if noise–as opposed to sound–signifies an ele­ment of mys­tery or the impen­et­rable, we might still press the title into crit­ic­al ser­vice. A noise is what one makes when one can­not make the sound of speech. And while a noise or two hap­pens all the time–grunts, mumbles, assents and acknowledgements–for most humans, the only lan­guage described by the phrase “a col­lec­tion of noises” is that spoken between the pre-verbal child and the par­ent.

So the lack of any actu­al noises in A Col­lec­tion of Noises mir­rors the gap­ing lack probed at anguished length with­in the piece: that of the moth­er, whose absence is felt through such cre­at­ive choices as hav­ing the prot­ag­on­ist glare into the audi­ence and scream “MOTHER WHAT CAN I DO I CAN NEVER BE AS PERFECT AS YOU.” We hope we are on the right track here?

This is not the medi­um for too-fine exam­in­a­tion of the show’s cent­ral ten­sion, that of a barely-tamed gaze which ever-threatens to erupt through the prot­ag­on­ist’s fra­gile Oed­ip­al web of san­ity into mon­strous viol­ence; hap­pily, there is the entire genre of fem­in­ist film the­ory to which the inter­ested read­er may refer. Noises’ Alice could prob­ably van­quish most all of her so-urgent psy­cho­lo­gic­al demons by just see­ing what Mul­vey or Clover had to say about Michael Pow­ell’s Peep­ing Tom, argu­ably the mod­ern ori­gin­at­or of the sub­genre to which A Col­lec­tion of Noises belongs.

Also her­al­ded by Peep­ing Tom–whose prot­ag­on­ist, just like Alice, lives for cam­er­as, blades and mater­nal fixation–was a revived pro­cliv­ity for the sort of Brech­tian audi­ence-hec­tor­ing whose hard­core title belt nowadays adorns the Gal­lic waist­line of Michael Haneke. Haneke’s unclaimed influ­ence on Noises is strong, in that the denoue­ment echoes Funny Games’ fourth wall-fum­bling scenes of audi­ence belittle­ment; and in that the play’s sole shock­ing moment is handled in the exact same way as that of Haneke’s Cache.

In as much as people go to per­form­ances to see ritu­ally-enacted dra­mas of sac­ri­fice (which is quite a bit, cave­men etc), A Col­lec­tion of Noises ful­fills its con­tract with the audi­ence; and in as much as people come to a hor­ror show to be con­fron­ted with the mar­gin­ally unex­pec­ted and mon­strous, a per­son screech­ing at you about how fuck­ing dare you come to a psy­cho­drama expect­ing a hor­ror show is per­haps apro­pos, all of the above not­with­stand­ing. To invite audi­ences to a show and then to present anoth­er show, and then to berate them for expect­ing the show they paid to see, smacks of those col­lec­tions of noises which we call “tan­trums” and which we expect of the very young and the devel­op­ment­ally fix­at­ive. Hope­fully it felt good to get it out.

A Col­lec­tion of Noises at Fringe Bar, March 1, 2