Compulsive Acts by Bateman David;Haferty Paul;Gilbert Sky;

Author:Bateman, David;Haferty, Paul;Gilbert, Sky; [Bateman, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 5437864
Publisher: Guernica Editions, Incorporated
Published: 2014-08-14T00:00:00+00:00

We had just returned from a late screening of The Truman Show. John and Howard and I were relaxing over a drink. (81)

This brief but loaded introduction serves to 1) identify Mandy as interlocutor, who is both a performer and a character, 2) align the work with a contemporaneous example of metadrama—The Truman Show, and 3) demand from the outset that the audience step out of their role as passive observer and take stock of more than one layer of reality. This introduction asks that the audience be aware that the scenario about to be played out is a re-visitation of events gone by—it is a theatricalization. Mandy uses the past tense in her introduction and then, as she moves into the main setting, transitions into a representational present that the audience is compelled to follow. Mandy’s experience is now the audience’s experience. And though Mandy has introduced the scene to come, once she steps into it she, like the audience, does not know where it will go. Within the primary narrative there are no “winks” to disrupt the naturalism of the scene, but the door to imaginative interpretation has been opened and the leakage of this interpretation saturates the scene’s meaning.

Gilbert’s repeated conflation of reality and theatricality through the use of metatheatre creates overlap between the narrative of the play itself, the idea of truth, and the performativity of lived experience that slip over onto the characters’ journey—a metatheatrical journey that undermines authority and subverts the idea of fixed reality.

In the opening scene, which begins with Mandy’s introduction quoted above, the tension rises and the characters’ personalities are on the verge of conflict when the action freezes and, again, Mandy steps out of the scene to directly address the audience saying:

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