In this landscape of frenzied playmaking, I detected, at least, a boomlet. Certainly that transgressive work born in the performance clubs more than a dozen years ago is gone. One night during a Fringe performance of K., the Neo-Futurists' clever adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, I realized that the last time I was in this particular theater in 1988 I saw painter Joe Coleman bite the heads off several white mice and throw their carcasses into the audience. But let me not wax nostalgic. Theater is like a cultural backwater that's been ignored, so it becomes a tidepool, and all of a sudden you have these vibrant new forms springing up.
Most artists use the perimeter to launch themselves centerward.
But a few are on the perimeter, falling off trying to fall off. I first met Nick Fracaro and Gabriele Schafer in 1991 when they were living, by choice, in a tepee they'd set up at the foot of the Manhattan Bridge, in the city's oldest shantytown. After about nine months in this camp, the two staged a Heiner Muller play in the tepee. And they did not want media attention. Schafer and Fracaro knew that once their fragile scene became visible in the media, it would disappear in real life.