Mark Boyett stars in “Chesapeake,” at the Kitchen Theatre through July 18. Photo by Samantha Braziller
LIKE THE TYPE OF DOG that lends Lee Blessing’s “Chesapeake” its name, the play, currently onstage at the Kitchen Theatre, is a mixed breed. With elements of comedy, melodrama, magical realism and farce, this mutt of a one-man show ostensibly centers on a man’s obsession with a canine. But over the course of what can only be called a shaggy dog story, the sprawling two-act monologue explores artistic, political and existential issues, touching upon topics as varied as political extremism and Italian futurism. And though it meanders back and forth and spends a good deal of time chasing its own tail, “Chesapeake” is an endearing creature, ultimately as loveable as the retriever.
Set in the late 1990s, the play begins as a political comedy. It opens with our trusty companion, a performance artist named Kerr (winkingly pronounced cur, a synonym for mutt) struggling to introduce himself over the incessant offstage barking of a dog. That dog – named Lord Radcliffe of Luckymore, or Lucky for short – belongs to Kerr’s nemesis, a conservative Southern Congressman who used the poor performance artist for political gain, when a piece involving public nudity was awarded a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Therm Pooley (a Strom Thurmond stand-in) has focused his campaign on the elimination of federal funding for the arts, and when a lone masturbating audience member (a plant, insists the performance artist) appears at Kerr’s piece, Pooley wins re-election. After a surreal incident in a hotel room, the artist’s dreams are haunted by Lucky, who has appeared in the politician’s advertisements, and Kerr plots an elaborate revenge involving a video-camera, dog-nappping and the Congressman’s 25-year-old beautiful aide Stacey.
The story doesn’t get any clearer from there. Kerr (the empathetic veteran to The Kitchen Mark Boyett, who appeared previously in “Clean Alternatives” and “A Play on Words”), rapidly switches focus from the personal to the political, describing each plot and incident with increasing embellishment. Kerr seems to relish cataloging the minute details of his art projects with the same gusto as he counts the seven slow beats his father would spend in front of each work of art in a museum. “Art,” he proclaims, “is an act of will. Like law. Like crime.”
And there’s no question that Kerr’s “performance art” project is certainly more extreme than reciting the Bible in the nude. Thankfully, his foil is not only a cultural conservative, but a bigot and a hypocrite, though Kerr’s quest takes him closer and closer to the politician’s heart of darkness. And in director Margarett Perry’s hands, Kerr’s world envelopes the audience in the increasing suspension of belief.
Blessing is a dramatist with a flair for the topical: his most famous work, “A Walk in the Woods,” centers on U.S.-Soviet relations; and his most recent play imagines President George W. Bush on the eve of a trial for war crimes. But although “Chesapeake” fixates upon the political, there are underlying currents of the universal, and the existential. As the play progresses, Kerr’s story becomes more and more absurd, and without spoiling the plot it should be noted that the second act involves many revelations and reversals.
“This isn’t a movie. This is performance art!” Kerr gleefully proclaims repeatedly as justification for sharp twists and turns of the play’s plot. And “Chesapeake” is anything but conventional: Boyett keeps the audience’s rapt attention over the course of the two-hour production, and accolades are due to scenic designer Kent Goetz, lighting designer is E.D. Intemann, and sound designer Lesley Greene.
Ultimately “Chesapeake” also comes to represent what one can’t find at the local multiplex, or in other art forms. Unlike on the written page, or even in the art gallery, the theater provides an immediacy like no other experience. The Kitchen Theatre’s 73 seats (when the company moves westward to its new residence in the old laser tag space on West State Street / Martin Luther King, Jr. Street, the theater will accommodate 99), allow audiences to see the sweat dripping from the actors’ brows, and feel the urgency even the newspaper cannot transmit.
“The new debate over the NEA had become its own art form,” Kerr notes towards the end of the work, and Blessing’s play repeatedly challenges audiences to question the difference between politics and performance, art and histrionics. It is a fitting end to the 19th season of the Kitchen Theatre, in a city that should be thankful that despite the massive cuts in government funding for the arts, audiences may still treasure a bit of performance art.
“Chesapeake” runs through July 18. Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, and 4 p.m. Sundays. Tickets are $18-$32 and are available at Ticket Center Ithaca on the Commons, by calling (607) 273-4497 or online at www.kitchentheatre.org.