Think "truth." Think "beauty." Think of them together and what comes to mind? Nature? Keats? A department store? Ping Chong’s Truth & Beauty, a brazen theater piece that gets its Boston premiere courtesy of Company One next week, explores that question by driving headlong into the congested intersection of corporate culture, advertising, and American moral deterioration.
"Truth & Beauty was made not too long after Columbine," Chong explains. "We were interested in looking at different factors that create a Columbine. It’s not a show about giving answers, but it gives suggestions as to why that might happen. It’s a work that dissects the damage to society caused by the propaganda of advertising. It’s about guns, nature of media, impact of media, advertising, and globalization."
The internationally renowned Chong has been turning out multimedia performance pieces since the early ’70s, when he began working with Meredith Monk. He has garnered Obie Awards, Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and a Bessie Award. Some of you will know him from his collaborations with Michael Rohd, the founding artistic director of Sojourn Theatre in Portland, Oregon; their Reason played last winter at Cambridge’s now-shuttered Market Theater.
A signature characteristic of Chong’s work is his inclusion of performers in the creative and productive processes. Truth & Beauty, which he developed with Rohd, is a technical exercise that calls for on-stage television monitors to be spewing footage. The two-character play premiered in 1999 at Virginia Tech, with Rohd and actor Jeffrey Rose, and it attracted national attention in 2001 when the script was published in American Theatre magazine. It’s unique in Chong’s canon in being what he calls "most play-like" — which means that it’s possible for other companies to produce it.
But it’s critical that each production preserve the piece’s original stylized format. "Since one of the main concerns in the show is propaganda," Rohd points out, "we try to embrace the connection of modern advertising, which includes multimedia, different styles bumping up against one another, short-attention span, satire. We wanted to make a piece that felt not quite like traditional theater, that had elements of the way advertising packages itself as narrative. The way we formed it, it has a barrage of commercial images. It uses short pieces in different styles, as if someone were flipping channels."
But the grander notion, a blunt critique of America’s dominant role in globalization, is a touchy subject in today’s muggy political climate. "My first thought is that it’s exciting [to have it produced now], but the reason it’s exciting makes me sad," Rohd continues. "It’s more timely now than when we did it in 1999. Violence, gun culture, corporate culture, prison culture are more insidious now than then. We’re about to go to war, and many make the argument that corporate issues have as much to do with why we’re going to war as moral issues."
Shawn LaCount, Company One’s artistic director and an actor in the production, says he considered doing the show even before September 11. "In light of the fact that we’re facing the strong possibility of war, it’s more relevant in a lot of ways. The purpose of theater is to stay on top of politics. Good art’s job is to stay current and necessary."
Truth & Beauty is at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont Street in the South End, March 20 through April 12. Tickets are $20, $15 for students; call (617) 426-2787.
