“Ever try to concentrate on doing something difficult with a crowd of people watching?” David Foster Wallace posed that semi-rhetorical question in How Tracy Austin Broken My Heart, an excitable and hilarious and ultimately pretty searching evisceration of the tennis star’s autobiography.
You can hear an actor ask it again during A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – After David Foster Wallace, part of the Under the Radar festival at the Public Theater. In this performance, conceived and directed by Daniel Fish, four actors concentrate on doing something very, very difficult – voicing Wallace’s famously effusive and recursive prose, footnotes and all.
Foster Wallace’s writing – still shocking in its exuberant precision – combines superb craft with seeming artlessness. Syntactical loop-de-loops swoop and spiral with practiced agility. Concatenations of clauses seem to flout all rules of grammar, until they resolve effortlessly. But no matter his subject – lobsters, porn, tennis, a cruise – his jittery, generous, quick-fire consciousness sprawls all over his prose, deliberately and helplessly.
To achieve this same mix of rigour and spontaneity, Fish sends his four actors on to a stage inundated with tennis balls and has them slip on bulky black headphones. Then Fish, visible in the first row of the audience, begins to transmit selections from various stories and essays into their ears. Whatever they hear they have to voice, though Fish sometimes accelerates the text to almost an inarticulable pace.
Sometimes an actor will speak solo; sometimes all four will speak in unison. Sometimes they’ll take the text in turns, sometimes in a roundelay. The way they trip over words or tennis balls gives the piece a feel of impulsiveness and naturalness, and of humanity, too, just as Wallace snuck surprising and genuine (and surprising for being so genuine) emotion into even the most erudite analyses.
The selections change night to night, depending on what Fish sends through the soundboard. Wednesday’s performance focused on the essay collections and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (including the long and scatological BI #42 06-97) as well as an epitaphic interview with one of Wallace’s friends. There are bits of business with the tennis balls and bouts of calisthenics.
But mostly the actors just speak. That’s enough. The smell of a swimming pool is “a flower with chemical petals”, a deck chair is “narcoleptically comfortable”, recollections are “almost Viennese in their repression”. A (Radically Condensed and Expanded) Supposedly Fun Thing could fall victim to Euro art pretensions (Fish fared less well with a performance centered on Jonathan Franzen). But the affable cast and the incontestable allure of the language (and a running time at least an hour less than in its last incarnation) keep it in bounds. This tennis-addled show should serve any Wallace fan right.
