She has a lot of stuff in her bag, and she — nameless, archetypal physically, defined primarily by her zeal — will tell you about each object, every over-enthusiastic inflection nearly roaring in place of the story behind the object, be it a dorky pen, cans of non-perishables, or the GoPro camera with which she documents her ambitious endeavor to walk barefoot across the United States of America (from Providence, RI to Paris, CA, she tells us) to raise money for the Water is Sacred Collective, amplifying awareness of climate change. Lynnsey Ooten’s delivery is too much, necessarily; even in motions that are unremarkable and quotidian, were it not for the project, there’s a forcefulness to these motions as if to convince herself of their realness.
If the monologue was, by necessity, a manner by which one could externalize the interiority of a character in theater and give insight into their unconscious, its utility and meaning has changed in the age of the internet, blogging, “content creation”, “influencing”, and, in essence, self-documentation. In an age of surveillance, where everyone is being monitored, or monitoring, all the time, there is no limit to performance. And so, in Protest, a solo performance piece written by Peter Kim George, based on poet Mark Baumer’s own project to walk across America barefoot, and directed by Charles Quittner, the audience is watching the performance of a…
