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 performance, a trick mirror there the delineation between pain and pleasure, change and stagnation, body and soul is thinner than the layer of skin on lips chapped from the cold.
It is not that Ooten’s resilience is remarkable or interesting but rather that it is constantly wavering, on and off and on, the suggestions by lighting designer Chris Roberson a playful red herring, still aware of the realm of public performance activism Ooten exists in. Ooten is extraordinary as the physical, emotional, and mental toll of the journey displays itself in a quivering voice, a self-conscious laugh, a bead of sweat rolling down her nose, a guttural scream. She walks back and forth, back and forth, her cheery attitude eroding, the gigantic bag pulling down on her, a weight compounded by material and existential distress. When the lights turn blue and the sound, by Nikolai Mishler, becomes glitched, Protest reveals itself to be a nightmare of body, ambition, and praxis, augmented and manipulated by the digital world, and grounded by the crumbling material world, sucked up and crushed into a void both political and personal.
Protest will be at RhinoFest 2020 at Chicago’s Prop Thtr on February 15–16. You can purchase tickets here.
