Paulette Phillips [review]
Parachute, July 1991

by Nell Tenhaaf

PAULETTE PHILLIPS,
The Lorne Building, Toronto
(presented by YYZ Artists' Outlet)
February 7 - 9

During his recent concert tour, Neil Young offered a comment on the Gulf war as the opening ges­ture of his performance. While \bung played a Hendrix version of the Star Spangled Banner from the wings, a stagehand dressed up as a sort of hick everyman placed an oversized forties microphone on centre stage and fixed to it a long yellow ribbon. Subtle, and proba­bly not making the intended con­nections for some of the audience.

In Under the Influence, her recent performance work for a cast of three, Paulette Phillips claims a parallel topicality in her closing monologue. She approaches a microphone close to the audience and reminds us that "We are at war, again unwanted." Not a com­fortable moment, because we have just spent an hour in an inter­personal battle zone staged by Phillips. In this instance, we, a sophisticated art audience, know that we know the connections. But they're so disturbing to speak aloud — do we have to be reminded?

Phillips' own minimal but sus­taining presence on the set anchors the work in the domain of per­formance, or rather a hybrid of performance and theatre. In her author's voice, she delivers open­ing and closing monologues, bracketing the theatrical core of the work. She performs a drunken walk sequence with repeated falls near the beginning, and inter­venes in the action in her suste­nance role (to serve the characters breakfast, for instance), but posi­tions herself off to the side for most of the duration of the perfor­mance. Seated in an armchair beside a lamp and a potted plant, she is far enough away from the centre of the action to not be visi­ble in the mirrors that line the walls of the performing space. Meanwhile, two actors, a woman and a man, engage in intense dialogue around and on top of a centrally-placed object, a raised floor that at first appears to be a stage with curtained sides. It's not solid though; it drops dramati­cally to the real floor when the woman sits on its edge.

This surface mounted on heavy springs becomes a powerful visual metaphor. It's the Raft of the Medusa with its survivors clinging to the edges; a site for preoccupa­tion with sex, like an oversized waterbed; an earthquake zone where usually reliable ground is not solid, not to be trusted. The use of this unsteady stage, with the actors tussling on it, humping each other, standing on it to stabi­lize it, and eating at it like a table, visually constructs a narrative balance between continuity and surprise, between the familiar and the unknown. It's the shifting real­ity of being stoned on something, of being "under the influence."

The mirrors have an influenc­ing effect as well. The actors watch themselves, as well as frequently playing to the audience through the mirrors when they are facing away. The checking out of one's reality as an image is looking at and assessing oneself through another person. This is a key idea for Phillips: measuring distance and differences between people, as well as "between what you feel and what you see." The performance is built around these inter-relation­ships, propelled forward by the visual strategies of destabilized stage and mirroring, and a densely woven text played out by the author and her two characters.

The characters here are not searching for an author, as in Pirandello's great theatrical exper­iment. Phillips' characters know their author, and acknowledge that they author themselves. The author is sympathetic to her char­acters' inter-relational dilemma in that she's always there with them. Nevertheless she is unable to help them out of it precisely because she has constructed two of them, each compelled by a complex set of  idée fixes.
The characterization is fraught with dualities that are caught up in language, several of which are philosophical mindbenders. The most obvious and ultimately fluid of these is gender difference. Among the more complex and entrenched is a discussion in the opening address to the audience in which free will is posited against determinism in the form of an "influencing machine" that some­times, as part of a passing crazy state, seems to control life. Later, the two characters spar around the issue of limits vs. possibilities in relation to mythologies about love, sex, and identity. They arrive at a kind of standoff, not so much an understanding as a manifestation of battle fatigue.

The dense and intense lan­guage of the lovers' dialogue, most of it conflictual, coupled with these convincingly ontological dualities, results in an almost tragic declaration on the inade­quacy of language. Words seem to slide past each other, not connect­ing with the other's receptors, something like a malfunctioning immune system unable to recog­nize and respond to what is not itself. Or in a more whimsical vein, like Wittgenstein's dictum that if a lion could speak we wouldn't hear it. Yet this inade­quate language is all we have, and so it is presented here as the pri­mary tool available to us for affect­ing the world and ourselves in it.

The performance subtly shifts linguistic contexts as the dialogue unfolds. In the discussions on will and its relation to destiny, choice, and the subconscious, we drift in the high, pure atmosphere of modernist philosophy, where will means freedom, the driving force of progress, and is quintessentially male (no matter how much post­-modern theory tries to feminize Nietzsche). Here the characters' standoff, an acute alterity or mu­tual "othering," is located within a play of cross gendering through historically rooted categories. It signals a crisis of language, a crisis of will. In fact, the woman claims will more than the man as a site of possibility, saying it is "like a muscle, you must flex it, and keep it in use and it gets stronger," while he prefers to speak of desire, the need to be loved, and the supremacy of pleasure. Ultimately, their standoff results from the difficulty of trying to transform the modernist legacy of solipsistic probing (what some call the Enlightenment Hangover) into a workable strategy for intersubjectivity. On this issue, Phillips' bottom line is optimism. For all their miscommunication, her characters are always addressing each other, and she us.

When the language issues of Under the Influence ask us to exercise our post-structuralist mental mus­cles, to consider an attempt to reconcile meanings with words in their Derridean evasiveness of is and is-not, there and not-there, we see a clear drawing of gender lines. Not that both characters don't have trouble with words, each voicing suspicion and a pro­found helplessness. He is declara­tive and rather cavalier about this shifting semiotic ground: "... but I don't know what that word love means. I'm an animal, you're an animal, we are all animals." He also insists that "we can't change." She, on the other hand, is per­plexed and possibly sad: "Every time I open my mouth to say some­thing I feel like I'm grasping for the right word, the word that will pin down... Do you understand what I'm trying to say?"

There is no blame attached to this measure of difference, but there is a comment on the real-life implications for both women and men of feminist investigations into language. They map out a different and therefore unfamiliar relationship between thinking, speaking and acting. There's a lot at stake. The feminist project in language stems from the dysfunctionality for women of inherited, colonized modes of language. But it doesn't follow that a decolonized alternative is self-evident or even recognizable. When Phillips says "... what I feel is contained within the distance between us," she is commenting on the human condi­tion, to speak to another and sometimes be heard.