That’s where “White Noise,” theater auteur Daniel Fish’s personal distillation of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel, could be seen during the weekend — hypnotizing, narcotizing, infuriating and, on occasion, seriously waking up its audiences. The hole speaks, you see, or its lone inhabitant does.
And this man (played by the admirable Bruce McKenzie), a middle-aged middle-management type in spectacles and a short-sleeved white shirt and necktie, has so very, very much to say. Yet little of it makes sense in the way of traditional narrative.
That may come as a surprise to fans of DeLillo’s much-acclaimed book, which is about the American obsession with and denial of death and is often described as a cornerstone of postmodern fiction. I’m not sure what that means either, but it’s a great read, which infuses a prosaic life with a steady, thrum of apocalyptic dread that heightens the senses.
From its opening pages, the book also deploys a host of lists — inventories of items as banal as the contents of a desk, a garbage can, a grocery store aisle; as poetic as the hollows of a lover’s body; as chilling as the side effects of exposure to toxic chemicals. These are the catalogs by which the novel’s central figure, an academic named Jack Gladney who specializes in Hitler studies, tries to keep his fear of mortality at bay.
These lists, as self-contained entities, are what make up Fish’s script for his 80-minute play, without connective narrative or characterization. I’m not sure whether it’s better to see this show with or without previous acquaintance with DeLillo’s novel.
If you’re a “White Noise” virgin, you may go mad trying to assemble its disconnected pieces into coherence. If you have read the book, you’re likely find yourself, as I did, grasping to recontexualize the passages recited here, which can dilute what at moments is a truly powerful experience.
Fish is an experimental theater artist who recently stepped into the mainstream with his Tony Award-winning revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!,” currently at the Circle in the Square Theater on Broadway. Audiences who enjoyed that production are by no means guaranteed a good time at “White Noise.”
But they may appreciate the chance to sample further evidence of Fish’s original and imaginative vocabulary as a stage artist. (It was also in evidence in his sensational interpretation of Michael Gordon’s chamber opera “Acquanetta,” seen at Bard SummerScape earlier this year.)
Say what you will about Fish. He definitely knows how to get under your skin, even if that means getting on your nerves as well.
His “White Noise” would seem to be partly inspired by Samuel Beckett’s great monologue “Not I,” in which a disembodied mouth delivers a lifetime-spanning roster of contradictory impressions before being subsumed into darkness. Like Beckett’s unnamed speaker, McKenzie’s character floats above the stage, looking both untethered and trapped.
He has the advantage, though, of being able to use his entire body, even if he can’t escape from that suspended hole, which resonantly brings to mind both womb and tomb. (Andrew Leiberman did the set, lighted to chill by Stacey Derosier.) And he isn’t altogether alone either.
Glowing, gigantic images of fresh-faced adolescents appear on the screen that surrounds him. (Jim Findlay is the excellent video designer.) Sometimes the children echo what he says, but in German. This is presumably partly because Fish’s “White Noise” had its debut in Freiburg, Germany.
The nationality of the young people — underscored by their sometimes appearing in lederhosen — also echoes the fixation of the novel’s protagonist on Adolf Hitler. And, yes, there is footage of Nazi rallies shown during this production as well, juxtaposed via split screen with a late-career Elvis Presley performing “Unchained Melody.”
More important, though, these young, unblemished faces become the source of the show’s most powerful moments, in ways that capture an abiding current of horror in the novel. The book’s narrator is a father. He and his wife find the wonder-struck, in-the-moment existence of their youngest child, a toddler, to be a source of profound comfort.
And throughout, there’s an implicit dread of childhood’s vitality and purity (I’m not sure innocence is the word) being polluted. Correspondingly, at a certain point in Fish’s production, the faces we have seen earlier show up increasingly bruised and bloodied.
Life maims, after all, and corrupts and scars. And, by the way, we later see the brush of the makeup artist, applying these artificial wounds, which does not ease the distress of the original vision of disfigurement. On the contrary, it somehow makes us feel culpable in the way these children have been displayed.
McKenzie’s narrator is in competition, in a way, with such bravura visual displays. He must also speak against the background of Bobby Previte’s exquisitely unnerving sound design and music, which ranges from primal percussion to ear-scraping high-tech distortions. Still, with only the subtlest modulations of his voice, this actor holds his own, finding a tone that suggests the grain of pain in its numbed detachment.
The show falters, I think, whenever it cheats on its list formula. Every so often, the script introduces snippets of storytelling that wrench us out of its governing vision of a land, and a life, as the sum of its itemized details.
“White Noise,” is, oddly, most convincing at its most abstract, when you can sit back and go with the sullied flow of spoken word — all those brand names, all those possessions, all that stuff — and sensory onslaught. At such moments, you may even feel that it’s your own cluttered, consumerist mind that’s being anatomized up there.
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Production Notes:
“White Noise”
Tickets: Performed Sept. 22 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; 212-998-4941, nyuskirball.org. Running time: 80 minutes.
Credits: Directed and adapted by Daniel Fish; score by Bobby Previte; video by Jim Findlay; sets by Andrew Leiberman; costumes by Doey Lüthi; lighting by Stacey Derosier; sound by Eric Sluyter; associate director and stage manager, Alexandra Kuechler Caffall; technical director, Carl Whipple; video engineer, Kevin Downing. Presented by NYU Skirball.
Cast: Bruce McKenzie.
This article originally appeared in
.