Disturbing. Disgusting. Dangerous. Such is my preview of Theater of the Evangelical Scientific Revolution’s (TESR) production A History of Shit: Manson in Thebes, which will have three shows during the Philadelphia Fringe Festival (9/4 & 9/17, 8 PM, The Rotunda and 9/11, 8 PM at the First Unitarian Church, All Shows $5). The problem is, despite the title (which is like a 2 x 4 over the head) I can’t even isolate what is so disturbing about the production. Well I suppose all is grist for the mill when writing a preview of a show (Is any p.r. ever bad for a show? Especially for a Fringe Show?), so let me give it a try.

What is so weird about my preview comments is that so little of my discomfort actually has to do with the production; but has everything to do with how the ensemble acted at the rehearsal I attended. And don’t get me wrong, TESR was totally open, friendly, and professional about my assignment to preview its show. I expected at most a phone interview with an overburdened starving artist seeking to redeem the world through his/her art, but instead I was invited to a rehearsal where I got the chance to see a lot of the show in operation. This included: the actors warming up through the Suzuki Method, rehearsals of a few scenes, an intense debate of stage design and props, screening of several colon cleansing infomercials which will be used in the productions, conversations with the group members, and the chance to peruse a working script (If only every performance group would be so open!)

But this was the unnerving thing about my visit – the routine professionality of it all. The group members could have been engineers talking about ball bearing joints instead of artists putting on a show about excrement, religion, and Charles Manson. I expected to meet frat boys making fart jokes, or some cult therapy group suffering from acute paranoia, but instead I meant a bunch of normal people involved in serious aesthetic activity about some very troubling topics.

The play itself, at least the parts I viewed, seems to mix a number of storylines and aesthetic styles into something of a coherent narrative, I guess. So, the spectator will get a realistic scene with Charles Manson in a prison cell and then a ritualized scene a lá Greek Tragedy with the God of Shit (yes, there is such a God apparently in the pantheon) filling in for Dionysus and intoning godly threats backed by a Greek Chorus, to scenes out of an after school special with a petulant man (King Pentheus) and a woman seeking weight loss liberation (Vitiligo). Throw in the Colon Cleansing Infomercials that will be shown during the production as well as a raffle for a Colon Cleanse and you get….? I don’t know. Something Fringe or maybe something criminal. It’s like listening to Frank Zappa while you are watching a John Waters parody of a Steven Spielberg film while you are getting a root canal.

Or, perhaps another analogy. The whole production strikes me as something between Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (there is my plug for the Brecht Society!) Both works deal with the issue of how to treat what society understands to be absolute evil – Hitler. But usually society or cultural expression passes on actually trying to present the actual evil figure through performance. And this results in very few treatments of Hitler himself but lots of films and plays, etc… about the people around Hitler. Or, pure fictional substitutes like Lord Voldemort, Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader, etc… But Brecht and Brooks did put Hitler onstage and ran the risk of humanizing the evil, perhaps even inadvertently validating it. And this is the conundrum that TESR runs up against. Can you put Manson onstage in any form? Can you really concretely talk about and show Shit onstage?

And I’m not sure if my visit and this preview doesn’t implicate me in the whole thing as well. Despite my distaste for the subject matter, I had to grudgingly admit that there is some spot-on good theater going on. The choral music and movements are impeccably timed and hilarious, the work of Bill Allen, Max Margulies, and Katya Quinn-Judge as the principal leads is very strong, and the direction of Ted Cubotsky is clever and irreverent. And to top it off, the production only costs $5 (a point that the ensemble was very proud of).

But again is it good theater if it is about Manson and Shit? Should not these be listed under the category, “That which we do not name?”