Language: as much as it lets us express ourselves, also lets us express how trapped we are in the prison of others’ buzzwords, binding decrees, and unforgiving commands. We don’t give babies enough credit, even though the sounds of their babble exceed the limits of any one of the languages we’re suffering within. Jerry Lieblich’s “The Barbarians” is not for babies, but rather for those of us driven mad and jaded by the rhetorical mess in which our politicians luxuriate as they make our lives worse. “The Barbarians” is a highly mercurial language game currently receiving its largest production to date at La MaMa. A play about the misprisions between speech, American political rhetoric, and futile attempts at expressing love is as timely as ever. Watching “The Barbarians” is like listening to an inside joke without any insiders because we’ve declared war on them after we didn’t get it the first time.
An attempt to summarize the plot would sound something like, “a loquacious storyteller recounts the drama of a war-hungry president and a team of scientists looking to bend language to less violent ends, while a discarded cigarette butt and dog turd learn to make do with life in a snowpile,” but that chops off much of the zany, if occasionally awkward and meandering, fun. Lieblich and director Paul Lazar—the duo have been working on this project for seven years—offer a winding dramatization of how our words can not only fail to do what we expect, but also do vicious, indiscriminate harm.
Segmenting the play are a series of laboratory scenes where a muscular, New Jersey everyman (Naren Weiss) reads out notorious presidential statements—including Nixon’s resignation and Bush’s declaration of the War on Terror—as he suffers a series of radical modulations in his speech. Our test subject looks like a cyberpunk jellyfish as he recites under a set of head gear with long, translucent curtains that make him stutter, tick, shriek, and switch accents. All the while, the language scientists (Jennifer Ikeda and Jess Barbagallo) give hilarious and nonsensical commands. Their mad libs push comprehension to the limit as their pseudoscientific jargon mocks presidential language.
I don’t believe that people who stutter or speak with a strong accent should be the butt of the joke. In their repetition, however, these experiments become uncanny and uncomfortable. The scientists even have their own short-lived fling until disaster suddenly strikes. Our overdetermined and nonsensical political language cannot be improved without a cost, and the scientists seem to be learning what we already know all too well: that pretensions to rules or norms provide cover for the harm our words could actually cause, no matter our intentions.
The set’s winding, white banners make for the perfect projection screen as the test subject’s burrowed words zig-zag down and across the stage. In my mind, the projections illustrate the strange and orthogonal path speech makes from speaker to listener, or for instance, from each insecure and uninspired warlord to their targets. For much of the play, deranged politicos and savvy technicians shout at the audience from the wings of the playing space. RADA alumna Chloe Claudel stuns as both a sentient security system with its own needs and also a precocious handler for the new administration. “The Barbarians” attacks your sense-making faculties from all fronts as each new twist asks for your patience and imagination to play along with the cast.
Enveloping the play are the warm, steady, and captivating monologues of the “witness” (Steve Mellor) who sits close to the audience at a little wooden desk full of more props than you’d ever guess—a coil of dog feces, Brechtian signage, and the pulley rope needed to raise and lower a dummy “actor,” for example. This is a man whose seasoned career makes him the ideal deliverer of such wordy speeches, and his enthusiastic and consistent cadence propels us through the play’s well-trodden language games.
Testifying that the fantastic could really happen, we listen to his stories and see them acted out to varying degrees of complexity. We hear of the ever-increasing intricacy of the theatrical illusions that a crafty team of stagehands might be putting us through, as well as the vast convoys of valkyries and tractor trailers speeding across a rainbow bridge between two people’s eyes. Mellor’s character stitches the play together with a meta-narrative of how much language could make us imagine before the story breaks down and we just enjoy hearing someone else speak or act something out. At one point, every actor assumes the role of the aspiring “actor” written on their black T-shirts. Maybe this is what theatre is all about, believing someone who talks—or tries to talk—earnestly enough?
The last major player in the game is Anne Gridely’s standout performance as Madame Fake President, a character as funny and incompetent as she is terrifying. Putting past crook presidents to shame, she constantly demands authority but needs to learn how to sweet talk her way to real power. After running through the multitude of countries, substances, and abstract concepts our nation has declared war “on,” she realizes she must declare a war of her own. Different from Trump’s unfortunately hilarious speech patterns in the present, Madame Fake President achieves more of the old-school, obstinate, cowboy leadership style of say Reagan and Bush that we’ve been too quick to forget. Her wordy bloodlust raises the stakes of the play’s critique far beyond the usual examples of performative language, like christening a boat or asking someone to pass you the gravy at dinner. We see how her decrees hypnotize and kill.
The “Barbarians” of the play’s title call to mind historical prejudice against speakers of foreign languages. Ancient Greeks called “barbarians” those who spoke other tongues, and from their imagined perspective, the United States must certainly represent a barbarous nation with a history of ineloquent leaders.
Much of the dialogue between the shifting characters sounds like a feverish (and possibly wet) dream had after reading J. L. Austen’s How to Do Things with Words—more like millennial Gertrude Stein than the sound poems of New York School experimentalists like Jackson Mac Low. Every character has a backstory fueling their manic utterances, everyone wants to be understood through their own seemingly sincere but clumsy narration. When you wake up from the dream—or leave the theatre—the real world doesn’t sound so different, but I’m not sure how or if this play helps us make sense of this phenomenon.
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