Who exactly is purified, absolved, or made clean in Sarah Kane’s brutal, sexually audacious Cleansed (1998)?
Grace receives a phalloplasty and a mastectomy; psychologically abused Robin hangs himself; Rod has his throat sliced; sadistic Tinker makes love to a transvestite sex worker; Grace’s twin brother Graham is euthanized by a needle to his eye; and poor Carl, Rod’s lover, not only has his tongue cut out, but his hands and feet chopped off previous to being raped by a steel pole.
There are no fun and games in this play. There may be tender moments, a bit of quixotic poetic dialogue, very fine acting, a visceral physical production with searing soundtrack and projections, a provocative set, but for what end? What the hell are we watching?
Yes, we know it’s about love: subversive, nihilistic, narcissistic, even mean and vile. It’s about abuse and debasement in the face of finding oneself. It may even be about the redemption of love through pain. It may be…but Kane’s third play seems devoid of humanity, even though Kane wants us to believe it’s there beneath the nightmares. The drama flies in the face of love. Salvation comes with a terrible price.
Young English playwright Kane, branded the mother of “in yer face” theater, exploded onto London’s theater scene in 1995 with her radical, experimental Blasted, a dystopian fever dream about war and its atrocities. It contains violent rape, incredible toxic masculinity, sodomy, eye gouging, starvation, cannibalism, and other forms of man’s inhumanity. In its juggernaut of sensory confrontation, the staid British critics called it grotesque, an abomination, and filth.
Overnight, Kane became a star and went on to mystify and enrage with Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed, Crave, and her final work, 4:48 Psychosis. (Blasted is the only Kane play Catastrophic has not produced.) She was the hot new voice in theater, raw yet poetic, wild yet contained in some skewed classical way. Suffering from years of depression, she hung herself with a pair of shoelaces at King’s College Hospital in 1999 at the age of 28.
While it may bat about the various forms of love that shall not be named – or those the Greeks had a word for – the drama reeks of torture porn dialed to 11. Cleansed is a contemporary remix of Jacobean Webster, fin de siécle French Grand Guignol, and Dickensian Punch and Judy. There’s a Dantean beauty in its horror, but also unforced comedy in its overabundance of atrocity. Kane relishes rubbing our face in the vileness of man.
Needless to say, this is not a play for your fusty Aunt Fanny. With dispassion, I shall describe briefly what it’s about. It’s then up to you if you want to see it.
In a nameless, grimy institution, Tinker (Walt Zipprian, in perhaps in his most frightening and forceful performance) rules with sadistic furor. His last patient Graham (Bryan Kaplún), perhaps a former lover, is put to death in Tinker’s arms. Graham’s twin sister Grace (T Lavois Thiebaud, in a phenomenally detailed characterization) visits the asylum (?) to reclaim her brother’s body. When she dons his clothes, that fellow inmate Robin (a poignant Ruben Ramires in his US theater debut) has been given to wear, she experiences a shuddering rebirth. She’s so in love with her brother, she longs to be him. She stays under Tinker’s care.
Fellow patients Carl (Chuck Vaughn) and Rod (Abraham Zapata) declare their love, overheard by Tinker. “I will never lie to you. I will die for you,” says devoted Carl. Tinker tortures Carl, cutting out his tongue with large shears. Sensitive Robin is in love with Grace, but Grace only has eyes for her deceased brother. She sees him, talks to him, wants to be him. She mimics his style, his walk, his mannerisms.
Tinker visits a sex show, where he masturbates while Woman (Raymond Compton) gyrates in her protective glass box. There’s an obvious attraction. The Woman wants help with her conflicts; Tinker will unctuously oblige. After each sexual encounter with Rod, Carl is brutally assaulted, resulting in his hands chopped off, later his feet, and ultimately having his penis grafted onto Grace in her zombie-like transformation. “I’m not a doctor,” Tinker says with an evil wink.
Rebuffed in his love, innocent Robin hangs himself with Gracie’s pantyhose. After sex with the Woman, who reveals he is a man, Tinker sobs in his arms, declaring his love. (This all can’t end well, we think.) Grace, after her operation under Tinker’s direction, finds a kind of peace with mutilated Carl.
“Death isn’t the worst thing they can do to you. Tinker made a man bite off another man’s
testicles. Can take away your life but not give you death instead.” This cryptic quote sums up Kane’s trajectory. Pain leads to love? Personal acceptance? Or just more sadism and kink?
Throughout though, Catastrophic glosses Kane’s scandalous play with the utmost professionalism. Thiebaud, Zipprian, Ramires, and Zapata are spellbinding. Afsaneh Aayani’s creepy set design in dirty gray metal is Broadway-worthy; directors and Jason Nodler, Catastrophic’s artistic director, and Thiebaud’s direction is swift and pungent, wallowing in the horrors – sometimes a bit too much and too long – and overlaying the atmosphere with an eerie chill.
But the true stars of Cleansed are the thumping electronic score by Sarah Moessner and James Templton; Hudson Davis’ evocative lighting; and the atmospheric projections by Templeton and Tim Thomson. What gorgeous work these magicians conjure. The music is loud and icy, raising hackles, the stuff of all the bad dreams you’ve ever had. While the projections, almost constant, are impressionistic raindrops, riots, burning buildings, childhood reveries, or a chrysalis morphing into a butterfly. It’s all tonally perfect for this hellish tale.
The one disappointment is that Catastrophic, Houston’s premiere avant-garde theater, plays it safe with nudity. This is Sarah Kane “in-yer-face” in spades. Why be so genteel and prudish with dance belts, prosthetic breasts, painted pubic hair, and patently false phalluses. Kane means to shove this in our face; go ahead and shove it.
Cleansed continues through April 27 at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays at Catastrophic Theatre at MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, call 713-521-4533 or visit catastrophictheatre.com. Pay what you can. Due to the subject matter, no one under the age of 16 will be permitted in the theater.
D. L. Groover
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