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eye WEEKLY                                             October 27 1994
Toronto's arts newspaper                      .....free every Thursday
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BACKSTAGE                                                    BACKSTAGE

                                preview

                        WHO SHOT JACQUES LACAN?
         Featuring Park Bench, Andrew Kines and Mark Johnson.
               Written and directed by Darren O'Donnell.

                     RADIO ROOSTER SAYS THAT'S BAD
 Written and performed by Darren O'Donnell. Directed by Andrew Kines.

                                 OVER
Written and performed by Darren O'Donnell. Directed by Daniel MacIvor. 

      Nov. 4-20. (Over runs only Friday and Saturday evenings).
     Buddies In Bad Times Theatre, 12 Alexander St. $10. 975-8555.


                            TALK TALK TALK
          Darren O'Donnell's triple scoop of verbal barrage

                                  by
                           CHRISTOPHER WINSOR


The house lights dim. The audience settles. Then the nasty-looking guys
burst in, waving guns in the air and chanting: "NOBODY MOVES NOBODY
GETS HURT. NOBODY MOVES. NOBODY GETS HURT." Over and over again, like a
mantra, chanting as they leap up onstage, grab for microphones and
flood each other with beams of harsh white light. Someone smashes out a
machine-gun rhythm on a snare drum; someone else explains the theory of
deconstruction. A couple of others sway like backup singers on Soul
Train.

Don't sweat it. It's just Mammalian Diving Reflex -- writer/performer
Darren O'Donnell's performance-art inspired theatre group -- working
through the opening bit of Who Shot Jacques Lacan?.

The Mammalians are remounting Who Shot? from this year's Fringe, along
with O'Donnell's earlier Rhubarb late-night show Radio Rooster Says
That's Bad, at the 12 Alexander St. Theatre. Weekend gluttons can also
catch O'Donnell and Veronika Hurnik in Over (Fri.-Sat., 10:30 p.m.), a
marginally more conventional two-hander directed by Daniel MacIvor.

Radio Rooster is a one-man lecture/performance play, a kind of
"high-speed, hypnotic, trance-inducing barrage," says O'Donnell. The
monologue is a high- voltage harangue made up of alliteration,
repetition, rhythm and rhyme -- elements the good Dr. Radio Rooster
says have been employed to "burn into the hard wiring of your brain and
inoculate you against a sickness: yourselves." We're sick, he says,
because we don't understand that the common-sense subject/object
distinction is an illusion.

Dr. Rooster also notes that the music and lighting for the lecture have
been similarly chosen to alter consciousness. He explains, for example,
using colored light bulbs, the physiological impact on the body of the
color spectrum. (Yellow, apparently, is good for the pancreas.) He also
attempts yogic flying and tries to mind-propulse the theatre to
Vancouver. Is it satire? Is it post-structuralist? Is it genius, or
four quarters short of a whole?

In terms of form (all the chanting and alliteration and rhythm and
percussion and stuff) O'Donnell says that Radio Rooster preceded Who
Shot Jacques Lacan?. But in terms of content, it kind of fits after.

"Lacan is about how the current structures in thought are failing us,
about how the way we speak never reveals anything about us, how
language always leaves us behind, grasping for meaning," he says. (I'm
still grasping. Which one was Lacan in the show? It's not clear. And
anyway, Lacan was never shot ...)

"Once you get that bullet into your brain," O'Donnell continues, "the
question is how will we find alternative ways to think? Radio Rooster
is about how to fill that void, how to draw closer the interface
between the mind and body. What wasn't as clear in Who Shot is that the
way out of this mess is by understanding the body, not through
technological solutions. I'm interested in ideas that are considered
the keys to unblocking the space between people."

Whoah. A detail here may help. O'Donnell, with buzz-cut head and in
jeans, a peach T-shirt and clear plastic square-rimmed glasses, is
carting around a thick book called The Future Of The Body. It's by
someone named Michael Murphy, co-founder of the Esalen Institute -- a
place he says is devoted to the "development of human potential."

"I find non-fiction a great source of inspiration," O'Donnell says.
"One of the reasons I like Lacan so much is that he's so rude, he's
playful in a rough way. I don't claim to understand any of it, but it's
fun to play with. When I'm working on something new, it doesn't have to
think right, it only has to feel right."


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