Can I Help You? Backstage Magazine, July 18, 2008, by Christopher Murray
"Alphonse, you are going to feel a big needle." Nine words blandly spoken but likely to strike terror in the heart of poor Alphonse — and a typical moment in the experimental collaborative Exploding Moment's new work.
Can I Help You? takes as its source material footage from an unnamed medical reality television program that focuses on patients admitted to a trauma center after various car accidents and mishaps. Five actors — Shea Elmore, Johnny Lops, Sharla Meese, Katherine Sullivan, and Katherine Wessling — painstakingly directed by Catharine Dill, re-enact different snippets of footage in a deliberately deconstructed manner. A transcriber upstage sits keying in the shoots, ostensibly for editing purposes, while varying perspectives are presented in the foreground.
Sometimes the actors gather around and meticulously pantomime a procedure in an operating theatre; additional sequences mimic medical personnel narrating surgeries or commenting on a patient's prognosis. Yet other moments are more clearly theatrical expressions, as when actors playing a doctor and patient engage in a pas de deux of pain to the "music" of a newly admitted patient crying out, or when closed-circuit video shows sides of meat being poked to replicate the often graphic shots of operations shown on television.
This postmodern presentation of the cable-ubiquitous images of real-life distress is often captivating in its technical sophistication, but the work's greater purpose is to reveal often unintentionally ironic shifts in perspective and purpose, in this case among medical staff, patients, and videographers.
The subject matter couldn't be more dramatic or, oddly enough, banal. Life and death moments alternate with the snide, self-protective sang-froid of nurses in cutesy scrubs and the often callous utilitarianism of a TV crew performing a surgery of its own to get the footage needed for a program.
The iris of the piece keeps opening wider, however, with increasing and disturbing poignancy as it reveals more of the backstory of some patients, particularly one Lisa Campbell, played with devastating bovine candor by Meese. Hospitalized after a car accident that might be concealing another, more sinister trauma, Lisa is drunk and belligerent when first admitted, howling in pain, then coy and self-congratulating days later as she prepares to be released back to the stresses of single motherhood and intones, at a cameraman's suggestion, "I will never drink alcohol again." Such complicated albeit incomplete stories rely on the viewer to connect the dots and make interpretations and elevates Can I Help You? from an obsessively detailed theatrical experiment into a moving short story in which the audience is seduced into the role and responsibility of narrator.
Can I Help You?, Flavorpill, July 20, 2008, by John Peacock
In Can I Help You?, theatre group Exploding Moment has created a fascinating new dramatic structure, and the results are completely chilling. Two actors sit at the back of the stage, narrating and editing video footage of a new reality-TV show set in an emergency room; elsewhere, three other actors act out the footage, complete with pauses and rewinds. The nightmarish show integrates actual video as well, creating a living web of instantaneous media and analysis. Rarely does the incorporation of technology feel this seamless; it's well worth the L train trip to farthest Bushwick
What I Like About Breasts, The Village Voice, by Alexis Soloski, Dec. 18-24, 2002 Vol XLVII No. 51
What I Like About Breasts: Neither an addendum to Gloria Steinem’s famous essay nor a dramatization of the latest issue of Maxim, this pomo production takes French surrealist Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresius as its model. (Don’t remember breasts on the Tiresius of Oedipus or Antigone? It seems that when the seer interrupted two snakes copulating, they turned him into a woman for awhile. Hate it when that happens.)
What I Like About Breasts, The New York Observer, by Alexandra Jacobs, Dec. 18, 2002
Before The Vagina Monologues, there were those naughty Surrealists…Tonight, trustafarian Williamsburg sits for What I Like About Breasts, a performance project based on a Guillame Apollinaire drama, The Breasts of Tiresius. “It’s sort of his paean to the people of France to make love and not war,” says director Catharine Dill, 39, who has styled props for Oprah magazine. “I saw the production elements as a great challenge: A woman gets rid of her breasts onstage and becomes a man; the man has 50,000 children.” Nothing Oprah couldn’t handle…