Deciding to go to Field of Flesh is already bending the conventions of theatre: they don’t tell you where the show is exactly: that will come shortly before your scheduled performance. By the end of the night you will have thrown out a lot more "conventions" of attending a show......
Read that Know Before You Go carefully, and remember to pee beforehand since they have to hold the house if you need to use the single bathroom before and not after the show. You will wait on the street before a nondescript building until performance time and be ushered into a small lobby area and given an orientation. You will be handed a prop. And then you will enter a surreal family dinner party where you will play a character based on your prop. There will be toasts, and you may be seated in front of a slab of raw ribs, ceremoniously displayed in a Lucite box. The fruit and veggie bowls have cicadas in them. In fact Gillian Butcher’s set looks like something Joseph Cornell assembled with Dali’s assistance. I was served wine and had it taken away because my character is under aged. And you know that black sheep of your family you have to navigate around every holiday dinner? Well every single member of this family is one of those. There is the anorexic, perfectly groomed anxious aunt played by Mackenzie Jones, and the provocateur daughter played by Carmia Imani who will perform poetry for the family, and Junior, played by Elijah Valter, who hovers in a conservative nightmare land speaking manifestos who likes to crawl under the table. Pop Pop (played by Brian Shaw) lies on a cot just off the dining room and various family members visit him. Does he have dementia? Is he dying? Book a ticket and be one of the 12 lucky folks who find out each”dinner party”. You can choose not to be touched: request a sticker if you are not totally ok with full body immersion into this unconventional and non linear evening. The only spoiler: you will never get dinner so don’t come hungry.
Creator/Director Derek Spencer and his cast of deviser/performers have created purposeful sensory overload and a reflection that is a full person immersion into the most ancient of human rituals: eating a meal (or in this case waiting to eat a meal.) It’s waiting for Godot, and you are in it, when Godot is the dinner and there are way too many of you at the table. It’s theatre but it's also something else: like exposure therapy for the way people who are related to each other don’t fit together. You can return and play a new character and experience a whole new sensation because the side conversations and over talking mean that if you are at one end of the table you are missing everything at the other end. And of course the new “audience” will respond to all they encounter in entirely new ways. The ensemble never knows what we, the audience/new cast will do and there is a fraught energy of questioning what is required of us who came to “see” this art work: the show is a vast experiment and you won’t be a passive spectator here. A shout out to this ensemble who make the immersion all too real.
Field of Flesh is playing some Thursdays, some Fridays and Saturday and Sundays through September 28th somewhere in Humboldt Park. For tickets and information go to
Photo by Eugene I-Peng Tang
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