Blessed with Switch (with an introduction by Martin Harries)

INTRODUCTION

Yet somehow they felt—how could one put it—a little not quite here or there. As if the play had jerked the ball out of the cup; as if what I call myself was still floating unattached, and didn’t settle. Not quite themselves, they felt.

—Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts

Anti-theatrical polemics always have it right when they claim that the role-playing central to the practices they abhor threatens fragile but desperately protected beliefs about the self and its solidity. To take a role, even for an hour, even for a moment, raises questions about who the performer becomes when they perform and what, in the aftermath of performance, is left of what they were before. Anti-theatrical voices are not as loud or as strident or as influential as they have been in some eras—or are they? Someone listening in on recent discussions of the self may be struck by the reoccurrence of similar claims: the self is a construct; the self is unstable; there is no singular self. We must, to borrow Fred Moten’s subtitle, “consent not to be a single being.” If there is, at least in certain left-bank quarters, general agreement about these claims, why the insistent repetition? Why do we need to be told, again and again, that the self is ephemeral, something made up, unstable, liable to break? 

The answer may be, as with so many things, because we don’t believe what we say we know. Or we believe it, but we don’t know it in our bones; our experience fails to catch up with what we know. The playwright and theorist Julia Jarcho speaks to just this problem: “Sure, I keep pretending not to believe in my own integrity, sovereignty, etc., I’m a good posthumanist, but in fact—in practice—everything that isn’t my ego seems completely foreign to me . . .” Jarcho’s confession gets at the recalcitrance of the conviction that we possess singular selves. One must, to use Moten’s phrase again, consent not to be a single being, because the rewards of assuming the comforts and the privileges of that singular self are, well, everywhere: the dividends that follow from our habitual agreement to be, and to remain, a single being keep adding up. Jarcho goes on to say that “theater can do something theory can’t: it can make me experience the inner division.” Jarcho’s plays exemplify the embodied insistence on psychic division. The practice of consent not to be a single being also captures the exhilaratingly disorienting practice of the Los Angeles–based playwright and director Asher Hartman. 

Hartman is explicit about his productions as a place to stage such forms of internal division. In an interview that forms part of a collection of his work, Mad Clot on a Holy Bone: Memories of a Psychic Theater, published in 2020, Hartman avers: “I can’t write specific characters who exhibit a singular sense of self, because in every person there are many people. We are supposed to imagine ourselves as consistent, singular, whole, but we are often unaware of the many shifting parts that constitute that whole. I feel that our bodies are temporary hosts for many energies that pass through us.” It’s important to follow through on the logic of Hartman’s claim: he can’t write such characters with a singular sense of self, because such characters would falsify the reality of a fragmented, shifting provisional self. This is also implicitly to say that theater as an apparatus has often been a powerful institution for the reproduction of such singular and apparently complete selves. What is the mainstream theater’s ideal of the “well-rounded” character but an ideal based in a belief in the self’s psychic completeness, a completeness that comes with those sharp and reassuring edges that wall off one character, or one self, from another? This is also to say, to articulate the insights of Jarcho and Hartman, that a different theater might be a place to make spectators “experience the inner division,” become aware of “the many shifting parts that constitute that whole.” A motive for making alternative theater is that outside the theater there are so many good reasons to hold on to the satisfying illusion that we are comfortably whole, so many everyday rewards for exiling the “many people” who occupy us. 

Hartman’s work acutely registers the political costs and the violence that attend all the tawdry and grandiloquent rituals with which we strive to maintain the singular self. Even as the riven souls who populate his pieces cannot but display the selves and disparate discourses passing through them, they break out into protectionist rages during which, the audience senses, they wish they could, like those blessed others they imagine, live happily within stable, singular identities. One of Hartman’s central concerns, indeed, is the violence that attends the adamant refusal to “consent not to be a single being.” Such consent takes work, and it’s so easy to put it off. 

I first encountered Blessed with Switch, the text published in this issue, when, in collaboration with Hartman, Jasmine Orpilla performed it at the University of California, Irvine, in June 2024 as part of a double bill with a piece collaboratively produced by undergraduates and their professor, the artist Simon Leung. Orpilla is one of the small band of astonishing performers who work together with Hartman in the Gawdafful National Theater. In the words of the company’s website, the company is “a loose cabal of highly trained, strongly gifted actor-artists-insects committed to making complex, poetic, crass, and finely crafted theater.” On that June evening, the black box theater on the arts campus of that public university was set up for a play: maybe fifteen rows of raked seats were set up, ready for the audience to sit more or less comfortably, and at a more or less comfortable distance from the stage, to take in a show. Standard black box stuff; standard black box protocols. The artist was present: Hartman, with long curly hair and a scraggly beard, elfin, and exuberantly hospitable, was having none of this: he wanted the audience to sit on the floor, to be as close as possible to the simple lone black institutional office chair that would prove to be the extent of the production’s set. A few spectators exercised their right to sit in seats, and some stragglers arrived late and also sat on those raked seats. Most of us made a crescent of seated bodies, ready to watch, on the black floor of the black box. 

I now have, and you have published in this issue, the text Orpilla delivered. I am grateful to have the text, and I will say some things about it below. But for now I want to convey what I can of the startling power of that initial performance, which was accompanied by a foreboding and layered soundscape composed by Orpilla. Watching someone fully consenting not to be a single being may be frightening. Like few other performers (I think also of her colleagues in the Gawdafful National Theater), Orpilla displays the passage of conflicting languages through her body; she displays this as conflict, as a set of intensities. That formulation is too abstract: it doesn’t capture the uncanny vividness with which she conveyed the experience of one body as the vessel for languages that do not belong to her. And her agile performance of the passage of languages through her body had its correlative in a physical performance of equal intensity. The point of the proximity that Hartman had urged upon the audience was viscerally clear, especially as the chair in which Orpilla had been sitting itself became a kind of collaborator. Orpilla’s increasingly entangled pas-de-deux with the simple chair at once gave uncanny life to the chair—what was it doing to her? what was she doing to it?—and made one wonder what this extraordinary actor-artist-insect wanted from the chair. Her eroticized struggle with that inanimate object felt like an encounter with an everyday thing at once alien and yet familiar, a piece of furniture which had become something else, something which was increasingly taking on a desiring, maybe hostile life of its own. And the chair served to remind us of the chairs in which we were not sitting and in which, even if we had been sitting, we would not have felt at all comfortable. (I imagine that those who were sitting in chairs on the raked risers also felt discomfited.) 

The text begins: 

She told me 

“God is the Midwife to the Devil’s Oceanic Womb”

I want to pass over the theological complexities of this enigmatic statement and concentrate on the punctuation. Those quotation marks suggest, simply, that these words belong to someone else—to her, to the one who spoke. The quotation marks acknowledge a debt or a theft or, at the very least, a repetition: “She told me . . .” What follows are her words. But do we know that “she” is not speaking? Maybe she is she? Maybe this body onstage is speaking of herself in the third person? Who else has said these words? (Have you heard them before?) 

The quotation itself resonates with the artists’ statement from the Irvine performance, which describes Blessed with Switch as “a dark, unnerving hacking and synching of external languages that poison and orchestrate the oceanic tides of unconscious matter within to unleash a glorious new Leviathan.” They bring “together their intuitive performance processes,” the statement continues, “to delve into the somatic repercussions of the destruction of the geo-psychical feminine.” As a spectator I was more alert to the dark and unnerving struggle with external languages than with the unleashing of this glorious Leviathan. Nevertheless, the aspiration seems crucial: the attempt to reverse-engineer discourses which destroy the “geo-psychical feminine” aligns their aspirations with a long tradition of radical and feminist thought, activism, and art-making that seeks to redress the paired logics of environmental destruction and misogyny. In performance, it can seem that those “external languages” have hacked Orpilla: the spectacle of their rearranging her sensorium in turn rearranges ours: 

The performance reminds us that hacking can be a matter of coding and decoding; hacking can also involve an ax. The piece speaks Hartman’s idiomatic “American English,” to use another phrase from the artists’ statement: the fragments of habitual, clichéd, everyday exchanges are paired but do not merge with the violence of the hacking. Which is the poisonous external language? What might be the counter-language that hacks the violent hack? 

“We’re . . . not having this conversation.” These words are, of course, a familiar ruse to end talk, to assert that the conversation we are actually having will not continue to happen. Why stop, why interrupt? And this interruption is itself interrupted by the sound of the misogynist’s “whore” inside a repetition of “horror” straight out of Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now. On the one hand, Blessed with Switch has a therapeutic aim, and works toward a method of screening out or switching off poisonous languages. On the other, to identify those languages assumes a willingness to confront them first, and such a confrontation, as Orpilla’s performance suggests, is a full body experience. The form of repression that denies how those languages pass through us and transform us—make us—assures that those unacknowledged languages continue to fester, leaving us, to use a phrase from Hartman’s Purple Electric Play (PEP!), “populated by slosh and revenge.” 

Blessed with Switch: to “switch” may now most often mean (in the words of the American Heritage Dictionary) “to shift, transfer, change or divert,” but I wonder if that dictionary’s first meaning is also in the mix here: “A slender flexible rod, stick, twig, or the like; especially, such a rod used for whipping.” Spare the switch, spoil the child? Once again, with “switch” as with “hack,” contradictory suggestions criss-cross this piece: 

Whose voice wants that sting instead of that slap? The title might suggest that punishment is blessing. But the blessing of the switch is also to get off that track, to listen to another transmission, as the end of the piece, switching off, may imply: 

I am not certain what transmission gets switched off here. In another world, my own text would be an introduction to a thousand-city tour, and you could see what you hear when Blessed with Switch plays in a black box near you. I don’t expect any impresario will make that tour happen, but the voices are audible here, in this text. 

Martin Harries 

Blessed with Switch

With excerpts from Asmodeus by Alain René LeSage (first published in French as Le Diable boiteux, in 1707), selected and edited by Jasmine Orpilla. Performed by Jasmine Orpilla.

Il faut donc . . . que vous soyez Léviatan, Belfegor ou Astaroth.—Oh! pour ces trois-là, ce sont des diables du premier ordre. Ce sont des esprits de cour. Ils entrent dans les conseils des princes, animent les ministres, forment des ligues, excitent les soulèvements dans les états, et allument les flambeaux de la guerre. 

. . . Regardez du côté de l’orient; la voilà qui s’offre à vos yeux: une troupe nombreuse d’oiseaux de mauvais augure vole devant elle avec la Terreur, et annonce son passage par des cris funèbres. Son infatigable main est armée de la faulx terrible sous laquelle tombent successivement toutes les générations.