`Interrogating The Nude' Pays Homage To Bad Boys
"Interrogating the Nude," by Doug Wright, directed by Dan Fields. Annex Theatre, 1916 Fourth Ave., Thursdays-Saturdays, through Feb. 1.
Long before there was performance art there was Dada, a subversive cultural expression designed to provoke and outrage audiences.
And long before there were performance artists, Dadists like the French painter Marcel Duchamp and photographer Man Ray were scandalizing the world with their irreverent "anti-Art Art" - including Duchamp's famous abstract, "Nude Descending a Staircase," which reminded one critic of an explosion in a glue factory.
That was some 70 years ago. But the iconoclastic spirits of Duchamp and Ray are up to their old tricks again in Doug Wright's nifty trick of a play, "Interrogating the Nude." Currently on at the Annex Theater, the piece pays witty homage to two notorious bad boys of modern art, while also tweaking their pretentions a bit.
The play opens in 1913 or so, at a New York police station. The enigmatic Duchamp (played by Doug Swenson) comes in to report the murder of his alluring twin sister, Rose Selavy (Patrick Lacey), to a pair of no-nonsense detectives (Randy Dixon and Evan Turner).
The murder weapons, he insists were two paintbrushes and a palette knife. And the main pieces of evidence are a canvas ("Nude Descending a Staircase," bien sur), a woman's veiled hat, and a slinky pair of long black gloves. The primary suspects? Duchamp himself and his womanizing pal, Man Ray (David Natale).
The audience solves the alleged crime long before the bumbling police do (especially those who majored in art) but that's no cheat. "Interrogating the Nude" isn't so much a whodunit anyway, but a whimsical collage of reflections on sexual androgyny, the nature and value of art, and the cultural gap between free-wheeling Bohemians and the forces of convention (i.e., streetwise cops).
The actors dispatch their roles with panache and plausible accents. And, as the effete Duchamp, Swenson comes close to Breton's description of the painter as "elegance at its most fatal." Dan Fields directs fluently, and Joel Shepard's set handily evokes an interrogation room, a photo studio and an artist's garrett.
Is this play based on an actual incident? Duchamp and Ray were indeed close friends. And Ray's photo portrait of the "real" Rose Selavy is reproduced on the show's program cover.
But Duchamp didn't live in New York until 1915, and his muse Rose wasn't "born" until 1920. Maybe Wright has just pulled his own elaborate art prank on us by writing this play - an impulse that a diehard Dadaist like Duchamp would probably appreciate.