Garcia Strikes Back in "Versus"

A combative provocateur, director Rodrigo Garcia is ready for a fight in his latest show, “Versus”, a battle the cast and audience live in real time over two brutal hours. At last Saturday’s production at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, the actresses, who endure simulations of torture (suffocation and drowning) and beatings, were covered with very real and visible bruises, and the public nearly came to blows, some shouting out their disgust and fairly stampeding for the exits, while others laughed at their bourgeois sensibilities and jeered them on their way. There’s nothing like the theater for inciting impassioned reactions, and if this was in any way Garcia’s intention, he was entirely successful.

Invited by the Festival d’Automne, which first brought his Carnicería Teatro to Paris in 2002, the 45-year old Asturias-based Argentine is not growing old quietly, but rather turning up the volume on his anti-capitalist, anti-consumer message, one that takes no prisoners and soothes no egos. “Versus” is a violent punch back at those who (to paraphrase a monologue repeated twice in the show) would shower us with myriad blows to our individuality and integrity, in the form of invasive publicity, corporate messages and marketing strategies, all of which regard human life as consumer behavior to be manipulated and people as objects to be bought, used and sold.

The show uses several of Garcia’s symbols to underscore the point: food and its mindless consumption in the over-fed societies of the industrialized world; and rabbits, which seem to happily endure traps of all sorts (in this case, a microwave’s timed reheat program). The polar opposite to this gluttonous sado-masochism is represented by books, hundreds of which lie on the stage, and their metaphorical signifier: learning. Both are trampled, torn and urinated upon, while an epithet-spewing monkey very deliberately carries around Proust and Rousseau as a reminder how far this life-style has alienated us from the arts of the mind. Driving the message home are a live, hard-rock beat and the true story of abuse and addiction told by a fairly desperate looking man from Buenos Aires, who is dressed for his funeral in the final scene. Seen through the dozen or so, mostly shocking episodes which comprise the show, consumer society appears as an unstoppable, one-way ticket to man’s demise. In “Versus”, Garcia’s theater is no more digestible than the tons of spaghetti, pizza and steak tartare consumed on stage, although it can be searingly funny. It does seem however, that if the logos and tag-lines and promotions that fill daily existence in the 21st century are any indicator, and if the market indeed holds human self-actualization in a stranglehold, that the premise is vital and the means to communicating it justified, and even salutary.

Photo Credit: Christian Berthelot