Your Brother. Remember?

Zachary Oberzan is finding fame with some of the most weirdly adventurous performances in miniature one might ever see. He was the star of Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s “Rambo Solo”, a retelling of the novel First Blood and its film remake, "Rambo", performed on film by Oberzan in his studio apartment and simultaneously live. The experience led to a full-length feature film redux, “Flooding with Love for the Kid”, where he plays all 26 roles, again in his 225 sq. ft flat. In addition to being an accomplished musical autodidact and sought-out actor, performing last year with New York experimental theater the Wooster Group, Oberzan is also, to judge from his latest piece, an action movie addict since his earliest years. In fact, “Your Brother. Remember?” answers the questions audiences to his previous projects might have pondered while watching him crash painfully around his apartment, such as: “Why does he do this??” If the story of “Brother” is any indication, it's because, as the child of a broken marriage in Maine in the ‘70s, he and his brother Gator bonded by watching Jean Claude Van Damme in “Kickboxer” (1989) as well as other inanities only teenage boys could get into.

The show finds Oberzan once again reproducing, gesture for gesture, video sequences that play behind him, trading John Rambo for Kurt Sloan, Van Damme’s character sporting a full-body pancake-makeup tan throughout. In these, clips of favorite scenes from the movie are interspersed with home video of the brothers precisely enacting the same segments, first as teenagers twenty years ago in their living room, and as adults today: more accomplished in Zachary’s case but rather worse for wear in his brother’s. Whatever artistic or conceptual motives may underlie Oberzan’s intersecting interests in video and performance (American society’s penchant for home video “bloopers” and Candid Camera gags, to hypothesize a couple), “Brother” doesn’t rise much above a homage to lost boyhood and above all Gator, now 100 lbs heavier and a methadone addict with a prison record. Extended footage of him and sister Jenny talking about the fun they had filming the project or retelling scatological prison tales may be meant to evoke those "Making Of" extras now common on movie DVDs , but a sudden glimpse of Gator coming down from meth makes for a suddenly startling reality show.

Oberzan’s considerable talents may owe much to those early film-making experiences, and he proves here again to be the highly versatile actor of his preceding projects. His fascination with acting is ultimately what lends needed weight to the show’s stunts. A scene where Oberzan meticulously acts out Van Damme monologuing about his start and struggles in the profession is the most interesting moment of the piece, engaging, in the pop culture terms of Oberzan’s language, with theories of acting, from what Diderot had to say about the “paradox of the actor”, who must only appear to feel the emotions he portrays, to Lee Stasberg's Method Acting.

Oberzan’s DIY approach to film and limitless physical exploits and costume gags have opened doors across the Continent. Next stops: Sweden, Norway, Italy, Austria, Germany, Portugal, and Belgium. What foreign audiences will make of this thoroughly made-in-America project is anyone's guess.

Seen at MC93 Créteil, Jan. 25, 2011