published May/June 1999 in Edge/NY

ASPHYXIA and Other Promises
Presented by North American Cultural Laboratory (NACL)

Text by Henry Israeli
Directed by Brad Krumholz
At La MaMa, E.T.C.
April 15-May 2, 1999
Reviewed by Randall Cohn

The landscape is bleak. There is a war. A woman is foraging for food in the garden of a convent outside of a decimated town. She is dressed in a longish, non-culturally specific peasant dress, and she wears a scarf over her head-- a classic fairy tale heroine for a classic fairy tale setup. I tell myself this, but cannot help but read her as a composite of the many similarly dressed women I've recently seen weeping on the front page of The New York Times.

North American Cultural Laboratory (NACL), a company that prides itself on the depth and length of its "process," could not have predicted how hauntingly topical the image would read when they began creating Asphyxia and Other Promises in January. This is clearly not political theater, its style is too apparent-- in the rich mix of synthesized, non-melodic sounds and eerie vocal harmonies, in the hybrid Wolf (part Bunraku puppet, part grocery cart), in the stilt walking and in the teasing obscurity of the dialogue.

To be fair to th artists, I try to isolate the play from the context of world events. But as I watch the tale unwind, that initial association won't go away.

True to any fairy tale, the woman has promised her excruciatingly innocent daughter (also in peasant dress), to an evil order of nuns in exchange for food. With the aid of Asphyxia, a sadistic, winged creature from the "Fourth Kingdom of Broken Promises", who fills the fairy Godmother role, the daughter transforms herself from an ingenue whose purity makes her a delicacy for the nuns' stew, to a woman capable of hatred, violence, and even murder in the name of self-preservation.

This is political theatre I begin to realize. Not an indictment of recent events in Yugoslavia, but of the human tendency towards violence that lurks beneath it. And the play's protest is scathing, poetic and masterfully performed.

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