So, just some musings on a spectacular show in town and what it made me think about.
Last night I attended a performance of Samantha Johns and George McConnell’s Britney Spears’s Crossroads at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis. If you could imagine, if you please: a row of men and women wearing blonde wigs and dressed in button down shirts (most of the shirts a light blue, but there was a red one in there somewhere) and short, black biker shorts, stiffly marching from out of the proscenium with overly fake and giant smiles down towards stage right and off out of view from the audience, every four beats stopping in their steps, jerking their heads from facing forwards to their right, back forwards, back to right, and then continuing on, a procession of self-aware ridiculousness.
This is a show to see, mark my words.
Before I continue on too much more, I only just learned about five minutes ago when I googled a bit using keywords like “britney” and “spears” and “crossroads” that there apparently was a film (well, movie) starring Britney Spears called Crossroads. Obviously, I’ve never seen it as I’ve only just discovered that someone bothered to create such an ill concept, and I shudder to think what the movie is actually about and what horrors must exist within such a malformed idea of project. I have a feeling, though, that I need look no farther than Britney Spears’s Crossroads to get an idea of someone’s idea of what those horrors might be.
Britney Spears recently came up in conversation last week when I was in Interlochen having breakfast with percussion ensemble Clocks in Motion. There were some young children at the table. (10, 8, and 6 years old? Not sure. I’m terribly good at incorrectly guessing ages.) I honestly cannot for the life of me remember why Britney Spears came up in conversation. Nonetheless, she did, but to my sheer joy and amazement, the younglings had no idea who Britney Spears was, to which I remarked, “I’m rather overjoyed to hear that the younger generation has some sense of good taste, enough so so that Britney Spears is fading from memory.” (Or something like that. I paraphrase.)
Since I know so little about Britney Spears as it is (I can’t at the moment think of a single song she performed) I viewed and enjoyed this play from a slightly more objective perspective than most others might, unless you, too, are fortunate enough to have selective memory when it comes to certain proceedings such as this. I easily gathered, however, that this was a play about Britney Spears’s obsession with herself. I can only guess that the movie, Crossroads, was a terrible mess of scenes of Britney Spears apparently acting in ways that represents a kind of unconscious parody of herself. This play feels like it could be a parody of that parody, poking fun in an obvious way that she’s presumably a terrible actor who likes the sound of her voice but isn’t intelligent enough to realize that she’s a terrible actor who likes the sound of her voice and so therefore unconsciously and inadvertently creates a parody of herself.
This play is wonderfully rough around the edges, unafraid to revel in its frayed seams, yet it is also careful and detailed and clearly thought out. It uses repetition in a way that makes things become nonsensical after repeated repetitions, like when you repeat a word like repetition over and over and over again until repetition itself loses meaning after repeated repetitions of repetitive recursion. Imagine, if you please: a toaster on a stool, one of the Britneys taking and inserting a piece of bread to make toast, the toaster toasts, ejects the toast, and the Britney who’s toasting says nothing except call for help. Two other Britneys get into an argument over why the one isn’t helping, until a fourth grabs the toast, and a fifth just says, “Hey, it’s just toast.” Then, repeat the whole scene, each successive repetition becoming slightly more hilarious because of just how ridiculous the scene is.
It’s difficult to pull off ridiculous scene after ridiculous scene, but this play pulls it off simply because it always returns to what this play is about: Britney Spears’s self-obsession with herself and her inability to realize her inner turmoil, a mass of Britneys in her head, all interacting with herself in a kind of psychosis of multiple personalities. I enjoy this play not only because seeing a stage full of men and women dressed up as Britney Spears is just so utterly hilarious, but also because it’s so clearly a window into the sad and damaged mind of someone who we are fast forgetting, presented in a way that is at once manic yet controlled, carefully flitting between loud and quiet, fast and slow, ridiculous and serious, all in a row of repetition that illuminates something new on a second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh parody of itself.