Virus as Metaphor in the Age of Catastrophe

it’s alive, IT’S ALIVE!, a theatrical cabaret written and performed by John Fleck, directed by David Schweizer, Odyssey Theatre, Los Angeles, CA, February 19-March 20, 2022.I am writing this on March 8, 2022, in the midst of a war and a planet is in crisis. You will probably read this months from now in a very different reality. I haven’t written a performance review since the very beginning of 2020. During the Covid years, going to live performance was out of the question. Watching the earnest attempts of dancers and theatre performers in the flat, limited, and distanced space of the computer screen became increasingly frustrating to the point of boredom and despair. So I stopped watching. And with my own sense of deprivation came the realization that live performance matters more than ever.This became the core theme of John Fleck’s latest work it’s alive, IT’S ALIVE!, directed by longtime collaborator David Schweizer, in which Fleck constructs a dialectic between the live virus that has taken over our lives and his own performance before a live (but well-masked) audience. It is an act of defiance, but also one of salvation that reiterates why art and theatre matter. Fleck is a master at shifting between personae, and he seamlessly slips in and out of three main characters: the Covid virus and its various mutant offspring, often speaking in a high-pitched falsetto; the uninformed, science-rejecting, angry model of toxic masculinity; and himself, the artist/performer speaking directly to his audience about life, death, art, and the absurdities of our condition. Through these different voices, he expresses our collective fears, assumptions, and prejudices, while questioning our roles and responsibilities as humans living on this planet at this precarious moment. The various anecdotal narratives, rants, raves, and personal revelations were intercut with Broadway musical numbers (with a twist), and a smattering of the latest media headlines mixed with media misinformation, accompanied by two singer/dancers, Kyle G. Fuller and Tomoko Karina, and two musicians, John Snow and Scott Roberts, on bass and keyboards, respectively. Fleck combined campy humor with darker satirical observations, ending with a somber but ironically hopeful conclusion.Fleck enters hobbling on one crutch, singing, “when Johnny comes marching home again … hurrah, hurrah.” The crutch functions as a metaphor: it later turns into a rifle when he wears a fur headdress with horns wielding his weapon at the “enemy.” The phrase that popped into my mind was that we are a wounded species, both hunted and hunter. As Covid, the alien invader, Fleck dons a clear globe-shaped space helmet adorned with spiky red viruses and explains that he is just a “living organism looking for a place to call home” and that he considers Earth to be “that junkyard in the sky.” Or perhaps, I think, we are the virus, both predator and parasite, destroying our home planet.While his backup singers act as janitors sanitizing the stage, Fleck addresses the audience with his characteristic banter, often mirroring our own discomforts and social uncertainties when he comments on how creepy it is to look out at a masked audience and not know if they are smiling or scowling. Such is our condition of isolation and subsequent alienation when we can no longer read each other’s faces, be they masked or watching themselves “perform” on the screen. Fleck leads us into doubt and uncertainty when he poses a series of “what if” questions, each one more absurd: What if the 2020 election was rigged?What if Donald Trump is Jesus?What if the Chinese virus put memory chips on your organs?He sings, “life could be a dream, if I could blow you to smithereens,” and insinuates that “we are embedded inside of you.” The Covid helmet repeatedly goes on and comes off as he sings “Amazing Grace,” mocks religion, rejects a mask, supports the truckers in Canada declaring the “government’s not gonna take away our rights,” and quotes Tucker Carlson in saying that the “pandemic is a homo agenda.”But then there is another point of view, that of the virus as a sentient being that perceives us as pitiful creatures in a troubled dark world. “Why would we want to kill you,” it asks, “when you are our host and our home … We are sensitive sentient beings that mutate and evolve, softer than the dominant variant.” Then, in an ironic aside, Fleck adds, “I feel like Liz Cheney, I don’t recognize my party.” In between are nostalgic cabaret song and dance numbers to make us laugh and cheer us up, and maybe to recall another time.Fleck sums it all up as “himself,” as someone lately preoccupied with death. He has just turned seventy. He has been doing this—live theatre—for four decades, breaking precedents, deconstructing media, connecting with his audiences on a visceral level, reminding us over and over how profound that collective connection can be. He is feeling the full weight of the uncertainty of our times. The Arctic is melting, the midterm elections are near, and democracy hangs on a thread. Life goes away too soon. But through all the madness and challenges of the past two years, Fleck believes in art and the power of theatre not simply as entertainment or distraction, but as a transformative act. And so we go on hoping to make a difference.

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