Eric Bogosian

A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of seeing Eric Bogosian perform at the Helmut Stern auditorium in the UMMA. I must have been one of five or ten undergraduates in the whole audience, an unsurprising fact given that Bogosian’s period of relative fame peaked a decade or two ago. Still, I recognized his face on some posters and figured it might be worth a watch. How unsuspecting and unready I was.

Bogosian performed a series of monologues from his many years of writing and acting in a one-person Off-Broadway production. Over the past few years, he has enlisted his actor and actress friends to perform these monologues as well; each week they release a new video to the project’s website, and will continue until they hit one-hundred videos. The project, aptly titled, “100 Monologues” provides a vast array of characters, problems, situations and contexts with which the audience can grapple and seek to understand. Some of them are familiar (a frustratingly pleasant but unhelpful flight attendant at an airport, a detached and existential teen hitchhiking across the country) and some are not.

During the performance, Bogosian moved from character to character and scene to scene with unforgiving swiftness and elasticity. Although he sometimes offered his own commentary between sketches, I found it impossible to know if the thoughts were coming from Bogosian himself or yet another character. He proved his commitment to staying in character within the first three minutes of his performance; while taking us through the distorted and rancorous and extremely boisterous thoughts of a drunk man on the subway, he suddenly started yelling at an invisible woman taking photographs. For a moment I thought this must be part of the skit, until he began pointing and clearly moving off script. The photographer was in fact not invisible; she was real and standing just in front of the stage. While maintaining his voice and character, Bogosian (in no pleasant terms) instructed her to leave the auditorium. No questions, no hesitation, no return to the actor. Later on in the performance he made a few comments about the occurrence, apologizing slightly in an agitated tone, defending his right to perform without distraction.

This seemed to symbolize Bogosian’s stance on his show. No mercy. He did not try to spare us from the socially ugly characters he decided to bring into the room. He demonstrated a keen tendency to suspend all formality and to discuss any idea or scene, regardless of how crude or crass it may be. Indeed, one of his characters talked of nothing but the enormous size of his penis, and the ensuing sexual escapades he had experienced because of it. This is Bogosian’s wheelhouse; he moved from a coked-out drug dealer to a recovering male sex addict to an overworked law enforcer. They are not overtly attractive characters, far from it, and their harsh language and abrasive tones make for an uncomfortable viewing experience.

But perhaps this is where Bogosian’s brilliance lies. In each of these characters– people we would have no trouble writing off as deranged or ignorant or unsuccessful– is a degree of truth, a moment of wisdom. The hopelessly lost boy wandering in the woods pondering his karmic movement from human to acorn to lion sperm is not a reliable character, and yet the end of his speech sparks a profound thought. He attests, “It won’t matter that nobody will know where I am, because I’ll know, and that’s the most important thing.” If nothing else, Bogosian’s performance teaches us all to be a little more tolerant to the voices we’re accustomed to writing off as lunacy, and that in exploring the lives of people pushed out from conventional society, we can find brilliance in places we never thought possible.

http://100monologues.com/