... suddenly though, the taut string concerto settles, and there are the two Toms facing off against one another. Scattered around each performer is a junk pile of milk crates, empty TV dinner packs, pornos, and a huge, black cardboard cut-out labrador named Mike Tyson. Tom #1, wearing specs that accentuate his trembling vulnerability, grapples with what appears to be a microphone stand. Tom #2, brooding, mesmeric, sits hunched up, stage left, all compressed male aggression preparing to spring forth from his hole and pummel the skull of his like-named nemesis. Somehow suggesting the furnishings of a myth, this setting as described could be any one of the following: the grim reality of lives lived in an inner suburban squat: a purgatorial waiting room, in which the two Toms hang trussed in the same suspended animation that characterises the manichean space between heaven and hell, or the interior landscape of a young man's mad mind, one haunted by jarring, disconnected words, letters and vowels expressed as stencilled graffiti stamped on the floor.
The following dialogue that occurs between the two Toms in no way contains dramatic devices, or any other contrivance. Sometimes, Tom #1 mumbles incoherently to himself in monosyllabic tones that in their repetition, threaten to induce an epileptic linguistics that will consume him. At other times, Tom #1 simply responds to Tom #2 by repeating the same words spoken over and over again. There is servility here, but like the same power dynamic that exists in all human relationships, control does not always reside with he who shouts the loudest. Chipping away at Tom #2's apparent dominance is a sly resistance that shields its face behind a veil of pragmatism. Tom #1 just wants to get on with life, whatever it is that this life maybe. He opens the door to a microwave oven, and shoves in and alongside one another two TV dinners. Sixty second button pushed and the two hot dinners removed, the basting really begins as each Tom takes his position at a table, a porno is inserted in the VCR, and the munching of steak, kidney and rice commingles with porn star/ starlet oohs and aahhs. The audience is invited to ponder this moment. In doing so, there begins to settle upon this performance a genuine sense of tragedy, if not hopelessness. One accentuated by the two Toms and the leering pleasure each derives from this sad mixture of sperm and love juice gobbled up alongside steak and kidney pie.
But amidst the chaos and confusion of lives that this performance apparently represents, there arises a pivotal moment between these two protagonists. Tom #2, all male macho-macho in a misenscene of masculinity, appropriately pulls on a blonde wig. As temptress, he fails to goad Tom #1 into allowing him to perform a blow job; even though #1 is desperate for sexual release. And here we have the tragic depiction of young men separated from their mothers, brim full of resentment and hate caused by feelings of abandonment, who in their own pathetic way attempt to recreate the presence of a mother lost, but only succeed in expressing their own contorted maternal instinct in the shape of mother as eternal whore. And yet, the improvised script is adamant that it will not make a big deal of this tragic sense of loss. The scene just IS, and nothing more. Cool, contained, and consequently, a moment of great tenderness, as the saying goes it's the quiet tragedies behind countless suburban doors that resonate loudest. And in the quiet tragedy that pervades this presentation of simple lives spiralling outward, Tom the Loneliest resonates louder that most.
Tom the Loneliest
Writer-Performers: Duncan Lake &
Julian Crotti
Writer-Director: Paulo Castro
Design: Bryan Tingey
Light: Kerry Ireland
Producer: Lenny Ceniuch
June 16 - 27, La Mama, Melb.
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