The 'Physical Torture' of an Art Piece

By DOUGLAS SADOWNICK

July 31, 1988 12 AM PT

During a recent New York performance of “Soldier, Child, Tortured Man,” director Lin Hixson sat in the audience, worrying that her three cast members might not make it through the last physically wracking minutes of the hour-long piece.

The three men were sweating bullets, having spent the last five minutes running furiously in wide circles, occasionally slamming into each other’s hard bodies as if they were malicious football tacklers.

Suddenly, the two largest men (Timothy McCain and Greg McCain) grabbed Matthew Goulish (half their size) and hurled him high up into the air. He responded by snapping his body into a last-minute back flip and landing on his feet. Barely.

Everyone looked a little shaken, --especially Hixson. When the performance finally ended, she dashed backstage to make sure that her performers were not injured or overly disoriented.

She had good reason to be concerned. The previous week Timothy McCain had hyperventilated; Greg McCain had recently thrown up during a particularly intense performance; Goulish had just recuperated from two cancer operations and a month of debilitating chemotherapy.

Hixson is now in L.A. preparing for performances of “Soldier, Child, Tortured Man,” which the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival and the Cactus Foundation will present at the First Methodist Church in Hollywood starting Friday. The work will run for two weekends.

She seems no less apprehensive now about what she sees as the “risk and danger that goes into performing this piece.” Why, then, does she build what she calls “physical torture” in her work?

“It was one hell of a way of bringing certain political realities home to complacent Americans,” she answers with a smile.

A year ago, she and her three collaborators (who form the Chicago-based performance troupe, Goat Island) decided that they wanted to examine in performance-art terms America’s involvement in Third World countries.

“The guys felt so strongly about their political views--that our country is oppressing Third World nations due to our economic interests--that they wanted to go through something real, a kind of psychological and physical torture,” she explains.

The group hoped that the audience would think about “the politics of daily life” in a new way by witnessing the performers’ deeply felt commitment to their political material.

“The piece is not just a outcry about our leaders,” Hixson says. “We are also concerned with how we, as Americans, are taught to be oppressors in every facet of life whether it’s sports or politics or social life.”

In shaping the piece, Hixson built the theme of competitive training by dressing the performers in football jerseys and presenting the work primarily in basketball courts, hoping that the site-specificity could help add “humor, irony and universality” to the work.

“It’s all supposed to be symbolically political,” Hixson says, still amazed at how audiences are “moved by the physical journey the performers go through.” She hopes viewers become “so transfixed by the dynamic where men are acting like self-made monsters” that they are moved to ask what Hixson considers to be the central question of an era characterized by Iran-Gate:

“What allows us as Americans to stand by passively as our government participates in unyielding and monstrous oppression of the Third World and at home?”

Hixson has no immediate answer, but admits that her pressing need to ask this question comes from the group’s involvement in CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador), an organization that attempts to educate Americans about the nature of this country’s involvement in that war-torn country.

“We wanted to make the connection that the way Americans are trained and disciplined to compete in athletics and career competition leads us to accept blindly the regimentation we impose on less privileged people,” she explains.

She sees the audience as witness to both the performance and its own reactions; the viewers sit in the round, facing each other as the performance takes place in the middle.

“At the end of the performance, Greg McCain breathes heavily, traumatically, for a very long time. To me, this is a crucial turning point in the piece. He is the witness and he is moved, distraught, and disgusted by what he sees. He represents the hope that witnessing or education, if you will, can lead to positive action.”

According to Hixson, action doesn’t mean that individuals have to become directly involved with events. “All it requires that you think these issues through as responsible citizens. If you can see yourself as one of the three participants in oppression, that alone is terribly profound.

“Why? It seems that even our own leadership is unable to think through its Third World involvement with that kind of self-awareness.”