Pass the Blutwurs, Bitte at the Ellen Stewart Theatre at La Mama portrays the life of Egon Schiele, the Austrian expressionist artist. La Mama is the New York City experimental theater which has been doing avant garde performances for nearly fifty years without ever managing to become old garde. Egon Schiele was a painter who specialized in the erotic, was jailed for pornography and yet highly successful, married for advangage, and died at twenty-eight in the great Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. All of this is in the performance. John Kelly is a poly-artist who does a little of everything. In this performance he wrote, choreographed, directed, performed and is having a simultaneous art show a few blocks away.
The show is certainly interesting with sets so minimal as to be virtually non-existent, period costumes and period music. Think silent movie with all of the dialogue cards at the beginning of the movie--there is no English dialogue and no surtitles. We aren't supposed to understand any spoken words. At the opening two men come out carrying signs explaining the action of the six scenes--dramatic discovery is not a factor here. Everything else is pantomime. There is movmement, much of it dancelike, and a marvelous bit where Kelly/Schiele "paints" by washing whitewash off a painting and a lovely beer-drinking scene where they actually drink what certainly appears to be beer. The audience clearly understands what is happening at each moment.
It is easier to say what this is not than what it is, but what it most significantly is not, is moving. I was never bored, but when it was over, I was ready and most of the applause was warm without being wildly enthusiastic.
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