Biggs performed "Premises," her latest work, at Kirby Theater on Saturday evening. The show was followed by several of her earlier works that explore racial, national and sexual identity as an African-American woman.
Her play is a mosaic of different perspectives on patriotism, though these views culminate in a common resentment. A versatile actress, Biggs portrays various characters including a Jessica Simpson caricature complete with an American flag bikini top and camouflage pants. She continually satirizes American culture in her piece.
Perhaps the best examples of this satire are the short films shown in the performance in which she dresses up in an oversized Uncle Sam costume and walks the streets of Brooklyn. Biggs bellows "Oh beautiful for spacious skies" while she dances enthusiastically with jazz hands. Because of this exaggerated recital, most people initially ignore her like the apathetic New Yorkers that they are. When she speaks on a serious note with pedestrians, however, she elicits genuine conversations about social issues with them. These films are remarkable in their creativity but misplaced in "Premises for Sale." Serving as a screen, white sheets on a clothing line cleverly distorted some of the images and visuals of a young black woman in an elderly white man's regalia certainly contributed to the show's irony. Still, the films would be more suited for a separate project. Biggs' experiment with her Uncle Sam costume has great potential for garnering reactions from people in other neighborhoods. Nonetheless, the interdisciplinary show was interesting in its mix of live theater and previously recorded video.
The live action and the choreography in "Premises" are exceptional. Biggs moves gracefully and accurately to embody each character. When she plays a wounded soldier, she painfully drags one leg in a realistic limp and slowly lifts herself up on the key word "stand." As a slave girl, she adopts the Suzuki method to create sculpture-like poses for her character so that both her words and her form identify this persona.
Holding this show together is a strong script that revolves around the iconic American flag. Rather than cherishing this flag as a symbol of opportunity, Biggs diminishes it throughout her performance. She originally clutches a small flag and cries out to some sort of higher being, represented by a white beam, that she has "nothing, nothing, nothing." Later, she lays down a larger flag and carefully leaps, steps and looms over it. While dancing on the flag, a sacrilegious offense, she realizes her egregious error and bursts into convulsions and technobabble as if she were a robot programmed to respect the flag. Ultimately, she brings it to a water basin and scrubs it against a washboard to rid it of its impurities, its hypocrisies. After all, this is the flag under which African-Americans were "three-fifths people," as Biggs asserts. During this final scene, a video plays of Biggs' naked body inscribed with such phrases as "my own nation state" and "my body is not a text"-more irony. This nudity and the sometimes coarse language in the show are not gratuitous but purposeful. Finally, Biggs holds up the flag, though upside-down, literally stressing the downside of patriotism.
"Nothing happens without a reason," Biggs reiterates in her performance. Each detail has a profound meaning; however, this meaning often eludes the viewers. It was not until after the show when she took questions from the audience that the disparate parts of the play became more understandable. The significance of the title, for instance, relates to the extent to which everything in the United States, even the flag, is for sale. This point was not apparent in the production. In addition, the irregular vignettes caused some confusion since there was no linearity. By improving the clarity of her ideas, Biggs can make the play more accessible to her audience.
"Premises for Sale" gave the distinct aura of a fresh work with immense power and profundity that still needs some fine-tuning. Given that this was the second performance of this piece, the show was highly respectable and further exemplified Biggs' talents as a performing artist who has much more to say about racial construction in America.