When I first began catching shows downtown, in late-night Manhattan, in the early nineteen-eighties, a fair amount of what I went to see was called performance art. I sort of had a sense of what that was, but didn’t quite understand what made performance art distinct from “regular” theatre: wasn’t it all part of the game of getting people to believe what was happening in real time and space? One of the artists whose work I admired most—whom I believed most—was a young German woman named Anna Kohler. I first saw her at a place called the Red Bar, in the East Village. She was performing in the cramped space with a then young unknown actor named Steve Buscemi and the comedian Mark Boone Junior. I can’t remember what their performance was about, but I do remember staring up at them with joy. Their exuberance and beauty—Kohler had a face as round and pretty as Debbie Harry’s—was exciting to be near.
Later, I saw Kohler with the Wooster Group—she was a member of the company for ten years—where she played, among many other roles, the grasping, insecure Natalya, in the director Elizabeth LeCompte’s version of “The Three Sisters.” Called “Brace Up!,” that piece remains one of the more thrilling reinventions of a classic text that I have ever seen, and I will never get over the sight of Kohler partially destroying the set toward the close; she made Natalya’s resentment real. After leaving the Wooster Group, Kohler pursued other interests, appearing in work by Richard Maxwell, Fiona Templeton, and John Jesurun—she is now on the faculty in the music and theatre-arts department at M.I.T.—in addition to directing and writing herself. (Kohler is also a noted translator.)
In her new piece, “Mytho? Lure of Wildness” (at Abrons Arts Center, through Dec. 22), Kohler no doubt takes some of the information that she has amassed over many years of performing with powerful directors to make a theatrical work about what looking feels like, to the muse and to her creator. Directed by Caleb Hammond, the performance combines all the mediums Kohler has worked in (video, stage, and audio), the better to create a myriad portrait of a mature actress whose beauty lies in her restlessness and her ability to incorporate theatre’s sadness—all those ephemeral moments—into the energy and excitement that goes into making something new, which exists to disappear, too. ♦
