San Francisco Chronicle

Hardmanology
Chris Hardman, the inventor of Walkmanology, is being hailed as the reigning enfant terrible of american theatre.
I want to talk about bow technology has marched itself from backstage to center stage, and how Walkmanology has marched the audience from their seats onto center stage. And then, I want to suggest a version of the future in which we all march offstage together. Chris Hardman, addressing the annual meeting of the California Theatre Council, 1984

By Robert Hurwitt November 1985

YOU NEVER KNOW QUITE WHAT TO expect next from Chris Hardman. His theatre pieces can be as minimalist as a set of flat plywood sculptures whose story evolves as they are moved from place to place over a period of daysor as extravagant as entire specially created walk-through environments explored by hundreds of audience members who, guided by tape-recorded instructions, become part of the show. This is an experimental theatre artistbut not in the usual apolitical mold. Social criticism is central to most of his works. "I'm a political person," the thirty-five-year-old Hardman proclaimed recently when visited at his Antenna Theatre Company's sound studio in San Francisco's Mission District. "I can't just be abstract." In fact, he also brings theatre into politics: when Hardman ran for city council in Sausalito several years ago, fifty campaign workers appeared around town, all dressed like him and wearing masks of his face. Recently, Hardman, renowned in the Bay Area for his Antenna Theatre and also for the innovative Snake Theatre, which he cofounded in the 1970s, has attracted national attention. One of his pieces was featured at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles last year, and another was commissioned by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Mark Taper Forum. This month, another of his plays, Russia, heads for New York to appear in the prestigious Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. And next month, Esquire magazine will profile Hardman as one of the best and brightest of the nation's young creative talents. In person, Chris Hardman appears just a bit larger than lifetall, with strong features softened a bit by a neat mustache and the long, straight hair that falls over the collar of his habitual white shirt and dark suit jacket. The archaic formalism of his jacket and bow tie contrasts oddly with his torn, paint-splattered black pants and tan cowboy boots. And despite his calm, even laid-back manner, Hardman's track record seems rather superhuman, too; he always seems to have several projects going at once. Last spring, within a two-month period, he opened two major theatre pieces, both at San Francisco's Theatre Artaud. Russia, a fairly conventional piece for Hardman in that it was presented in the traditional proscenium frame, electrified audiences with Hardman and Ronald M. Davis' striking, hard-edged set pieces, Jim McKee and Barney Jones' driving score and the large, cubistically distorted masks the actors wore. The scriptpresented as taped dialogue stripped to its essentials, mixed with the music and honed to a fine poetic edgetells a wry tale of how one fathers jealousy, overprotectiveness and xenophobic anti-communism create a series of paranoid cold war nightmares in his relationship with his grown, estranged daughter. And two months later, Hardman had turned Artaud into a theatrical carnival of satiric tributes to the American fixation with the automobile. Adjusting the Idle, a remounting

of me piece he did last year at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, was a new incarnation of Walkmanology, the audience-participation form of theatre Hardman invented in which die "audients" don earphones, wander through fabricated environments and become actors in the drama they hear unfolding on tape. As Hardman originally presented it, in High School (1981)and Artery (1982), Walkmanology was a fairly solitary experience, limited to one audient at a time. But in Adjusting the Idle, hundreds of people occupied the same space, some on solo "drives" following the individual tape, others in groups of four or more, banging out polyrhythms on an engine block, taking an ersatz drivers test, practicing to be street-walkers, forming a chorus line to beg Dad for the car keys, pitching used cars on closed-circuit TV, singing hymns to the Idol/Idle. It was almost as much fun to watch the bewildering swirl of chaotic creativity as it was to participate. The first weekend in September, Hardman was back in his carnival Walkman mode with Fairplay, one of the highlights of the San Francisco Fair, and this time he had upped the ante. Whereas Adjusting the Idle had seventeen taped trips, Fairplay featured some two dozen, all related to the social or cultural history of San Francisco, and some tapes fed directly into others. As a result, audients who followed the Take It Off for SF North Beach tape found them-selves performing as barroom go-go dancers to entertain the audients who, following the lead of former Bologna Brother Ed Holmes, were impersonating sailors on leave. Dancers reliving the Avalon Ballroom of the sixties found themselves staring in at, and usually joining, a roomful of spaced-out-looking participants in Tripping with LSD. Meanwhile, still other audients cooled out in a Beat coffeehouse, sang with Caruso as the earthquake hit, scrambled through downtown as bike messengers, tangled with ghosts at Mission Dolores, battled cops in the General Strike and subbed for Bogie in The Maltese Falcon, while a surprisingly large number waited patiently in line to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge. Late last summer, when Hardmans Fairplay was in full production, so was Liberty, an Antenna project produced by Lee Jenkins and Barney Jones. A taped tour of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien, the last unaltered liberty ship from World War II, Liberty, which also opened at the San Francisco Fair, mixes the recorded recollections of the men and women who built and sailed the liberty-ships with the sounds from that era. As a permanent installation, the tape should greatly enrich die experience of visiting the ship at Pier 3 at Fort Mason. At the same time, Hardman was extensively revising Russia, mixing in more historical materialthe voices of Richard Nix-on and Fidel Castro and proceedings from House Un-American Activities Committee hearingsto highlight the play's cold war theme and prepare it for a brief run at the Marin Community Playhouse in San Anselmo (November 1st through 9th) before it moves on to the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And in the midst of all this activity, Hardman was already planning his next projects: Dracula in the Desert, a very new look at an old tale, planned for this spring; Tlje New Season, a series of radio plays cued in to new television shows ("You watch the new-season on television with the sound off," he explains, "and listen to our audio interpretation of what's going on"), and Radio Interference, a piece he'll develop at MIT's new-Art and Media Technology Department next year, using media cross-fertilization to explore basic human values in the age of mass communication. "It's following through on my basic interest in mixing me-dia." he says, "and putting people in different relationships to theatre and events." MIXING MEDIA, PLACING HIS audience in new and startling relationships to a performance, using distinctive, strikingly stylized masksall these elements in Hardman's theatre are traceable to his theatrical beginnings in Vermont in the late sixties. Born in Seattle and raised in Los Angeles where his father wrote scripts for television (Lawman, Rawhide). Hardman went to Vermont's Goddard College to study architecture and to get away from the city. At Goddard, however, he en-countered Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theatre, which was in the process of relocating there from New York City. Like the San Francisco Mime Troupe and El Teatro Campesino, Bread and Puppet was one of the seminal theatre groups of the sixties. Each of these three troupes was engaged in breaking down the walls between audience and performers, moving its shows out of traditional theatres and into the parks of San Francisco, the vineyards of Delano and the streets of New York, respectively. Schumann's work, rooted in the folk

traditions of his native Germany, was distinguished by strong, simple story lines, an emphasis on ritual and pageantry and, above all, his unique visual designsmost notably the use of giant puppets and huge, stark generic masks. To Hardman, Bread and Puppet present-ed the concept of theatre in a whole new light. "I was already feeling that I wanted to get into something that had more social ramifications than being a lone artist," lie recalls. "It seemed to be a sort of lonely profession. The whole tradition of the artist as loner who's discovered after he dies didn't really interest meall that lonely living you have to do; I felt really alienated from that. And once I saw Bread and Puppet I realized that theatre had moved out of its existential modeyou know, the lone actor onstage, the two characters in the trash cansand was doing really visually interesting work that a visual artist could play a role in. I immediately fell into the theatre/circus mode." Hardman dropped out of college and worked with Bread and Puppet for the next year, following the company to Coney Island, where he spent the summer as a carny, painting and designing a funhouse. With the coming of winter, in true carny spirit, he headed for warmer dimesfirst to Los Angeles, where he teamed up with visual artist Laura Farabough in 19'71 and began creating theatre pieces and pageants based on his work with Bread and Puppet, and then to San Francisco, when LA'S cultural climate proved inhospitable to such work. "The city was just too big," Hardman explains, "too spread out [for us] to make any kind of an impact or find an audience. And all the actors that you work with are just waiting for their next commercial jobs. Masks don't go over too well, because they all wanted photographs for their portfolios." Settling in Sausalito, Hardman and Farabough founded the now-legendary Snake Theatre with composer Larv Graber and his wife, dancer and choreographer Evie Lewis. As in Schumann's work, Snake's pieces featured the choreographed movement of actors wearing larger-than-life masks, but here the visual elements became even more deeply layered. Geometric, highly stylized set pieces and props, de-signed to serve many functions, became sharp visual puns. And Snake took Bread and Puppet's dedication to theatre in non-traditional sites a bit furtherall the way out to Fort Cronkhite Beach in the Marin headlands for the memorable Somewhere in the Pacific, which catapulted the group to local prominence in 1978. "I called it 'location theatre'," Hardman reflects. "It interested me in that it was shifting the forms of theatre so that vou took the audience to a place that was part of their existing environment and theatrically altered it into another experience for them, leaving the area sort of humming with that new meaning. "At that time there was a lot of interest in site-specific art," he adds. "In a lot of ways. that was less particular than this location theatre idea, in the sense that it could have a much more abstract reason why an installation was in a particular place. We were trying to bring out an essential story that could be inherent in that space." Hence Fort Cronkhite, studded with World War II-vintage concrete bunkers overlooking the ocean, for a story about a life lost at sea during that war, and hence an abandoned gas station for the groups aptly titled Auto in 1979. Lary Grabers untimely death in 1980, along with the desires of Hardman and Farabough to go their separate ways, brought tile Snake collaboration to an end. The following year saw the debut of Hardman's Antenna Theatre and Farabough's Nightfire, and both have been remarkably productive ever since, becoming two of only six American companies included in last year's Olympic Arts Festival. With each new piece, Hardman seeks to invent and improve new methods of involving his audience. He conceived of Antenna, he says, as an instrument for receiving information from the audience, transforming it and then transmitting that information back out. For Vacuum, the company's first piece, he constructed his script and sound track from numerous interviews with vacuum cleaner salesmen and housewivesturning a tale of a traveling salesman's banal affair into a witty and scathing look at a society where human relationships are based on buying and selling. This year, in Russia, Hardman used the same process, mixing histori-

cal material with actors' voices and taped interviews with experts and laypersons to link tile overprotective father with [tie cold war myths so prevalent in our society. "This way," Hardman explains, "you gain a folkloric body of information that be-comes your script, and it becomes a way of engaging people with your theatre. I have a basic interest in mixing media and in put-ting people in different relationships to theatre and other media. But I'm not interested in that stuff just for the effect's sake. I think it harks back to that same thing I went through at Goddard: why be a lone artist and die without having had any relationship to your time?"