We’ll start off with something I rarely do: a summary judgment and a deep spoiler warning.
Why? Because Caught is a fantastic piece of theatre that really benefits from the audience walking in with as little information as possible. In fact, knowing that you’re walking into a piece of theatre removes one of the layers of this production from Firefly Theater & Films, Think Tank Gallery, and Vs. Theatre. But since this is a theatre review, it’s somewhat hard to get around that fact.
So if you don’t want to have any more surprises ruined and you trust me just go get a ticket to Caught. It’s not what we would consider a traditional piece of immersive theatre (whatever that might mean) but it is a great and important piece of work.
Now, on with the review…
(Spoilers after this image.)
(No, really.)
Caught is a mindfuck.
I happen to really like mindfucks. Especially funny mindfucks that actually have a point. Which playwright Christopher Chen most certainly does.
The initial set-up of this Obie-award winning play is that the dissident artist Lin Bo has fled China and has set up a gallery showing here in the United States. In this case that gallery is our dear friends at Think Tank Gallery, where the Xiong Collective has collaborated with local artists to evoke the spirit of District 798 — once a dissident center, now a commercialized arts district. We, the audience, are treated to time in the gallery to inspect the very real works of art before Lin Bo is introduced to read from his soon to be published memoir.
The dissident weaves in and out through the fashionable gallery crowd as he tells his story before finally settling in behind a microphone. It’s almost natural enough to make you believe that it’s real, and maybe some of the gallery-goers do think its real. After all, the production company is playing it fast and loose with whether this is a play or a gallery show called District 798. Indeed, what you believe this to be kind of depends on how you got there in the first place.
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But that’s just one layer of Caught, and as staged by director Ed Sylvanus Iskandar this production has bars. Verse after verse of them.
Each scene of Caught takes us into another layer of reality, stripping away the world that had just been created and reveling the “truth” behind it. In Chen’s script this means scrapping the characters that have just been established in order to start deconstructing the action we’ve witnessed and asking all too pressing questions about truth, journalistic integrity, and who has the right to tell a story — or if it’s even possible to understand someone from another culture at all.
It’s the kind of material that you see lighting up the laptop screens of culturally aware writers and artists around the country. Here the material is explored both pointedly and hilariously. Yet never are we laughing at the arguments, only laughing through the pain of disconnection that our all too connected world creates.
That is, if you manage to get in on the joke.
Iskandar has done such a fantastic job of constructing separate worlds for each layer of Caught’s onion skin that on opening night one patron — either not realizing or not caring that we weren’t in an actual artist talkback session — decided to just start talking back to the show. And the actors ran with it, as far as they could without having that derail the entire thing. It was an incredible moment where the artifice of the production came crashing right into the reality of the subject matter and we all kind of slipped into a hyper-reality. For a while I couldn’t tell of the audience member was a plant or not. She wasn’t, but it didn’t matter. The moment was pure.
What’s so invigorating about this production of Caught is that it both moves the play from its traditional proscenium stage confines and at the same time doesn’t wed itself to any one form. While the audience is always cast in the role of witness to the action, our physical and emotional distance from the scene is played with from sequence to sequence like so much taffy. The production pushing the perspective-bending script further than a straight-forward rendering ever could.
The layers of truth and fiction, and the bedeviling ways in which they are played off each other, brought to mind one of my favorite films: Orson Welles’ F For Fake. By sheer coincidence I had rewatched the film — which is an essay about fakers and art forgers — just the night before. That movie is a perfect film for our time, with its meditation on what is real and what isn’t and how readily our societal institutions fail to disambiguate the two. Caught is a spiritual successor, which has all that in it along with the cultural anxieties that come attached to our transition into a pluralistic global society.
Great works of art happen when a culture is able to diagnose a new kind of problem. Such works stand the test of time.
I’d put good money on Caught being part of the canon for decades to come. Yet this particular production is the one that I wish generations could experience.
Caught runs at the Think Tank Gallery through Sunday, December 10th. Tickets start at $45. Bring a friend and tell them you’re “just going to a gallery with a performance art piece.”
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