Karinne Keithley

Astral Potatoes: A technique for the anti-psychological projection of lowest vegetables into cosmic space in Sibyl Kempson’s Potatoes of August 

Sibyl Kempson’s new play, Potatoes of August, which she recently directed at Dixon Place ends with the proclamation, “This is not psychological. This is not psychological!” The play is, like the potato, a deeply asymmetrical thing: following a plot and persisting past its resolution in a kind of lumpy melancholic stupor, waiting to both rot and flower, and waiting to sing about it. The exact inverse of a drama driven by psychological interiority, Potatoes demands a performance of continual projection out of and beyond the play even as it possesses a set of intertwined married couples and other standard elements of emotional realism; it is a kind of Swedenborgian Days of Our Lives. This anti-psychological drama makes use of plot and behavior conventions that disable inwardness. But far from simply rebelling against the conventions of 20th century drama, the foreclosure of inwardness redirects the theatrical experience of language onto a shared plane of what T.E. Hulme calls an “intensive manifold,” against the traditional playwright’s habit of rendering the judgment or redemption of enclosed subjectivity. Potatoes, insisting on the materiality of this plane, produces at best a kind of terror of cosmical violence. This paper examines the admixture of force, voice, matter, numbers, and pop vocals that Kempson generates, most notably in her own performance, to render the play in a rigorously exterior plane. Drawing on theories of puppetry, I will attempt to create a new dramaturgy of exteriority, and generalize from this dramaturgy an acting technique for the anti-psychological play. 

Karinne Keithley is an artist and scholar working on text and performance currently working toward her Ph.D in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her plays, dances, videos, and soundscores have been heard and seen around downtown New York and Brooklyn since 1995 at such venues as St. Ann’s Warehouse, Soho Rep, P.S. 122, the Ohio Theater, Dixon Place, Dance Theater Workshop, and Ur, a dance palace she co-founded with Chris Yon. Web treasury of ukulele covers and more at www.fancystitchmachine.org.