Photo: Ian Byers-Gamber
The Dope Elf
“Premiere:
Yale Union, Portland, OR
September 14, 2019
in conjunction with the 17th Annual Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)
Written and directed by Asher Hartman
Tim Reid, Assistant Director and Dramaturg
Created in collaboration with Michael Bonnabel, Philip Littell, Zuty Lorz, Paul Outlaw, Joe Seely and Jacqueline Wright
Creative Team: Mark Allen, Patrick Michael Ballard, Dena Beard, Sofía Benito, Ian Byers-Gamber, Nina Caussa, Chu-Hsuan Chang, Neha Choksi, Carmina Escobar, Nicholas Gaby, Brian Getnick, Trulee Hall, Nikii Henry, Aubrey Lynn, Joe Seely, Amber Skalski-Gutierrez and Mathew Timmons
A Gawdafful National Theater production commissioned by Yale Union and The Lab (San Francisco) with support from The Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, the California Arts Council and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.”
Elves, trolls, magicians, and infectious agents of Europe’s historical disease come to life in the form of ordinary American folk who inhabit a landscape of psychic pain set upon the structures of white supremacy and violence.
Gawdafful National Theater’s most ambitious piece to date, The Dope Elf is a six hour tragic-comic saga of the lives of American otherworldly-everyday people whose souls have been deformed by the legacies of white supremacy. Meaninglessness, dissociation, unsatisfied lusting for power, partial orgasms and workplace blah underscore this serial jaunt through white power’s psychic legacy.
“Although there was a superficial gloss of wacky humor throughout, the underlying tone was one of deep metaphysical disturbances. The wretchedness reached a nadir in a scene in which Bonnabel holds another man (played by Paul Outlaw) hostage in his bedroom, commanding him to remove and replace articles of clothing, psychotically singing love songs to him while mimicking sexual acts, and threatening to tape his mouth shut before the scene fades out. From my vantage point, I was able to see Bonnabel discreetly remove a length of rope and a set of kitchen knives from a duffle bag at the start of the scene—not everyone would have seen this, I just happened to be standing directly behind the actor—and as a result I spent the entire scene worried that we were about to witness a gruesome fictional murder. To my relief, the action never devolved into that sort of spectacle, but that doesn’t mean the audience was spared any discomfort.”
- Martha Daghlian, Oregon ArtsWatch full review