What at first seems to be a novel about a 1960s experimental theater troupe turns out to be genre fiction that uses theater as a backdrop for a plot involving murder and menace. This is not what I was hoping for from author Alexis Soloski, whose day job is writing about theater for the New York Times. It shouldn’t have surprised me; her first novel featured a theater critic as the protagonist but turned out to be a crime thriller. But “Here in the Dark” two years ago was at least playful and knowing about the current theater scene in New York. “Flashout” (Flatiron Books, 288 pages) is a darker book and a less enjoyable read for a theater lover.
Our protagonist this time around is Allison Hayes, aka Alice Haze, aka Mrs. Morales.
In I972, Allison is a teenager who has moved to New York for its theater but, at her parents’ insistence, attends a strict women’s college. She nervously takes the subway to the seamiest street in New York — 42nd Street – to attend a production called “The Exodus Project” by Theater Negative.. She hadn’t been much interested in the company when she read about them in class; this is a troupe past its heyday that lives communally and tours the world, where it periodically gets arrested for obscenity. “Back then, despite my occasional nights downtown, I still believed that theater didn’t really count unless the seats were numbered, and the curtains were heavy and hung and velvet.” But seeing Theater Negative live was like “staring at the sun.” She fell hard for the show, and for the company, and for its cult-like leader, Peter, who had come onto her, mishearing her name as Alice (or deliberately changing it; she never asked which it was.) Allison violated her school’s curfew that first time, kept on going back, was kicked out of school, lied to her parents and joined the company, moving into their rundown loft and, eventually, going on tour to Europe with them, which doesn’t go well.
In 1997, Mrs. Morales is a divorced middle aged drama teacher at a private school in California, living like a fugitive from her past, and largely detached from her present, having sex she doesn’t like with the married headmaster of the school, occasionally having one-night stands with women she meets in a local bar.
The novel alternates between the two years. We know very early on that something horrible happened in 1972, because in 1997 someone from her past visits Mrs. Morales’ school when she isn’t there, and then sends her an anonymous message on the newfangled electronic mail system at her school (what we now call email), with the implicit threat that they will expose her.
Mrs. Morales then sets about to figure out who this person is, by researching in the library, interviewing a scholar who wrote her PhD thesis on Theater Negative, and, finally, contacting (first on the phone, then in person) the few members of the troupe who are still alive; very few survived.
We learn why as 1972 unfolds with one squalid, sad or outright violent episode after another. Only a few of the members of the troupe get memorable moments before their suicide, overdose, fatal miscarriage, disappearance or murder. They formed a kind of dysfunctional family because, as one of them explains, they didn’t fit with their original families (We eventually learn that Allison’s father was abusive to her.) Peter is charismatic, perhaps creative, but certainly controlling, and above all a predator. After seducing Alice, he casually replaces her with a Bronx-born street hustler name Rosa, which devastates Alice, but t he has picked up many an adolescent before; his wife Suzanne explains that he needs them for his work. Peter is not the only predator among the men in the company. “This was a perquisite the company provided, a flow of girls and boys all yearning, all vibrating with want taking our first steps toward the adulthood on trembling legs,” who are subsequently destroyed.
Theater Negative is a fictional troupe. The author at one point explicitly rules out as her model such renowned experimental troupes from the era as “the more overtly political” Living Theater and Free Southern Theater. But it’s hard to imagine any theatrical troupe worthy of a scholar’s attention that fits the bill, given how much more time Soloski spends detailing the troupe’s individual and collective horrors than their actual theater making. Allison’s first visit in the first chapter is the only extended description of a performance that we get, and it’s both difficult to follow and easy to satirize. Yes, it won over Allison, but she is a naïve young woman who soon after discovers “something called a knish which looked like a man’s leather wallet fried.” We know that the troupe liked to dramatize stories from the Bible, and then from Grimm fairy tales, but we only get an occasional sentence about a design or staging idea.
The upshot is that this is a novel not so much about a theater as about a cult.
And it turns very ugly – way too ugly for my taste starting three quarters of the way in. Past that point, the book is likely to appeal mostly to readers who appreciate gritty thrillers with a couple of surprise (albeit implausible) twists.
Soloski writes some great sentences. That knish one is a sample. There is a delicious passage when the troupe is performing and staying in a college in London, and must dine with the ancient members of the faculty:
They had questions for us, questions about our methods, about our lives, which they asked without pause as they dragged chunks of meat through gravy, their forks held in the wrong hands. We weren’t people to them, it seemed, merely curiosities.
“But is it really art?” said a man to my right, his white eyebrows mingling above his red nose. “These pageants you perform.”
“A sort of folk art, perhaps,” said a professor across the table.
“Carnival,” said his neighbor. “Or is it only noise?”
“And is it true that you take your clothes off?” a man at the other end said.
“Now, now,” Nigel remonstrated.
“So what?” JoAnn said. They’d served wine with dinner. She’d had several glasses. “Those paintings of naked ladies in all your museums, you’d call that art, wouldn’t you?”
“What’s art anyway?” Peter said.
“An imitation, an illusion if one consults the ancients,” said the first man. “But I’ve always preferred Kant, who defines it as the purposive—”
“Fuck your Kant,” Bill said, his silverware clattering to his plate. “And fuck all of you. Yeah, we’re artists. Our bodies are the brush; we’re the canvas and the paint, too.”
If only there was more like this in “Flashout.” But this is the second novel I’ve read this summer by a former drama critic (the other Charlotte Runcie’s Bring The House Down) who doesn’t seem to like theater much anymore.
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