In Habit

The first time I saw Mitch kill his older brother Doug, they were in the corridor of their squalid bungalow, and he shot him at point blank range. Then he shot Viv as she stood frozen to the spot in the living room after which he slumped onto the sofa in shock. The second time I saw Mitch shoot Doug, they were again in the corridor, but Viv was in Doug’s bedroom when the gun went off, then Mitch took his own life. Third time around, I was peering through the living room window because Doug had thrown all Viv’s belongings into her suitcase by the front door and had demanded she leave. I couldn’t see who had the gun, but there were three shots and it looked as if this time Doug pulled the trigger on himself. On each occasion, after being shot, all three woke up with the most god-awful hangovers; Mitch first, then Viv, and finally Doug would rouse himself and start throwing his weight around, bullying Mitch and touching up Viv.

Murders and hangovers. Murderous hangovers. This is how each loop of Habit – David Levine’s compelling theatrical performance-in-the-round, staged at the end of September in New York’s Essex Street Market – would end and begin. Habit was originally co-commissioned by Luminato Festival, Toronto and MassMoCA, and presented in New York by Performance Space 122 and the French Institute Alliance Française (FIAF), as part of FIAF’s annual Crossing the Line festival. Performed continuously on loop, eight hours a day, a cast of three actors (in actual fact, two casts of three, alternating one day on, one day off) worked through a short realist drama commissioned by Levine from playwright and screenwriter Jason Grote. The action took place in a replica one-storey house constructed in the middle of one of the market’s big empty spaces. The house was fully plumbed and wired, and the audience watched the play through the windows and doors. The actors had to follow the script line-for-line, but could move freely within the house, improvising the staging as they liked. Although they could do what they wanted within the parameters of the script – how and where they moved in the house, in what register they played each line – they were not permitted to take their acting out of a realist mode into anything more expressive or surreal. When they had completed a cycle – signalled by the gun being discharged – they would begin again. If they needed to eat, take a nap, go to the toilet, or take a shower, they had to do so on set. (The cupboards and fridge were stocked with food each day, and there was a fully functional shower in the bathroom.) Importantly, the audience couldn’t enter the set. Peering in through the patio door, or a bedroom window, one moment the action might be right in front of your nose, the next it would move to another room. You could run around the perimeter of the house to follow what was going on, or you could stay put and listen, perhaps watch what one of the characters was doing when left alone. Levine made us work at being an audience just as much as the actors worked at inhabiting their characters.

The plot was bleak, its mood seedy. It’s Halloween. Doug and Mitch are two brothers sharing a house in a no-hope suburb. Doug is the older of the two. He’s a bullying coke dealer, mean to Mitch, yet aware he has a responsibility as his brother’s only family guardian. Mitch has just been fired from a job a WalMart. He’s an aspiring but mediocre poet and singer-songwriter with a trainspotter’s knowledge of Neil Young, Captain Beefheart and the ‘Pebbles’ compilations. Viv is their high school friend. She left town to go to college, but she’s squandered her scholarship and been thrown out for bad behaviour. She’s come back to town to kill herself. Habit begins the morning – or more likely the afternoon – after the mother of all binges. The house is festooned with Halloween decorations, as Doug is obsessed with making the house look ‘normal’ so as not to arouse suspicious about his dealing. Doug and Viv have slept together that night. Everyone is trying to get their heads together as they recuperate, but soon find themselves unravelling. We follow them through revelations about Mitch’s unrequited love for Viv; Viv’s sideline as a stripper; a cash flow problem Doug is having that puts him in trouble with his supplier; and a vanity-published poem Mitch learns is part of a scam to part aspiring writers from their cash rather than anything to do with his talent. Mitch confesses to Viv that it was he and his brother who, as kids, accidentally killed her brother Petey. Viv flushes all the coke Doug has to sell down the toilet. She pulls a gun on them both, then asks Doug to kill her. Doug refuses, mainly on the grounds that he’s in enough trouble as it is, and orders her to leave. At this point, how the play resolves itself each time around is subject to the actor’s interpretation, depending on how the mood of each iteration evolves: sometimes all three die, sometimes none of them. Whatever happens, they all end up collapsing; either dead, or slumped somewhere, numb with shock and emotional exhaustion. A few minutes pass. They lie still. The audience circles the perimeter of the house, wondering if that’s the end of the play. Then death or exhaustion turn into hungover groans and bodies hiding under blankets. Mitch gets up – perhaps starts carving a Halloween pumpkin, or plotting a trick to shock his companions awake – and the whole sorry saga starts again.

Once familiar with the plot, the pleasure and power of Habit came from comparing each successive loop of the play, or the treatment each cast would bring to the script. The first cast I saw – featuring Quinlan Corbett as Doug, Matthew Stadelmann as Mitch and Stephanie Wright Thompson as Viv – were understated in their approach, like characters in a US indie mumblecore film. Corbett’s Doug was oafish, like an over-grown jock. Stadelmann was smaller, his Mitch cursed with body language that was awkward and shy. Wright Thompson’s Viv was small and flinty; her insecurity and mental instability hidden behind a tough and manipulative manner. By contrast, the second cast I watched reversed the physical build of the two brothers; Ben Mehl’s Doug was shorter and slimmer than Brian Bickerstaff’s Mitch; this pitched Mitch as big and clumsy, his brother agile and scheming. So too with Eliza Baldi’s Viv; her take on the character was made with broader strokes, her thin veneer of confidence often right at the edge of spilling over into a mess of desperation and substance addiction. Yet mood was always nuanced; Baldi’s Viv occasionally seemed more sympathetic and less manipulative towards Mitch. Corbett’s Doug threw his weight around more but at times seemed a fraction more caring and less coldly bullying towards his brother than Mehl’s version of the same character. His odd clothing; dress shoes without socks, a wife-beater vest or sometimes polo shirt, looked threatening on Corbett and creepily hipsterish on Mehl. Mitch, in both instances, was always a loser; both actors successfully conjuring a person who at times seemed like a young man of potential stuck in a rut through years of servility and humiliation at the hands of his brother, and at others more of an innocent, a victim of circumstance whose interest in Beefheart or writing poetry didn’t necessarily signal a particular talent or intelligence, just a place in which he could temporarily find refuge from the dead-end town he lived in.

During the day, with light coming straight down onto the action through the building’s skylight, the artificiality of the set felt foregrounded; like watching a reality TV show, or a psychology experiment. In the evenings, with just the lights on set and the rest of the room shrouded in darkness, the atmosphere was far more intimate, which served to emphasize action over the conceptual conceit. Yet, with successive viewings of Habit the importance of the story began to give way to increasingly rich questions raised by that conceit. The actors could move freely within the space of the set, which often placed them in problem-solving situations where they would have to react quickly and adjust what they were doing if the script required. For instance, if something needed to be said out of earshot, or one character was trying to conceal something they were doing from another, they might know that plot point was coming, yet find themselves in an awkward spot where it couldn’t be executed. How would they deal with this? Running with that idea, how might we deal with that in our own lives; that is to say, how do we follow cues based on our conscious and unconscious motives? What makes emotional responses routine as much as instinctive? If Doug, Mitch and Viv are archetypes to some degree, then what categories do we conform to? Habit put a new spin on going through the motions.

Was Habit crossing the line from performance art into theatre, or from the stage into the gallery? Levine and his producers didn’t fret about trying to frame Habit within a particular theatrical or visual arts history. (‘The Real World meets No Exit’ was the precise extent of any contextual reference in the publicity.) In concentrating on the here-and-now of the experiment, rather than demonstrably worrying about critical positioning or genuflecting to the guardians of whatever continuum of performance the production inhabited, I’m not sure it mattered which borders were being broached. Maybe we need to break those curatorial reflexes – or habits – more often.

If there was a meta-theme to Levine’s project, beyond those of plot and character, or even formal theatrical issues, it was one of affective or creative labour. Here we could watch the shift work of a jobbing actor’s life – the special trip to the theatre stripped of its singularity and all the emotiveness that gets freighted with that sense of occasion. Here was the lifestyle of the precariat underscored for eight hours a day. To borrow the title of Erving Goffman’s 1959 book, this was ‘the presentation of self in everyday life’; one day on, one day off, one day on, one day off. Then it was over, onto the next job, the next presentation of the grind.