I admit it, I'm lazy as hell when I read the comics. If I have a minute or two, my eyes will sweep across the three or four cartoon blocks in a strip, searching for the funny. If I have less than a minute, I'll focus right on the last strip, and if it's cute, I'll backtrack to see the set-up. Of course, that's not the way to treat what some consider an art form, and it's impossible to treat certain cartoonists that way. Heaven knows, Ben Katchor's work demands a sedate, museum-like trek from block to block, the cumulative effect being more important than any kind of final punchline. His strips are usually worth the effort on paper, but would they work in the context of an avant-garde theater piece? Judging by The Carbon Copy Building, an avant-garde piece ensconced briefly at The Kitchen, the answer is yes more often than no.
A musical with rock and modern classical influences, Building spins one particular Katchor cartoon (published in Metropolis magazine) into a full-length meditation on class and culture in urban society. Though the piece includes a burgeoning love story and some attempt to follow the life of a delivery boy, Carbon Copy is really about what two New York City buildings represent. Both are structurally identical, but one is in disrepair in a disreputable part of town, and the other is a gleaming beacon of architecture, housing, among other tenants, a philanthropic organization besieged by ridiculous entreaties for funding. Katchor, and Carbon, are at their best in these moments, which use a "Top Ten"-list technique to rattle off sample grant requests, or, in another scene, descriptions of decayed leftover dishes from a fancy restaurant. Because all the text is written across screens as well as sung by the performers, we're kept at an ironic, Brechtian distance from much of the action, which is okay as long as there IS action. Long stretches of Building simply kill time or elongate the timespan of a scene to make it feel more artsy. (Honestly, if a minute takes a minute instead of ten minutes, is it no longer art?)
The nadir is a lengthy sequence of the delivery man running while a black-and-white film loop of midtown is projected behind him. The show never recovers its momentum after that and becoming yet another theatre project that would thrill at sixty minutes but bores at ninety. And I'm not exactly clamoring for a cast-album of the modernist score, either.
