Tim McCown Reynolds gives a tour de force performance as a metaphorical “tourist” traveling in his own home and body through the persona of a man with Tourette’s Syndrome. Because of what that does to a person mentally and just as absolutely excruciatingly physically, Reynolds must perform acts and attitudes that make extreme actors’ exercises seem like preschool activities. Is it because the protagonist decides early on to be an actor that what follows is justified? Is this the Theater of Cruelty that Artaud called for? Or is Kirk Wood Bromley’s play simply his means of being dramatically provocative, shocking, to be noted and successful? What motivates the actor of the diseased man and how did he research the disease — in reports or in observing its victims? What’s the real purpose of the portrayal? In the beginning, the man thinks he’s like a gorilla on crack. Or a hummingbird? A characteristic disjoining. He rocks back and forth, almost knocking over the scrim behind him. He talks about finding blood in his stool and mentions Serbian atrocity centers. Before long, he’s spitting out ugly adjectives, blaming others, blaming self, having a stomach ache, being happy, being sad. BORING. But what’s to come isn’t. Now blinking, next eyes open wide, driving, grinding teeth, smacking lips, until he looks at a sun, moves his head all sorts of ways. There’s clapping. He gasps for breath, hops, skips, jumps, bends, steps, rocks up on a foot, changes feet, trips on his feet, tip-toes, blows on his hands, hits his face, kisses a hand, does some clucking. He flaps his arms, scratches, struggles with too-tight clothing, fondles his hair, gets wildly jumpy. And that just constitutes Act 2! Act 3 brings animal noises. With Act 4 the Tourist projects a toaster, mini TV, exercise bicycle as in a popular TV commercial, and other objects. Before the finale, he notes relationships with his parents and a psychotherapist he considers stupid. The finale itself he titles, “My Brain on Drugs,” which he acts out before his body, complete with the tourist in it, is able to go out to meet his parents for dinner. I can praise Tim McCown Reynolds’s performance, but I didn’t like the show. For the same reason, I wouldn’t have liked, in a previous age and time, to watch mentally or psychologically ill people crammed into an institutional snake pit or public square as if they could entertain or thrill me.
