Sponsored By Nobody likes to call themselves “Blue Collar Avant Garde,” and while that’s certainly applicable, there’s a lot more to this Brooklyn-based theatre company than just that. Since their inception in January 2005, SBN—which is led by artistic director Kevin Doyle and producing director Peter Hoerburger—has produced a steady stream of socially conscious original work that challenges conventions with its use of absurdism while staying true to the company’s mission of “developing new work that is relevant to contemporary America.”
But, wait: SBN doesn’t have a mission statement—at least, not according to them. “American theatre has too many mission statements,” they claim on their website, “and not enough people with the guts to cut through the theatre of bullshit our nation has become. Our role models are people who have very little to do with theatre…Think of us more as a band. Please.” Those are fighting words, but SBN is a company with enough talent and know-how (not to mention a noticeable lack of pretension) to back them up. (In keeping with the company’s irreverent rock ’n’ roll mentality their name derives from the title of Neil Young’s defiant 1988 tour, in which the veteran rocker hit the road without any corporate support.)
The work itself reflects SBN’s unshakable conviction that art can be “a catalyst for provoking change/thought.” Doyle's Styrofoam (originally produced by Feed the Herd) attacks America’s yuppified consumer culture with mounting piles of the title packing material. FOX(y) Friends and Compression of a Casualty both skewer television news media shallowness: by imagining the private lives of a smiley anchor team in the former; and by juxtaposing a dead U.S. soldier’s testimony with the TV reporters who gloss over his story in the latter. In The Position, playwright Doyle comments on corporate America’s stealthy annihilation of individuality via the anxiety of an impending job interview. In not from canada, he examines what’s eating away the heart of civilization through three strangers in a restaurant and a large panda bear. And SBN’s work-in-progress, W.M.D. (just the low points), looks at the day the government’s report on the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was released through a pastiche of pop culture references, news bulletins, and other bits of found and collated text.
The main thrust of SBN’s work is to thoroughly investigate what it perceives as America’s sick ideological health through a deep-rooted belief that it can (and should) be better. The company’s aesthetic influences come from the worlds of the absurd and the experimental, the most obvious ones being Vaclav Havel, Eugene Ionesco, and The Wooster Group. The frequently ridiculous non-sequiturs that occur in their productions—either through verbal or physical humor (or both)—deliver the kind of laughs that make the stronger medicine go down smoother. Quite simply, SBN’s work is theatre as political activism.
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This page last updated Jul 25, 2008