Fringe Festival: Pig Iron’s ‘99 Breakups’ (third review)

Another philosophy on breakups that always stuck with me came one morning in homeroom during my freshman or sophomore year in high school, when a childhood friend and I were gushing over the big homecoming dance, a week or two away, which we were looking forward to attending with two very nice boys.

But she gave a dramatic pause. You know, she said, there are only three possible outcomes to all this: “We’re either going to break up, get married, or die.”

I’d discover soon enough that making it to the altar was actually poor protection — divorce crops up at a fairly brisk rate among the weddings I’ve attended in the last ten years, and now I wonder if you could just file those under breakups, despite the achievement of marriage (as devout teens at a Christian high school, divorce didn’t figure too large in our worldview, except as something God hated almost as much as premarital sex).

As Pig Iron Theatre Company’s much-buzzed-about 99 Breakups, directed by Quinn Bauriedel at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, points out, there are all kinds of breakups (never did more sobs echo through an art museum). Sure, there are those agonizing romantic demises, but there are also things like job loss and death in the mix.

The performance, which takes place in a series of vignettes throughout the museum, with audiences herded to and fro by “docents,” quickly busts up any idea you might have had of experiencing the show alongside your date.

As we come up the stairs into the main gallery space, a line of sobbing actors (“I’m giving this back to you!”) hand every ticket-holder a bedraggled-looking item out of a box.

A demanding experience

I already tend to feel like Pig Iron asks a lot of us — just getting a ticket to one of their Fringe shows means subscribing to a weeks-long slew of emails instructing you on how to attend the performance, including how you should get there, what to wear, and what you shouldn’t bring. Do I really have to follow the actors around for 75 minutes and carry this darn CD?

After we all spend several minutes adrift in a tumultuous rock-band performance (my college pal, Amanda Damron, singing the lead) that saw every artist storm off stage, while figures like a woman in a wedding dress, crying copiously and drinking a Big Gulp, made free to embrace and weep upon us, we learned that the objects we’d been given were just a way to sort us into four different groups. I went with the CD folks. My date disappeared with the toothbrush people.

I was relieved to surrender my CD when asked, but not everyone felt the same. “Oh no, we can’t keep them?” a woman in my group exclaimed.

The following performances, some more inscrutable than others, have a few verbal and physical gems, but lines like “We cannot get a dog. My allergies are not psychosomatic,” “What is it about my friends?” and “You’re talking about fish but I think you might be implying something about me” aren’t exactly revelations on human nature.

With an effort, I tamped down my innate museum nerd and (mostly) resisted the urge to lose myself in the paintings instead of the play’s scenes, some of which do refer to the artwork. The mobile setup of the show in the echoing space also proved distracting, as bursts of applause and moving crowds filtered through each piece.

The scene that tugged at me the most, which takes place in a claustrophobic freight elevator, its gate opened to the audience, reminded me of my husband’s take on breakups as a much-needed reality check.

A cruel game

In a silent physical routine, two women play out a twisted, poignant dynamic of controller and victim, one repeatedly flicking the other, grabbing her, kissing her, and then rudely rebuffing any attempt at reciprocation before stomping away.

So maybe some “breakups” aren’t really breakups at all — they’re just the end of one person’s cruel game, and you don’t realize it until you see his or her back and know where you stood all along.

The whole thing wraps up with a long, wrestling, pounding, circling “dance finale.” The actors punch and slap their own bodies in violent unison. It looks like it stings.

When the show ended and the audience remingled to stream down the stairs and out the door, my friend quickly appeared at my elbow.

“I really enjoyed it, until the finale,” she announced. “But maybe that’s how breakups are.”

For another review by Ilene Raymond Rush, click here; for one by Steve Cohen, click here; for one by Carol Rocamora, click here.