dog & pony dc’s Toast. Image via twitter. By DCist Contributor Landon Randolph
Toast, the latest experimental offering from dog & pony dc, is an avant-garde performance reminiscent of a corporate team-building exercise. Directed by Rachel Grossman, Ivania Stack and Wyckham Avery, the mood of the show lies somewhere between earnest optimism and winking satire. For the life of me, I can’t tell which it wants to be—possibly both, or perhaps the vibe changes on a nightly basis.
The show is billed as a “participatory-performance-meets-science-fair,” a description which goes a fair way toward explaining the core concept of the show. In Toast, a secret society is revealed as a manipulator of human technological progress since Ben Franklin’s time; its newest inductees—the audience members— are tasked with coming up with The Next Big Thing. After a brief introductory performance by the actors, they unveil a muse to jump start the creative juices: a toaster.
From this simple beginning, the audience is asked to extrapolate a solution to the ills of human society. While I’m pretty sure that will remain the same from night to night, the theme, much like the venue and cast, appears subject to vary wildly across performances. On the evening I saw the show, the audience split into groups to contemplate the physical, emotional, and functional properties of the eponymous humble kitchen appliance, writing lists on butcher paper and connecting ideas with multicolored twine. It looked like something a serial killer would make.
But guided by an enthusiastic cast member, we used it to come up with a concept for a watch that would capture and store smells (don’t ask me how we ended up there). We then presented our idea to the other groups, who invented things like water purification systems and portable photosynthesis devices. The discussion centered more around the ideas and general solutions to large problems than it did around the actual solutions themselves, which resulted in a very broad mission statement, something to the effect of, “We will create a device that will aid decision making by eliminating human needs and anxieties.”
So where exactly does the “theater” part of this performance kick in? Be forewarned that the audience provides a fair amount of it. While the actors do spend some of the time taking center stage, they function more like facilitators to a seminar rather than performers; their job is to draw the performance out of the attendees. Consequently, it’s important to consider what questions the show is asking you to solve and how it goes about it, rather an spend time analyzing individual performances.
The core question posed by the show—how can we advance human technology?— is flawed. While show leans heavily upon democratic audience interaction and crowd-sourced solutions, it couches that interaction within a framework of an imaginary elitist society that makes decisions on behalf of others. The presentation and discussion of ideas is also marked by a territorial defense of proprietary ideas, and while these differences are eventually overcome (or were in the production I attended), the ultimate solution is so anodyne and vague as to be meaningless. And of course, that presupposes that a simple solution is possible at all.
If the ultimate goal of the show is to demonstrate the power of thinking outside of the box, such a lackluster result doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. It mirrors far too closely a sort of corporate retreat where nothing is really achieved, but everyone leaves feeling accomplished. And maybe that was the point. There are subtle moments in the show that seem to wink at an ironic take on the proceedings. A video segment, for example, outlines a (fake) non-disclosure agreement for the audience while the actors exaggeratedly reassure the audience that signing their rights away is nothing to worry about. And among the more traditional black box venues the show runs in, there are some unusual but canny performance spaces on the list, including the conference room of a downtown law firm.
These artistic decisions could hardly be considered random, but they are isolated enough that it is never really clear whether the play is enamored with a totalitarian decision-making system, or more interested in critiquing the process. In a show like this, like with many of dog & pony’s previous shows, the real meaning (if any) is left to be interpreted by the beholder.
Toast runs at various venues in D.C. and Maryland through October 18. Ticket prices vary, including freebie and pay-after-play performances. Tickets are available along with a full list of remaining performance spaces here.
