Lazarus

Lazarus

Without having any idea about the Man Who Fell to Earth, I'll break apart the already fractured yet duct taped Lazarus. With cart Blanche access to David Bowie's catalog, the show is like the Northern State Parkway. It winds its way around the richest areas of the island but never lets you peek inside. You get glimpses of greatness at multiple landscapes and then you're pulled over by the strobe of police before you can even tell them how much you enjoyed your view.  The actors are mad for each other and drive your interest through the two straight hours, however there's never enough dialogue to secure ones fallibility.  Just as your invested, poof magic trick, smoke, stab, drag off stage and strobe into the next digital remedy. I try to keep my criticism to be less than just a scene outline, and therefore where in my life did I find myself? I found myself searching for each character's wants and needs without focusing on the David Bowie songs that were way too popular to not be a biopic musical on his life (also the vinyl records in sleeve laying against the wall was kitschy). How do we create a scene that matches this song, and hey, we can sing it slower or pitchy...I loved it and I wished it was me, but I also wanted to fall in love.  I wanted to lay in the afterbirth cytoplasm that is my life and bleed opaque purity as if to have offered more than I was given. I watched that intercellular fluid travel toward me on stage as they lay. The battle between life and death is indicative of the angel and devil on ones shoulders, or a grim reaper like meet Joe black, taking a life in order to meet you in the flesh and depict a message that you might not have believed if not tactile; there he's striding past in your nude box, black as night, the part of your heart that's long since died, and he continues to poison your spirit because you know you're not the same. They'll try to save you. You made up your mind long ago, but you're a good person and try to save them the pain that time has worn on you. Certain characters got me there, even with the snot, the tears, the milk and the electric hair, but I went limp when they started singing about the man who sold the world, or being a hero just for one day.

What would you do if you absolutely couldn't get home but you knew that home existed?  What about not being able to die? I think in the end the only way to survive such pain is your eventual efforts to destroy oneself. Hope is a fallacy and makes for temporary glimpses of a future that's never to come. That's not really a future, that's a dream and therein lies the premise. In order to escape our lives, we picture  ourselves in another place, dreaming about what we'll have and how great it will be, while each day that passes, we grow closer to our deaths. Did we love enough? I hope so. But then again, we know what hope does. It keeps us alive, for how long, and for who, well that's up to you. What memories will keep you ticking. You'll never figure it out. It's not for us, it's more important that you do it for them.