Museum of the Mind

In Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford's new work, memory is the operative word.


	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Aug 31, 2006

The body would have looked supine, close to death. Unless it was wriggling, soused with rum and alive. Anyone who spends time in and around the medical amphitheater at Pennsylvania Hospital reckons that, for patients lying on the room's surgical table before a crowd of 18th-century spectators, the latter option was worse. "When they opened you up," shivers hospital archivist and historian Stacey Peeples, "there was no anaesthetic." What she means is, you'd remember the surgery.

Now, on an afternoon of broad sunlight in August, the rotunda and its encircling tiers of balcony seats sit empty. The only sign of the room's past as a live surgery classroom is a sheaf of scalpels displayed in a tidy museum cabinet. Peeples drops her voice again. "To be honest, I don't like to be here after dark," she says. "So much has happened here." Pesky memories, cluttering the place up.

Besides, no one is here. Most importantly, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle are not here. Three thousand miles away in San Diego, the two Philly actors are trying to remember what this place feels like.

Last year, fresh off their success with All Wear Bowlers — a clownish twist on silent film titles that was a hit at the 2003 Fringe/Live Arts Festival — Lyford and Sobelle were looking around for what to do next. All the while, they found themselves stumbling over fascinating and quirky museums: During a trip to Los Angeles, they visited the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a nexus of idiosyncrasy founded by one David Wilson.

Inside, Sobelle found a fruit pit. "It was mounted in a glass cabinet, with a mirror behind it, like a jewel." The placard read: "The front is carved with a Flemish landscape in which is seated a bearded man wearing a biretta, a long tunic ..." The description continued for several lines, but Sobelle could see there was no such carving. "This museum had such a good sense of humor, walking the line between exhibit and practical joke," he remembers. (The lesson: In China, there is such a craft as fruit-stone carving. This, however, was just an unadorned pit.)

Much later, in Brooklyn last May, they checked out a show by the artist William Wegman. "And there we met this totally funny, awesome curator guy, big shoulder pads, houndstooth jacket," Sobelle recalls. "Jack Hyzergian. We started to follow him around. At one point he said something like, 'Now ladies and gentlemen, it's very hard to give a tour of this place, there's no linear tour, so I hope you'll understand.' We loved that line."

"What we got to," Sobelle continues, "was the thought of the curator, the docent, becoming or shaping the exhibit."

"I have a terrible memory," says Lyford. "Geoff has an amazing memory. He just told you the name of a guide we saw at a museum. That's ridiculous."

The show they aim to create is what Sobelle calls "a museum of how we remember." Titled Amnesia Curiosa and staged in the rich aura of the surgical amphitheater, it will be styled much like "cabinets of curiosity," the rudimentary personal museums of the 17th century. And just like the Wegman and Wilson exhibits that bore the personalities of their creators and curators, their museum revolves around its "docent" — a pair of conjoined twins, facing opposite ways. Now, who would that remind you of?

"Janus," prompts Sobelle. This two-headed Roman god of beginnings and endings was said to look into both the past and the future. "And museums — particularly museums of natural history — always live in that space, showing you objects from the past, but as a way to enlighten you as to what could be ahead."

During research, Lyford became engrossed in a book titled Museums and Memory, edited by Susan Crane, a University of Arizona history professor specializing in cultural memory. She wrote that museums were more than display cases: "They are the sites of interaction between personal and collective identities, between memory and history, between information and knowledge production. We go to museums to learn about ourselves."

Lyford concurs. "That could be said of much good art," he says. It struck a chord with Sobelle's feelings about the amphitheater itself, where medical students and the public could brace themselves for their first view of human innards.

It's been three weeks since the pair were actually in the rotunda. Since then, they've been out west, performing All Wear Bowlers in the evenings while developing the new show in the day. Three weeks ago was also the last intensive session with their director, the British performer Andrew Dawson. His latest one-man show, Absence and Presence, about the death of his father, convinced Lyford and Sobelle he would grasp the themes of family they wanted to explore — not just the brotherhood of the twins, but a larger idea: "That in some way, you're always performing your family," says Sobelle. "Maybe in a turn of phrase, which makes you think, Oh no, I'm my father. And then there's DNA, physiognomy, the shape of your face, all that's genetic."

A show about memory is nothing without real recollections. Lyford credits Dawson with paring down the true memories each actor should mine for the show.

"For example, my father was a pilot in the U.S. Navy. And I have some very strong memories of him flying planes. That's mentioned in the show." So if he can dredge that up from childhood, surely rehearsing on the West Coast poses no problems — he can just imagine himself in the amphitheater ...

"I'm not sure we've succeeded at that. Most of the time in our [California] rehearsal space, we just walk around as conjoined twins and play with the coffee machine."

So much for the constancy of memory. It's time for Lyford and Sobelle to come clean: They may have opened a museum to memory, but do they have any idea how memory works?

"It's a goal of the show to discover that," says Lyford. "Not one we've yet achieved fully." So how does a collection of wisps of memory make a story structure?

"Andrew has a theory he calls 'tensegrity.' Because he's a dancer, he happens to believe that the skeleton isn't held together so much by bones attached to one another as by fluids, veins, soft tissue. Basically, that tension gives structure.

"In the show, we've let him guide us ... convergences between ideas, however slight, create a tension, and therefore a shape.

"For example, one of the first memories we put into the piece was about birds. It was Geoff's, of his grandmother. And ever since, the mention of birds has come up repeatedly. So my father flew planes — the convergence between planes and birds is pretty strong. And we have tapes of my father the pilot, singing. That could be birdsong ... and when you look down from the top seats of the rotunda at the action below — it's like a bird's-eye view."

"It's very delicate, and tenuous, and doesn't necessarily lead to any easy conclusion. But it's like tensegrity, your body held together by fluid and membrane — beneath the skin, your skeleton is floating.

"How are we talking about human dissection again?"

(j_fletcher@citypaper.net)

Amnesia Curiosa (Geoff Sobelle & Trey Lyford), Sept. 7 and 12-14, 8 p.m.; Sept. 8, 9, 15 and 16, 8 and 10 p.m., $20, The Surgical Amphitheater, Pennsylvania Hospital, 800 Spruce St., 215-413-9006, www.livearts-fringe.org.