After witnessing Whatever, Heaven Allows (WHA?!), staged by the Brooklyn-based experimental performance group Radiohole, and watching as it humiliates anyone who ever believed they were a part of forward-moving theatre, you may be left wondering what it was you just witnessed. What was the story? What were they trying to say? Where was it going? No matter the question, I would suggest the only reasonable response is, "Who knows?"
You see, that's just it. Knowing has nothing to do with it. This show is not for your brain, but rather your body and your soul. It's a show for audiences to taste, smell, and most certainly feel (especially if you're splattered with Jell-O shots from the front row). It's purpose is to vibrate, tickle, rattle, blind, deafen, chill, and warm you within a lightening quick hour and a half. You are lambasted with an image one moment then unapologetically snatched away into new imagery the next, with no regard for continuity or safety. Video screens whip out and slap you with rainbows. Ice water flings from a man's bald head into your lap. And there will be no mercy.
"Experimental" and "experience" are practically the same word.
This company is operating on the leading edge of the theatrical universe. A usual outing to the theatre is like Michael Faraday discovering electromagnetism on a table top; important, noteworthy, interesting. But we've been there many times before. Radiohole is closer to the Large Hadron Collider. Once they crank that thing up, who knows?
Here's a teaser video for the show.
peace.
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