Jet of Blood Review Critiqued

To the Editor:

Your unlucky reviewer, Ms. Ashwini Sukthankar, could have done herself a service by reading a dictionary definition of surrealism before writing her review of Jet of Blood, as most of her witless and floundering criticism of both Artaud and Gammons is in fact an uneducated denunciation of the surrealist movement.

Ms. S. does not mention the video that ran throughout the play. Nor does she mention the soundtrack. Nor does she mention that there was a six-foot long hand of God that spewed liquid although she took notes on it with rapt attention for a good quarter of the performance--all through the sequence where one cast member is naked (she doesn't) mention the nudity). Ms. S. doesn't like Artaud very much, although she obviously hasn't read the play.

In general, her language border on the surreal, presumably unconsciously. She describes the swings as "what appeared to be flexible silver stalactites" and says that "Cast members were poised...with fog machines." "Inexplicably," she writes, "actors chose to spin around the stage." Does she really think that the timing and movement of actors in a seventeen-minute play that coordinates lights, script video and sound is a choice or an accident?

Ms. S. has fouled up on a far grander scale than her confusion, misunderstanding, sexual hangups and titillation and massacre of the English language and its syntax could ever explain. She went into Jet of Blood expecting to see Guys and Dolls. Her comments about acting and plot, when applied to a surrealist play, carry about as much weight as complaints about the temperature when reviewing an art show. Ms. S. had the opportunity to read the play and comment on how Gammons successfully or unsatisfactorally handled the demands of the script Artaud called "unstageable." Then maybe she could think of how and why such a "meaningless" show caught the fancy of the Harvard theatergoers last weekend, seating over 100 people in three nights.

But in the end blame rests not on Ms. S.'s shoddy reporting, carelessness, bad writing, and total ineptitude in reviewing a complex play, but in your actually printing such a banal piece of garbage. Every detail is incorrect and misinformed, right down to the insipid photograph that you ran, miscaptioned "The Climax" when in fact it is a cast photograph bearing little relation to the performance and staged entirely by your staff photographer.

Sincerely,

Will Stewart '93

"The Young Man" in Jet of Blood