SQUAT THEATER DAYS

nocynic
5 min readJul 9, 2020
Photo by Yona Hummels on Unsplash

A CLASSICAL VIOLIST ENCOUNTERS THE AVANT GARDE

In the early 1980s, the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan bore little resemblance to the gentrified enclave it has since become. In fact, it was so down at the heels that a collective of Hungarian performance artists who went by the name of Squat Theater had managed to acquire the lease for a disheveled town house on 23rd Street just east of Eighth Avenue. The ground floor constituted the theater and they resided on the upper floors, living “above the store” as have so many other immigrants to America over the decades. This was a step up for them. The name “Squat Theater” referred to the fact that for most of the troupe’s history, going back to their earliest days dodging the authorities in Communist Hungary, they were all but homeless, squatting in any space they could find.

I was a free-lance violist in New York in those days, and made the acquaintance of an Israeli violist named Yossi Gutmann, who had written a short piece of music that was performed in Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free, the show then running at Squat. They paid almost nothing, of course, and since all of us would naturally take a better paying job if it were available they needed a stable of violists to cover the part. So I learned and rehearsed the music, and performed in the show off and on for years.

Yossi’s music was a setting of the lyrics to the James Brown song “Sex Machine”. The melody was pretty basic, not much more than a chant. It was sung by one of the founders of Squat, Eva Buchmuller, in a gorgeous, all but indecipherable Hungarian accent. Yossi’s viola writing was difficult and brilliant, a bit reminiscent of Kodaly, and there was a primitive drum set part played by a guy whose name I don’t remember and possibly never learned. I recall that he had issues with heroin.

The show, as I say, was on the ground floor of their townhouse, which I believe had been a restaurant in an earlier incarnation. The audience sat in bleachers at the rear, and the stage was at the front. Large plate glass windows behind the stage afforded a view of the street — and gave the people walking by a view of the show. They exploited this feature quite creatively. At one point in the show, a jeep would scream up onto the sidewalk, full of actors in Vietnam era combat gear. They poured out of the jeep and stormed into the theater; they were part of the show.

There was an attractive young woman who would sprawl nude on the stage a bit later in the performance. She executed remarkable contortions, linking her ankles behind her neck. Often, pedestrians would happen by while she was on stage, and inevitably observe her with considerable interest. Then they would notice that there was an audience watching them watching her, which would precipitate fascinating reactions of embarrassment and complicity — unwittingly, they were part of the show as well.

An icon dominated the stage, a Buddha-like baby made out of paper mache, perhaps nine feet tall with an ecstatic expression, equipped with the Walkman headphones of that era. The baby’s eyes were two large TV screens. The images on these screens served as a commentary on the action on stage, and there were times when the stage was empty and the videos in the baby’s eyes constituted the entire experience.

One scene that played out on these screens featured a teenage girl played by Eszter Balint, the daughter of Squat’s founders, who has since had a noteworthy career as an actor and a musician. Eszter’s scene was a disturbing tableau, in which she walked down deserted industrial streets with an older woman, who recited a pornographic fantasy to Eszter, giving a first-person account from the point of view of a man: “…and then I rip your pants off and my cock is in your cunt and we fuck until we come…” Her delivery was so deadpan and so repetitive that it managed to be devoid of any trace of eroticism. At the end of the scene, Ezster politely thanked her and they went their separate ways. While I don’t imagine that too many American parents would wish to find work of that nature for their daughter, I saw no evidence that Eszter was at all traumatized. She was an extremely poised, thoughtful, and intelligent kid.

The Squat troupe was like a big family, and I enjoyed spending time upstairs in their living space. While they were subsisting on practically no money, they always offered me something to eat and they seemed to have worked out the inevitable negotiations of communal living rather smoothly. I remember once hearing them laughing uproariously at a loaf of bread they had purchased on a lark at a supermarket. It was called “pumpernickel”, although it was essentially a browner version of Wonder Bread. I think they mostly baked their own bread.

There was no narrative that unified the show, but there was, I believe, an overall theme, suggested by the title “Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free”. In several of the vignettes, a man dies before his child is born; this was the gist of the Vietnam sequence, for example. I interpreted the show as a celebration of this scenario. The Squat collective was forged behind the Iron Curtain, in a totalitarian world of dictatorial strong men. The show seemed to say that only with Mr. Dead could there be a Mrs. Free, and could the baby live blissfully lost in the music from his Walkman. I proposed this to some of the Squat people, but the idea didn’t interest them. I think that the whole concept of a coherent message was extraneous to their aesthetic.

The climax of the show was a performance of the first rap I had ever heard. I still remember the chorus: “Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free/Fuck the fish out of the sea/Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free/Fuck for a nickel, fuck for free!” It was grotesquely obscene and deliciously joyous.

My own little cameo was just after this. The stage was set up as a cabaret with a few tables. A robot resembling Star Wars’ R2-D2 rolled on stage and recited the poem “El Dorado”. Then it announced, “And now — Sex Machine!” This was my cue to come on stage with my viola and perform with Eva and the drummer. After we were finished, Eva and I would sit on stage at one of the tables for a while, chatting and enjoying a drink before we left.

It has been nearly 40 years since I was a small part of Squat Theater’s fascinating world. I had never before met such uncompromising artists, who pursued a vision so far from the mainstream with such courage and creativity. My own path has been far more conventional, but I like to think I was able at least to take from my time with them some lessons about determination and integrity.

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nocynic

Max Raimi plays viola in the Chicago Symphony. He composes music and despairs over the Detroit Tigers.