Hixson is an inveterate newspaper clipper, intrigued and concerned by the way the media transforms real events from the trivial to the profound, into disposable fictions. She is interested in the various ways to tell the same story and the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated stories. Her non-linear narratives are without plot development, and her performers play themselves as well as the “characters.” Hixson’s scripts intercut appropriated texts from newspapers, television, movies, and literature with monologues developed by the performers.
In Sway Back the Film Director played by Jane Dibbell glamorously dressed in a man’s suit and fedora hat, voyeuristically observes the “action” within the performance. The piece opens with her watching a home movie of the yet-to-appear cast. Her appearances at the culmination of dramatically loaded scenes diffuse these scenes and “fictionalize” them. They become so many frames from the “film.” Dibbell’s final monologue is taken from a newspaper interview with film director Bernardo Bertolucci in which he talks about his next film to be based on a “real-life” story he read in a newspaper.
In Rockefeller Center performed outside at a train station in Claremont, California, a series of overlapping highly choreographed tableaux evoke romantic memories, nostalgic yearnings, and a sense of loss. A man appears with a suitcase. A woman waves to him across a field. They approach each other in slow motion. Our response to this familiar re-enactment takes on a double meaning. We identify with the filmic recollection, not the actual event.
Lin Hixson, Sway Back 1982. Photos: Courtesy of the artist.
Sinatra Meets Max relies heavily on movie allusions and romantic idealization. Various performers recite the opening narration from The Road Warrior in different styles ranging from melodrama to irony. Songs by Sinatra are sung live and on tape. The cast of forty includes a real motorcycle gang, groups of school children, a crowd of people in dark overcoats carrying suitcases and briefcases, a crowd of people carrying “ghetto blasters,” family tableaux, and a fat man with a dog on a leash, all in a floodlit park-like setting with hills, trees, and paths. The values, style, and aspirations of the Sinatra era collide with those represented by the Road Warrior Max — the silent loner, cult-hero of a post-holocaust future. The 1950s meets the 1980s head-on.
In Flatlands, an American road story about the place we remember that never was and the horizon line we never get to, Molly Cleator appears in a white slip, sensuously brushes back her hair and sighs deeply. She stands on a green lawn behind a white picket fence, an updated vision from Tennessee Williams or William Faulkner, and tells us in a soft southern drawl of her dream to “make something of herself,” to become a singing airline stewardess and do little testimonial “commercials” in flight. She recites her accomplishments and virtues and the advice of a TV evangelist preacher who promises prosperity. She is contrasted by a tough-looking teenager in a leather miniskirt standing at the side of a flat anonymous highway (a film projection loop that runs throughout) like a hitchhiker into a Road Warrior future. There are excerpts of text from The Great Gatsby and the flight log of a Florida plane crash, personal anecdotes and one-sentence recitations of unidentified disasters in the news. The power of Hixson’s work is in the way she transforms her appropriated material into metaphors with a larger meaning.
Lin Hixson, Flatlands 1983. Photos: Courtesy of the artist. Montage: Jacki Apple.
Hixson’s work has also provided a context in which other young emerging performers could develop their styles and material. At twenty-five, Molly Cleator is one of the most promising new talents. She first met Hixson as a student at Otis Art Institute, performed in several Hangers pieces, and was memorable in both Sway Back and Flatlands. Encouraged by Hixson and Jane Dibbell, who is a skilled actress, Cleator enrolled in the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute where she studied for a year and a half. Cleator developed her autobiographical monologues as metaphors for larger social issues. Her approach is intimate and vulnerable, and she builds her “characterizations” to an unexpectedly high-tension pitch. She has a presence and quality most often found in the women in Robert Altman’s films.
Private Molly, Public Molly, created, written, and performed by Molly Cleator and directed by Lin Hixson, premiered at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in October 1983. It is about performing and performance, about name brands, style, charisma, image, packaging, our fantasies of “stardom,” and our idolization of performers. It is also about desire, the quest for approval, recognition, and love. It portrays our existential ennui and our detachment from “real life,” the vicarious lives we live through media to fill the terrible void at the center, and the private fears, insecurities, anxieties, and bad dreams that occupy that void. Finally, Private Molly, Public Molly is the product of growing up and living in LA, the dream center of the world with Hollywood at its heart.
Cleator, like Hixson, is fascinated by the power that media has over our sense of identity, movies, and rock ‘n’ roll in particular. Private Molly, Public Molly is built around the tension between the appropriated material and Cleator’s personal confessions. Under Hixson’s skillful direction and staging, Cleator walks a precarious tightrope. We are repeatedly seduced by her, manipulated into identification and complicity, then jolted back into the relationship of audience to performer. Cleator slips in and out of her public and private selves, her daydreams and nightmares, as facilely as she changes her clothes. She puts a pair of high-heeled sandals in a bookshelf and says, “That is Marilyn Monroe,” and then, “If I stand here I am Marilyn Monroe.” She tap-dances to Tom Waits. She lounges in a pale pink swimsuit by a turquoise swimming pool, then tells us how inspired she is by Aretha Franklin who lives in Encino and how what she really wants is to do a concert with her. She plays another song by Tom Waits whose last lines are, “I never saw your tears till they rolled down your face,” and then tells us that when she closes her eyes she sees a ball of brown lava getting bigger and bigger and rolling towards her. She sits on a hard wooden chair under a painting of an empty road in perspective, wearing a gray coat and clutching a large black purse against her. She stares into space, tensely waiting, as a video tape plays featuring her being interviewed about sexual inhibitions on a real talk-show.
In a low-backed black sheath dress she “performs” an Aretha Franklin song to a record, using a bare-bulb standing lamp like a microphone. Every so often a telephone rings and a little girl’s voice on the answering machine tells us Molly isn’t home. The differentiation between fantasy and reality collapses in the final scene. In an intimate tone she asks us. “You can hear ‘em, can’t you? They’re sitting over there talking about her.” She describes the woman adoringly, almost worshipfully, telling us over and over, “I remember that I loved her,” shifting the emphasis to a different word each time. Only when she refers to the woman walking over to a young man in a snakeskin jacket who plays the guitar, does it become apparent that this narrative is related to an earlier scene in which Cleator in a voice filled with longing, talks to the man, then turns to us and asks if we have “any corrections” regarding her “performance.” Switching to the first person Cleator becomes the woman and in a soft southern accent says, “I don’t care what you say about me…I am who I am.” The “scene” is from Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending. In the end when she finally answers the ringing telephone, it is Elvis Costello singing to her, I Write the Book.
How many scenes do we each play out in our lives in which we re-enact lines, gestures, and postures from strangely familiar scenarios? Cleator makes us aware of how we mold ourselves to resemble the public personalities whom we admire, the stars and celebrities whose projected