as Campbell Carolan
Miami Basel 2018
Montez Press Radio 2019
First performed during Miami Basel, 2018. Produced as a radio play by Montez Press Radio May 2019, New York.
Written by Campbell Carolan
Cast:
Samuel Ashford
Dean Kissick
Ala Dehghan
James Shaeffer
Pujan Karambeigi
Micaela Carolan (understudy for Marianna Ellenberg)
An adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross staged in an art fair booth
NAFTA Miami is set in the art world — at an imaginary art fair called NAFTA Miami— starring our own community of arts professionals in the roles of Mamet’s blazing salesmen. Only, we’ve replaced all of the original lines with the language of a press release— and the blue-collar vernacular of a backroom car dealership with the canting language of critical discourse.
It could be said that there are no characters in Glengarry Glen Ross: there are only actors, so positioned and possessed by the roles they perform in speech that, by the end of the play, they ultimately come to resemble their consequences more than they do themselves. Campbell Carolan’s adoption of David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer drama stays faithful to the original form, if it is possible to recontextualize fidelity as a postmodern gesture. NAFTA Miami is a sincere hit of postmodern theatre— a work of theatre before it’s a work of art— with a lot of stuff going on behind it. Reaganism, masculinity, the art world, institutions— all feature here as one or many horizons of sense, rather than “commentary” or “critique.”
Words were replaced with other words in a sort of mad-libs process, which was later supplanted by a computer algorithm. Words, they say, work. They work on other words. One listener might witness a promiscuous abandonment of plot, another might call into question the very nature of the subject, someone is bound to screw up the lines. At stake in this work was participation, reflexivity, belief, a little bit of treason, but never betrayal.
