'The Object Lesson' Hoards Critical Acclaim
“When it comes to hoarding, the Collyer brothers have nothing on Geoff Sobelle, who has created a performance piece on the compulsion to preserve the flotsam and jetsam of the past,” writes Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times of The Object Lesson. “By the end, this storehouse of memorabilia has become synonymous with one man's inner life, and it's scary to think what might happen once it’s gone.”
McNulty is the latest critic to be enthralled by the magic of The Object Lesson, which plays at the Kirk Douglas Theatre through October 4, 2015. Below is a selection of the sparkling praise the show has received from reviewers around the world—think of it as our virtual box labeled “clippings.”
This immersive archival wonderland reveals what a haunted house really looks like. Christopher Kuhl’s lighting, artfully deploying an array of desk lamps, deepens the atmosphere of psychological mystery.
The production, directed by David Neumann, a choreographer with an extensive background in experimental theater, is divided into movements that try to capitalize on Sobelle’s versatility as a performer. An actor who trained in physical theater, Sobelle is also an illusionist, a deft clown and an eccentric dancer able to be graceful on ice skates while chopping a salad with his blades.
That most of us maintain—and effectively are—our own museums is the premise of The Object Lesson…The show picked up the top prize at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year, and you can understand why. Directed by David Neumann, with the spectacular scenic installation designed by Steven Dufala, this cunning show finds universal common ground in one man’s field of detritus. It’s a ruefully, comically sentimental piece that plucks a fleeting connective poetry in the seeming randomness of what we hoard.
So much of the incandescent The Object Lesson comes as a surprise that I must take a basic precaution so your perfect, gleeful enjoyment might be preserved. It is this: Go to the show. And I mean, right away, this minute…The Object Lesson is Geoff Sobelle's wistful, silly ode to stuff, a magic act in which your soul is the rabbit and the show is the hat…[It] closes with the artist's equivalent of an aria, a lovely, wordless sequence in which Sobelle pulls an entire lifetime's objects out of a seemingly bottomless box. ...you won't be prepared for how beautiful it is. It will uproot you too.
Proust had his madeleines and here Sobelle has his objects—a telephone, a winking traffic light, a pair of skates—all of which allow him to conjure memories of the past: a summer's evening in France, a surreal dinner party. …The Object Lesson is best when it is at its most interactive and most meditative, and when it's staged with an illusionist's skill and an aching sense of the need not just for less, but also for that which is truly valued.