The piece begins with Thomas playing the narrator of Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." Gary Bellis stands behind him, wearing a power suit similar to Thomas, underlining certain moments by mirroring Thomas' movements as he speaks. Immediately one must question whether this narrative is his or someone else's. The narrator disclosing the theatricality is one of the things which has marked this play out as experimental, but Thomas has turned this on its head. He is performing Thornton Wilder's narrator, when as a performance artist, he is expected to immediately perfom "himself", or some revealing aspect of his persona, on the other hand he has problematized the opportunity for the actor, playing the narrator to play "himself" within the theatrical tradition. He has, in a matter of a few minutes undermined one of the central tennants of recent performance art, a tennant which says "this is genuinely my (the performer's, not a distant playwrights) art, I am performing it, it's mine, immediately in its production", he resigns the performers ownership of the new and distinct intellectual property, which is most often a representation of self.1 Clearly, through this theatrical and collaborative method, Thomas and his many collaborators critique through their process the moment when theatricalized and tamed performance moves into the direct relations of capital, pay your money at the door, you know what to expect, and its going to be real.

Instead of theatrical action to which the narrator refers, these narrations are followed by Thomas, at times later joined by Bellis on the floor, repeating a painful looking exercise raising his legs and torso, dropping with a thud, turning on his side repeating sharp contractions, counting out these movements with the name of rivers, one Mississippi, two Missouri, three Snake, four Hudson, etc... then randomly starting back, as if in failure at one Mississippi.

Finally standing up again to delivery, cooly the introduction to the next act of "Our Town". The pain of these exercises at first seems to fall into this search for immediacy, but then through their contextualiztion, escape. At moments one is less worried about the (self)abuse of Thomas' body than that he will snag his apparently expensive suit on the rough hardwood floor. Gary Bellis, as if repeating an exercise from Boy Scouts, uses tape to attach a thin piece of wood to the back of Thomas arm like a splint rendering the elbow immovable, in a straight locked position. Bellis then places Thomas coat over this rigid arm. Out of sight out of mind. Only seconds later Gary Bellis places this arm, marked out as a sight of trauma over his knee and sharply cracks it. One is forced to imagine the arm snapping, the healing bone breaking again. Thomas howls with pain, and then in what seems a remarkable recovery, he delivers another line of text as if nothing had happened, returning to his uninjured body faster than the audience can collectively dis-suspend their disbelief we had only so shortly suspended. What we were willing to take as real pain is only so shortly unsettlingly turned into facile representation. One feels as if the empathetic associative moment that others use to assure us of their authenticity is robbed of us before we can complete our catharsis.

Thomas works through what has been lost in other discourses around this traumatized body. This body is not essential, but socially coded. The use of Thornton Wilder's Our Town as a framing device belies this movement. "Our Town," as Thomas notes in his discussion of the work is seen as an "experimental" theatre production, but by audiences that know what to expect from such productions. Performance art has become idiomatic in much the same way at this moment, thus we can see the "experimental theatre" - "performance art" boundry/dialectic as the object of discourse. It is my opinion that one of the greatest failures in this generation of performance artists is their willingness to perform "the (naturalized) idiom of performance," whether that be multi-media extravaganza, expressive pedestrian movement or folding chair monologue. Thomas cunningly shows the seams of this idiom through his reference to this play which is overdetermined as "on the edge."

This confrontation with the social construction of pain is repeated again and again. After a long fight (an essential moment of male identity) in which Thomas and Gary Bellis repeat the same punches and kicks over and over, one taking the aggressive and the other the victims role alternately, one realizes that this has been as tightly choreographed as a dance. The pain is mere appearance. Later, Thomas shaves repeatedly, foaming, shaving, foaming, shaving. After the second time this grooming, caring, feminizing ritual becomes a masochistic ritual, only scraping and irritating skin which cannot become any smoother, any closer to the ideal. Near the end of the piece, after a repeated face slapping while repeating patriotic slogans commemorating attacks on America, "remember Pearl Harbor-slap, Remember the - slap, Remember the Alamo-slap", Thomas asks Bellis, "does your face hurt", Bellis, "no, why" (he seems incapable of remembering the face slapping only moments before), Thomas, "It sure hurts me", (He has shaved and shaved while Bellis read the script of "Our Town.", Thomas' over adherence to the law and submission to its pain renders him capable of historical memory)

The strongest moment of the piece comes near the end, followed only by the conclusion of the "Our Town" narration, Thomas and Gary Bellis exchange blows, similar to one of the choreographed blows in their previous fight. This time the blocking is turned 90o and we can see that it is not the face but supplicative hands which are being slapped to produce painful sounds. The illusion of the pain is shown. But then as a last moment, a sort of mise en abyme, one can see the hands growing redder, actually battered. The "real" of pain is misrecognized, but pain is dialectically produced, not altogether marginalized, both the representation of experience and the experience of representation. This taken with the birth of Thomas' nephew, narratively inscribed in Wilder's liberal-progressive-naturalizing myth "every child is nature's attempt to create a perfect person", reveals the horrifying aspect of such an essentialist liberalism.

Of course "Our Town" is the essentializing narrative par excellence ("things change, but they remain pretty much the same). Tom, for whom the piece is dedicated, on his first birthday, is a relative of Thomas' who is developmentally challenged, only beginning I suspect, to discover the barriers that society has placed in his way, as if disability was not enough in itself. This fact never becomes evident in the piece, perhaps for the better for he thus avoids a sentimental cheapness and allows us to see this critique is applicable to many essentializing discourses which fail to account for the social production of the "other." Thomas seems to comment upon the tactical flaw of many marginalized communities, not only disabled people, but women, racial minorities, and queers. By taking up an essentialized position, I'm what I am, its not a social construction, it's my nature. They seek acceptance through making their difference intransigent, unavoidable. In reality what they do is re-inforce and feed into the preexistent essentialist discourses around these differences which have been used to marginalize them: accept us how we are, despite the fact that "how we are" cannot be understood outside of prevailing represenations which are by definition depricating. A natural somehow self evident identity is posited instead of attempting to actively construct a new identity. It is necessary to reclaim identity, not to passively occupy stereotypes constructed by centuries of repression, but to actively occupy them and transform them.

Thomas seems to suggest a way to deal with the lived reality, and pain of marginaliztion, and to resist without essentializtion. Neither does he rely on the stable, essential productions of dominant ideology, nor to negate ideology altogether, he does not allow this to undermine the actual and lived moments of pain and oppression. Authenticity is thoroughly problematized, ideology becomes a practice, not a mere representation. Pain becomes present but only dialectically through its representation. Most of all, the moment of identity, the political construction of self is engaged instead of consigned to the atomized individual. In this way he is able to critique and address some problems with contemporary performance art, but more importantly to address with a poetic delicacy which avoids sentementality very critical issues in our society.