'The Bed' is a terrific way to see ourselves
Homo sapiens mating observed
By Mike Steele
Star Tribune Staff Writer
Saturday, NOVEMBER 9, 1996

While endless TV documentaries reflect our obsession with the oddities of nature - the mating games of the auk, the territorial wars of mites and such - the Margolis Brown Company's "The Bed Experiment" reminds us, with wit and imagination, that we Homo sapiens are the oddest creatures of all.

This movement-theater piece won a 1987 Bessie (New York dance and performance award). Since moving to Minneapolis three years ago, the company's leaders, Kari Margolis and Tony Brown, have been absorbed mostly in training a strong local company and experimenting with new works. So it's great to get a glimpse into their history.

The Bed Experiment" is a cheeky and brainy piece. The audience, which can purchase binoculars for close Homo sapiens watching, gazes upon a distillation of weird and wild human behavior carried out in the species' natural nesting place: a giant bed. With its barred headboard, the bed resembles a cage, and its inhabitants - four women and four men wearing white underwear - look something like apes in a human zoo.

The first image is stunning, accompanied by the sounds of whistling wind and bawling babies. A white sheet is ripped from the bed, revealing four-heads peeking out at either end, all of them powdered white; with large, vacant eyes, they look like porcelain dolls.

Their heads slowly rising, the men on one side, women on the other, notice each other. They begin arching their necks and stretching toward the other side, panting and straining as they begin what to nonhuman outsiders would appear to be very bizarre mating behavior.

Over the work's one-hour duration, the bed serves as an arena for stylized courtship and consummation, birth, domestic tussles turned into wrestling match es, and something like mini-wars. Transformation is at the heart of the piece, as comic moments - the seducers suddenly turning into puling babes - turn into introspective ones in the form of contemplative and tender duets.
Occasionally, a voice will come over a loudspeaker in the reassuring, flannel tones of a documentarian commenting on the rituals of birds in the Antarctic or the psychology of rutting animals - only to be juxtaposed with the "civilized" human species who engage in battles of the sexes, territorial defenses, violence and worse. When one human gets in the way, he is summarily dumped off the bed and sucked under it.

It's funny watching these people thrash around, trying to keep up with their libidinous instincts. It ends wryly, with gaudily dressed tourists strolling out to videotape these beasts and feed them popcorn. It's also a terrific, turnabout way of seeing ourselves: so certain of our superiority and sophistication until, like the artist, we come under the close scrutiny of the outsider.

I'm sure mating auks don't feel they're any more foolish than mating people are, but both can look plenty foolish when ogled in a zoo - or in a theater piece as deft as this one.

-Who: Presented by the Margolis Brown Company.
-Where: Movement Theatre Center, 115 Washington Av. N., Minneapolis.
- When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and Nov. 18.
- Tickets: $15. Call 339-2025.
-Review: The human race is observed in its natural terrain a bed - and found to be both a provocative species and a very foolish one in this witty work.