Performance art

Earn while you burn

By Chris Thompson

As an audience began to turn up for the second of Vasilios Gletsos’s two sold-out performances last Friday at the Filament Gallery, an ancient record player pumped out the music of Milli Vanilli. The sounds soothed the tension created when a kid accidentally knocked over and broke a tiny sculpture of a woman’s torso.

Behind the two tables supporting his miniature stage, Gletsos sorted through the puppets, props, and backdrops of his show. Out of a large trunk with a photo of William Burroughs taped to the inside, he extracted things one by one: cut-outs of clipper ships, one of a cartoonish little girl in a bunny-suit, several Little Trees air-fresheners.

Satisfied that things were in place, he came out to greet friends who had come for his “six short plays for toy theater,” collectively and threateningly entitled “The 6 Great Plagues of Burning Foul Mouth.”

Gletsos, a third-year student at the Maine College of Art and creator of Pros·the·sis magazine, will be the last to perform at the Filament’s current location. The gallery will close around New Year’s, to reopen later this winter a few doors up Congress Street in what used to be the Munjoy Hill Market.

The lights dimmed; he played some mild-mannered classical music, and lifted the stage’s cardboard curtain. To a child’s cries of “Puppets!” the first scene began, with Gletsos pulling paper sailboats back and forth across a homemade harbor. During the six acts, several cryptic themes split into a dozen sub-themes: in one scene, a record extolled the virtues of working for Amway, while a series of backdrops showed the houses of the imaginary town where Gletsos’s story was taking place catching fire. On stage, an aspiring salesman tried to peddle the idea of a root canal procedure to his 8th grade science teacher. A 1960s motivational voice droned on, “You’ll make money without even trying. Be the envy of your friends and neighbors.” The flames burned higher. The play ended, its disjointed narrative leaving the audience feeling that something tragic had happened, but not sure quite what it was.

Gletsos let the crowd vote for which music they wanted during their post-performance mingling. He offered his “Hits of the ’50s and ’60s” record.

“It’s got ‘Leader of the Pack’ . . . ” he said, but the crowd’s desire for more Milli Vanilli was overwhelming. And suddenly, so was the significance of the Amway employee working tirelessly while his neighborhood burned down.