The most immediately pertinent title in this year’s Under the Radar festival at the Public is The Truth Has Changed, written and performed by Josh Fox and directed by Fox and Ron Russell.
During The Truth Has Changed Fox isn’t just whistling “Dixie,” although if he’d thought of it, he might have included the beloved ditty in his 90-minute-plus tirade. He does grab a banjo at one point to pick out (but not sing) “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which he tells a surely unaware audience that the tune was popularized throughout United States in 1814 after beginning life as a European drinking song.
As he recounts innumerable contemporary assaults of the truth, the “Star-Spangled Banner” fact may actually be one of the few he dispenses that perhaps most audience members won’t already have under their belts. That’s if they’ve kept up with the news—real, not fake—over the last few years.
Those are years, he underlines—after he opens with the challenging question, “How do we know what is true?”—that stretch back long before today’s troublesome Washington, D.C. administration. Not that Fox shies away from the rampant current dissembling and consistent outright lying. Among other made-up excuses he mentions are the 1960s Gulf of Tonkin incident that ignited the Vietnam War and the false missile claims that sent thousands of American troops into Iraq in 2003 (and for the time being are keeping them there).
As writer, Fox does a splendid job. (Amusing, isn’t it, that he shares his surname with a certain prominent, if not predominate, news outlet?) Reiterating this era’s besetting problems, he may be stressing the nation-wide fracking situation more than anything else. For good reason—citing Gasland, his 2010 documentary. He particularly stresses mounting released methane conditions.
One answer he eventually supplies for eventualities is, “We’re always sold on a lie.” The comment pertains to his conviction that a persistent national goal is “oil and racism?” As part of that conclusion, he speaks at length about his viewing the BP Gulf of Mexico spill from 3,000 feet above and the skirted acknowledgement of the severe damage done. Addressing what some contend is our major contemporary issue—climate change—he spends minutes discussing the two-degree global temperate hike that by 2030 will doom the globe to mass resettlement. He laughs at one glib solution being to “adapt.”
Before he closes, he devotes a hefty segment to the giveaway algorithms now accumulated for corporate big brothers and sisters. Repeating the cry, “They know who you are,” he declares that thousands of details are being amassed by, for instance, Facebook and the ubiquitous Mark Zuckerberg, who’s seen in footage where he attempts to dodge damning questions from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Fox also gets into other personal info gatherers like Cambridge Analytica, although he doesn’t refer to its demise. (Nor does he comment that all the facts piled up didn’t keep Hillary Clinton from winning the 2016 popular vote.)
So Fox’s writing is pithy and persuasive. But what about his performing? That’s another kettle of fishy behavior. Seated for the most part at a desk with microphone—like Spalding Grey and Mike Daisey before him—he doesn’t just speak his mind. He performs. He gestures broadly and gives himself over to histrionic changes of tone. He raises his voice to a shout and then theatrically lowers it to a near whisper.
All the time, he’s pushing buttons on a control board, starting and stopping mood music, as if scoring a 1940s Joan Crawford movie. When Zuckerberg and AOC are going head to head during their inflammatory footage, for which Fox gets a film direction credit, he sits near the screen playing the banjo, as if to mock (unnecessarily) the proceedings.
Why is a choreographer listed? Because there’s a sequence where the sly Fox picks up an umbrella, opens it and dances around the stage for a while under Barney O’Hanlon’s supervision. Don’t ask what social ill he’s belittling just then. The capering is too distracting.
Let’s just say that Fox as writer is justly opinionated and, more often than not, right on target. As performer, however, the climbing up to stand on the desk and then jumping off (and so on) threatens to render his angry screed phony. It might be beneficial for him to consider that the importance of what he wants to establish isn’t enhanced by the compulsive clowning around. Neither is anything he wants to establish heightened by the overblown lighting, for which no designer is credited.
There’s another paradox Fox has built into his over-animated lecture. As he crafts a strong case about the fear that manipulative forces are daily attempting to instill in American hearts and minds, he’s conjuring fear in his audience. This is his approach to instigating societal change. He may be correct in suggesting that fear, not love, makes the world go around, but why join the fearmongers instead of heartily promoting an approach to beat them?
Incidentally, the Under the Radar Festival is also including this go-round a 16-minute virtual-reality item, To the Moon, which plays like a fairground ride. Only five people at a time are allowed into the screenings—replete with head gear and hand-held devices. At the moment all showings are sold out, which doesn’t mean last-minute tickets may not become available. Laurie Anderson has associated herself with the enterprise, but is hardly on hand. It does seem to be her voice that makes a few comments on wondering where we come from and why she so dotes on the stars.
