MATTIAH 2239 - Playing Pretend

Beyond the actor itself, what is the most essential aspect of performance? When thinking about theater as a form of storytelling, which seeks to transport an audience to a time, place, and narrative experience, one cannot help but consider aspects such as production, set design, costumes, those elements which extend beyond the performance itself, in order to evoke an imagined space. Yet there exists a clear inverse approach, arguably minimalist in terms of production, through which the performer, accompanied by naught but the most minimal of prop and costume work, conjures the unseen, utilizing a deft understanding of sound, weight, and somatic awareness. This is the actor as an illusionist, bending and teetering under invisible weight, pausing for respite beside a tree that does not exist, not unlike a marionette, galvanized by imperceptible strings. Such a mastery of form is on incredible display across the duration of Mattiah 2239, a post-apocalyptic exploration of mimework, modernity, and the paradoxical nature of the human as a social animal.

In an unnamed future wasteland, two neighbours dance, bicker, and play games of pretend, in order to distract themselves from the fact that they are the sole survivors of humanity’s extinction. The titular Mattiah is a paragon of responsibility. He tends to his poultry, maintains his well, and only eats as much rice as he needs to. He begrudgingly shares these amenities with his friend and neighbour, Yohanna, who bestows chaotic levity upon each scene. In one instance, Yohanna will gleefully scoop up a chicken and bound across the stage, with clucking bird in tow, pursued by a frustrated Mattiah. Of course, there is no chicken on stage, only bricks. In fact, all of the aforementioned possessions are represented on stage by a number of nondescript bricks, which the two actors manipulate with seemingly effortless skill.

It is here where the play takes on a fundamental layer of meaning, as the neighbours play pretend with their limited surroundings. Mattiah scolds a brick with exasperation, addressing it as his son, while Yohanna imagines himself as the owner of various perfumes and sprays, imported from Dubai. Thus, a space of material uncertainty is created between audience and performance, as the actors mime as characters who mime as other characters. This throughline of absurdity concludes as Mattiah, having chased off his sole companion in favour of his supposedly material possessions, remarks that his own existence, which he refers to as a “play”, cannot carry on without an audience. While in the context of the narrative, the audience that Mattiah refers to is his fellow human being, such a remark is simultaneously addressed to the audience, solidifying the spiralling nature of the relationship between act, actor, and audience, as an essential facet of human existence.

It is this process of perception and reaction which forms the basis for Mattiah 2239’s model of society, which is proven to be just as real and tangible as those bottles of perfume, that are simultaneously bricks, that are simultaneously placeholder props for a piece of theater. Through this process, the play interrogates the notion of material ownership taking precedence over societal cooperation and understanding, where the material is robbed of its immediate nature, its weight only implied by the movements of the actors. Yet it is not the weight of chickens and crockery that ultimately causes Mattiah to stumble and fall, but instead that of the realization that he has, in his own obsession with possession, discarded that invisible thing which matters to him the most. An experience such as this is, in many ways, one made possible only through the medium of theater, which contains the potential to entirely transcend traditional media boundaries, and render audiences as part of the stage, and the stage as part of the world beyond. If all the world is indeed a stage, then what use are our bricks?