New TMT production turns Jean Genet into a challenge for its audience

When’s the last time you saw a play that proudly proclaimed itself degenerate? And what would you expect from a show that advertised itself that way? In Target Margin Theater’s THIS IS REAL, degeneracy takes many forms, but none are shameful. They are provocative, but they are also joyful and revolutionary.

The production, which began previews on March 1, officially opened on March 11, and runs through April 4 at 232 52nd St., is the culmination of the theater’s season, DEGENERATE ART NOW! In THIS IS REAL, the season ends with several bangs, considering the number of gunshots in the performance.

The play is experimental in both content and presentation. It opens with a monologue performed by James Tigger! Ferguson, who appears nude. The monologue recounts a sensual encounter inside a prison and seems to draw on Jean Genet’s semi-autobiographical novel Miracle of the Rose, written from the French writer’s experiences in prison.

David Herskovits, the show’s director and Target Margin’s artistic director, said the production began with his interest in Genet but grew outward from there, incorporating his own interests as well as those of the people involved in shaping the work, including performers, designers, lighting and sound technicians, and even interns.

“I’m not interested in what I know, I’m interested in what you know, what everyone else knows while I’m developing a show,” Herskovits shared in an interview before a preview performance.

That collaborative style is reflected in the show itself. The first words Tigger! speaks before beginning the monologue are, “I am David Herskovits.” Truthfulness aside, the gesture feels symbolic. The show begins with one man, who then makes room for others to overtake the stage. And overtake it they do. For the next several minutes, a group of performers writhe, scream, beg, and sing, stopping only when the surveillance state intrudes.

After this display of degenerate acts, performed in the theater lobby, the audience is led into a more traditional seating arrangement, though the scenes that follow remain unconventional.

The show moves through scenarios in a stream-of-consciousness rhythm. Clothes are put on, then removed again. Bombs fall. People are shot. Royals are crowned. Throughout, the dialogue often sidesteps literal meaning while holding onto emotional and political truth.

The politics of the show are direct and confrontational. Late in the performance, one political act onstage is clearly designed to provoke a visceral reaction. Some audience members may respond positively, others negatively. On the night I saw the show, this was the one moment audience members broke their silence with cheers, boos, gasps, and murmurs before the standing ovation at the end of the performance.

Immediately after that act of protest, a performer takes center stage and says, “Watching such acts performed often gives people an excuse to not do that thing in real life.”

Spoken to a largely white audience at a theater in a predominantly Latino and Asian neighborhood, the line lands as a challenge, a dare, and a call to action.

That challenge lines up with what Herskovits said he hopes audiences take from the work. “I hope it lights a fire. Hot, bright, emotionally full, and change-oriented,” he said.

THIS IS REAL is activist theater. Or it is purely absurd. Whether it lands as activism or absurdity may only become clear after audience members leave the theater and decide what, if anything, to do with the feelings the play provoked.