Abstract
From the moment a Linda Mussman performance begins, it is apparent that she and her actors intend to use the theatre's basic tools—language and movement—in highly unconventional ways. Sentences begin, but splinter or dissolve into fragments before they are finished. Words are stretched and distorted and twisted out of shape. Phrases drone like incantations till their meanings dissolve. The actors move in quick athletic bursts, or haltingly like wind-up toys, or in formal patterns like dancers. They freeze unexpectedly with a face or hand or foot isolated in a pool of light. Whether it is Mussman's own playfully abstract poetry as in her “triptych” Room/Raum, Door and Window (1978-79), the flowing rhetoric of Georg Buchner's Danton's Death (1980), or the delicate narrative of a Japanese fantasy play, The Bandit Princess (1978), the language of the piece is fragmented, its delivery restructured, and it is associated with oddly stylized movement.
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