A tangle of cords, electronic and lighting equipment, and pictures on cardboard in two or four dimensions was perhaps as fascinating as the use of them by artist and story teller Zach Dorn. The title of his self-described “Performance Art” proved half true referring to his art (as toy and theater), but watching his harried work putting everything together (and not always succeeding) was often indeed excruciating. In Dorn’s creations, toys are not traditional but rather crayoned, painted, or drawn pictorial constructs of people, places, things that illustrate—in cartoon fashion—stories that Dorn tells as he manipulates digitally their “performance” elements. These stories appear on a screen above the table that holds the art work and, in back of it, Dorn’s script and means of controlling the projections. Both process and product are a great deal more complicated than a traditional puppet or filmed cartoon show. For SaraSolo, Dorn used journal entries to narrate his stories that take place over a six-year period. That he asked the audience to suggest a year in which to begin made it seem that the chosen date would require some improvisation. Maybe it did; maybe not. Clarity in narration was not a salient feature of Dorn’s theater. For the record: the years chosen for the time of action began with 2005. One would suppose that would require that at least clothing of a story’s characters would be accurate, but apparently Dorn’s ready-made art could not be held to standard theatrical practice. The first story involved a character named Chad Elliot, Germany, a cruise, a villa, and a coffee ring on an old dresser (furniture, not a backstage helper). Then was Created (not my capital choice) a boy who had a vision in a coffee shop. Chad’s voice was next heard via a voice mail about returning security deposits. All the above led to A STORY ABOUT THE SADDEST STORY CONTEST. The person who won was illustrated but his story was not. He walked home “sad and alone.” From here on, Dorn went on about his various efforts to embellish the Elliot story or to tell new ones. He seems to have had a lot of relevant art work to use on these, especially after he decided to do more “on the dark side” than his stories went to earlier. I don’t want to go into any of them any more than I wanted to see even as much as I had already seen. Verdict: A good idea (of digitally capturing images and projecting them) but still in its development stages. Dorn’s art is clever, but he needs work vocally enunciating, scripting, and relating to his audience. His narrative style and the stories he uses lack coherence. He had trouble maintaining interest; many obviously thought he’d ended twice before he did. To give him credit: the title for his presentation did warn.
