Body Familiar

The Joe Goode Performance Group touts Body Familiar as a play that blazes the borderlands between theater and dance, borderlands that have not, in the last few years, gone unexplored. A gay artist named Leonard (Liam Vincent) builds sculptures out of sheep intestine. His rich patron, Kitty, is a socialite fraud who believes she knows more about art than she actually does. Her husband, Bull, can't get over the death of his first wife, Simone, and Bull's intelligent, bitchy sister Katherine goes insane. The subtexts of the relationships among these four people -- with a gay doctor (Felipe Barrueto-Cabello) thrown in for romantic confusion -- are expressed in surprisingly literal modern dance as the actors speak their lines. While Kitty and Bull fail to communicate, like most married couples, the sinewy ghost of Simone (Marit Brook-Kothlow) pours herself over Bull's shoulders and plays in his lap. "What are you doing, Bull?" his wife asks. (He's reading a book.) "What does it look like I'm doing?" he snaps. The scene is well-danced, funny, stiffly acted, and somehow obvious. Goode's excellent choreography overshadows his playwriting. By far the best part of the show is a whimsical pure-dance routine at the start of Act 2, introducing us to Katherine's insanity, with Brook-Kothlow and Barrueto-Cabello chanting, "She ... cracked ... up," and moving like pigeons. The rest of the play tilts toward pomposity (and sometimes topples). "Sure, this body is familiar," says Leonard, referring to himself, "but it's here, it's finite." His work in sheep intestines is a way of reaching out to other bodies, and this joke, if it is one, becomes an overly precious concept that weighs on the show like a bad meal.