“It’s HUGE.” This is perhaps the biggest complaint the Rotterdam bookstore owner Inez van Dam has about Paul McCarthy’s buttplug-wielding Santa Claus sculpture, which was installed outside her home and business on Eendrachtsplein square. Her ire over the controversial work, and the debate it raised over public funding for art projects, is at the core of a comic theatre piece, Looking for Paul, by the Dutch troupe Wunderbaum, on show through Saturday at New York Live Arts in Chelsea.
The deeply self-referential storyline beggars belief: the Wunderbaum cast invite Inez to Los Angeles to confront McCarthy as part of their residency at the RedCat theatre. This quickly spirals into an existential crisis for the whole group as they debate—via emails, which are read out for the first half of the performance—the artistic process and what kind of work they should create now that they’ve received all that funding. “It’s all about new media and performance today,” the cast’s resident difficult-genius proclaims.
But the satire is spot on and the parody of McCarthy’s own performance art is flawless, with a graphic grand climax of cartoonish characters that spread faeces, squirt ketchup, simulate sex acts and generally trash the stage. The show, which won a Total Theatre Award during the 2014 Edinburg Fringe Festival, travels to the Harbourfront Centre, Toronto in April 2016.
