“Letter of Love (The Fundamentals of Judo) reviewed by Jacob Davis

Highly Recommended **** Painting, judo, and psychological incest? Letter of Love (The Fundamentals of Judo), the new play now at Trap Door Theatre, has a lot going on. The brainchild of French guest director Aleksi Barrière, this piece is devised from the two sources in its title: one a stage-directionless dramatic monologue by experimental playwright Fernando Arrabal, the other a treatise by 1950s painter Yves Klein. The centricity of staged judo fights to the performance puts a unique spin on this examination of how young people try to break free of their parents’ legacy. It makes everything a lot more visceral and provides a living illustration of the type of toxic relationship described in Arrabal’s text as the cruelest form of torture, in which people are starved into eating those they love.

As is typically the case with Trap Door plays, the performers are onstage when the audience enters, but this time, they’re doing something unusually normal: warming up on a mat. The reason for this soon becomes clear. Yves Klein, we are told through dialogue split among the four actors, believed that paintings contain an existential struggle between line and color emblematic of how humans attempt to order the chaos that animates us. Judo, the art of falling, is another representation of this. We see this play out when the elderly mother (Marzena Bukowska) delightedly declares that she has received a letter from her estranged son on her birthday, and her younger counterpart (Hallie Ecker), engages in a grappling match with him that will last for nearly the next seventy minutes.

Her son (whose younger self is present as actor Mike Steele and older self is played by Bob Wilson) had been very close to her after his father was arrested and disappeared by Franco’s goons. When he was very young, the two were extremely close amid the upheaval of war and their social isolation during the height of fascism in Europe. But as the son aged, he came to wonder if his mother was actually complicit in what happened to his father. Or, at least, if she did not live up to his idealized image of how the wife of a political prisoner behaves, which he saw as an equal betrayal. The recriminations between them were especially bitter because they were still deeply in love/lust. Both are needy, manipulative, and masters at browbeating. In the present, the son engages in the sort of boundary-pushing painting that Klein is famous for, such as using the bodies of nude female models as paint application tools. He’s apparently working through some issues.

It’s quite remarkable that the actors are all able to deliver their lines so clearly while being flipped and grappled with. The show is intense, but not all done at a high volume. Some of the most disturbing moments are the quieter times when a judo hold becomes the embrace of a coercive lover or when tickles are really a power play. Clever lighting and set designs by Richard Norwood and Samantha Meng Shui allow the actors to merge into Klein’s monochromatic paintings during the discourses on art scattered throughout the show. When they’re not on the mat, the cast play found instruments to provide more of the ritualistic elements Arrabal believes help the audience reach a heightened state (“Panic theatre”). There’s even some humor, mostly as the expense of the excesses of the 60s experimenters.

Is Arrabal’s text improved by the merger of Klein’s? The focus is certainly shifted, since instead of only the mother, we see her son as an equal presence and have a sense of the long-term societal consequences of her compromises. Klein provided Barrière with a fully-formed visual vocabulary to draw from, and that makes an arresting and exhausting experience. This is a production that rewards an audience for having some prior knowledge of art history, but for novices, there’s plenty of exciting judo to watch, as well as a twisted psychological drama.

Letter of Love (The Fundamentals of Judo) runs through April 28 at Trap Door Theater, 1655 W Cortland, Chicago. Parking is available in the neighborhood.

Running time is seventy minutes.

Performances are

Thursdays:          8:00 pm

Fridays:                                8:00 pm

Saturdays:           8:00 pm

Tickets are $20-25, with 2-for-1 admission of Fridays.

To order, call 773-384-0494 or visit Trap Door Theatre.

To see what others are saying, go to Theater in Chicago, go to Review Round-Up and click at “Letter of Love”.