Review: We Come to Collect: A Flirtation, With Capitalism Is Experimental Theater Nearing Bankruptcy

There is plenty to critique about capitalism, the economic system in which the means of production are privately owned, with the distribution of resources primarily driven by market forces and the profit incentive. Is it fair that passive ownership regularly yields greater rewards than active labor? No. Is it troubling that market competition always seems to be slouching toward monopoly? You bet. Are wealthy incumbents a threat to democracy that, if unchecked, will undermine the entire capitalist project, taking us back to something resembling feudalism? Absolutely.

Unfortunately, you won’t hear many cogent (or even coherent) arguments about those issues in Jenn Kidwell’s we come to collect: a flirtation, with capitalism, now making its world premiere at the Flea. A digressive rant animated by Romper Room antics, it may leave you thinking about the marketplace of off-Broadway theater and how it has become so thoroughly divorced from the needs and desires of its audience.

It opens shortly after 7pm with Kidwell and her co-star Brandon Kazen-Maddox lounging on a chaise. “Good morning,” she greets us, peering into an upstage mirror. This leads to musing about “debatably noble fictions” like the notion of work-life balance and time itself.

“What is time?” she asks, pausing as the audience collectively wonders if we’re meant to answer (we are). Teacherly, Kidwell calls on individuals who appear to be wearing watches to proffer an answer, and they comply through the nervous mumbles of a student who didn’t quite complete the reading.

The following 80 minutes go on like that, with Kidwell climbing into the house to directly engage with audience members, asking about their dreams and “devil nuggets,” which apparently means something you know to be true but don’t often show others. The critic seated next to me was interrogated about his shampoo and skincare routine. A woman wearing an N95 mask was asked for a kiss. Watching her mentally navigate this Sophie’s choice of progressive taboos constituted the most thrilling drama of the whole evening. It’s the kind of flirtation you might experience on a subway platform at one am.

“The devil nugget gleaming back at me,” Kidwell states with resonant sincerity, “from the rock face of my mind shaft / is my absolute clarity that / I neither trust nor believe in the nobility of an honest day’s work.”

And it’s easy to believe her after watching we come to collect, a half-finished clown show in which cliché masquerades as wisdom (the front gate of Auschwitz flashes across the screen in Matthew Deinhart’s video design) and strained outrageousness substitutes for rigor (Kidwell’s breasts, which she has dubbed “Cardi B” and “Rihanna,” make celebrity appearances). It’s meant to be shocking and provocative, but it’s about as edgy as a pair of safety scissors handed out at a Montessori school.

This is a shame, because the rubbery-faced Kidwell has natural gifts as a performer. In one section, she speaks with perfect clarity through a plastered smile. Kazen-Maddox is similarly expressive, live-translating everything into American Sign Language, even Kidwell’s ad-libs. There are even nuggets of brilliance in the design, like Petra Floyd’s Marie Antoinette wigs made from toilet paper rolls. But Kidwell and her co-director Adam Lazarus have failed to shape these individual elements into a cohesive whole that builds, astounds, or persuades. Mostly, it feels like a church service you pray will quickly end.

This is especially true when they project a QR code leading to a Venmo account and pass around a collection plate, a bit that becomes more pathetic each time I encounter it. “I might not believe in money, but I know I like having money,” Kidwell admits in one of the more honest lines in the play.

Kidwell seems to want to disentangle our inherent worth from the monetary value we can command in the marketplace, but the list of grants and fellowships she includes in her program bio betrays a certain insincerity. Clearly, there is someone out there buying her nonsense.

Of course, receiving lumps of cash from philanthropists with piles to burn is quite different from convincing working people to part with the price of admission (at the preview performance I attended there were several empty seats in a house that had already reduced its capacity). Perhaps so many artists despise the market because it lays bare just how little their work is valued by the average citizen. One can only survive this brutal democracy of the marketplace by daily imbibing a heady cocktail of delusion and contempt—renewable resources in the not-for-profit theater, so long as the donors keep giving.

I emerged from we come to collect more convinced that if the theater is to be liberated from the whims and fetishes of the super-rich, a market-based approach—that is to say, capitalism—is the surest path to revolution.