TRANSGRESSIONS

The world of Transgression, written by Terry Curtis Fox, exists within multiple time periods. In 1970, an adult male artist engages in an illegal relationship with 15-year-old Robin Black, played skillfully by actress Ivy Rose. When the artist dies in 2010, his wife, Jane Ives, returns to his studio to find pictures of young Robin that were obviously taken without Robin’s consent. Later it’s revealed the photos were hidden where he knew they would be found posthumously.

She choses to share these photos with the museum curator designing the artist’s memorial exhibit. Fox then weaves a unique intersection throughout the plot, where characters and ideas from 1970 and 2010 coexist, conjuring “a reckoning with art, consent and legacy”.

Entering the black-box theater at HERE Arts Center drops you into the photographer’s private studio. There’s a messy bed where he receives inspiration by his muses, and a photo backdrop to capture them. Black and white stills, silhouettes of naked women’ s bodies frame the space, enforcing his life’s controversial work as central to the plot.

Fox shuttles the audience nonlinearly through this discovery, using powerful lighting tools to shape the experience. A bright projection of the year accompanied each jump between 1970 and 2010, and in the mysterious in-between places of past and present. Looming ambient tones form a blanket of blue light that washes the stage.

When particularly controversial themes are presented, the stage fades to black, and the audience is stunned with bright white light pointed directly at them, exposing the work’s exact dilemma — looking at morally questionable art.

While the audience is never exposed to the photographs of young Robin, these images are cast as the best work of this artist’s career. The characters are conflicted about what
to do, and present day Robin enters the story to express what seems obvious: destroy the nonconsensual images of her teenage body instead of putting them on display for thousands. A powerful moment occurs when she asks the curator to imagine “that photograph” hanging in the gallery, while older men with daughters stand in front of it lusting after that body.

The curator argues you can’t determine human nature, or alter someone’s inward impulses. But the point: why would you perpetuate it? Does the quality of photographic beauty overcome the ugly nature of a crime? Fox succeeds at articulating all sides, but all comes crashing down with the discovery of tapes, and an intense scene between the ghost of the artist and his widow.

Call it performative contradiction, or thematic hypocrisy, the play critiques the perpetual moral violation of this young woman, through compelling staging by director Avra Fox-Lerner.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Emma Edy Morris