REVIEW: The Festival d'Avignon Presents YES DADDY By Bashar Murkus and Khulood Basel

The performances of this year’s Festival d’Avignon trended towards the intimate and the documentarian. With videos and testimonies, projects aimed to establish a personal connection with real world subjects. Bashar Mrkus and Khulood Basel’s Yes Daddy, now in performance at the Festival d’Avignon Théâtre Benoît XII, uphold the intimate. Their two-person play offers neither smoke nor mirrors to dampen the connection between the audience and the performances. It, however, eschews the documentarian in favor of the game of imagination.

An old man sits alone with his orange, his wheelchair not too far from his table. There is a knock at the door. Who is it? It’s a handsome escort that he invited over. Though he can’t remember doing so. The escort asks for his pay and then to leave. He doesn’t do "daddy-son" or, rather, "granddaddy-grandson” dynamics. The old man doesn’t know where the money is. He seems confused about much of the given circumstances. Though he seems to confuse the intruder with his lost son, he hugs him tenderly. The escort plays with this, entering and repeating this action until they have solidified a new dynamic. Is this a surreal alternate universe? Is the game afoot? Is this abuse? All valid questions arise as the play explores more intense, intimate dynamics between the two men.

At the end of the play, after we seem to discover that the father had raped his son - after the son exits the bedroom with a bloodied head - after the father had pissed himself and the son cleaned up, dressed in his mother’s clothes - after the son beckons his diapered father to take a few tentative steps towards him and then breastfeeds him. - After all of that, we learn that the father is lucid. That this has all been a game and that they both remember everything. “Why not?” the father asks. “You got to be who you wanted to be, and I got to be who I wanted to be.” After extreme bouts of intimacy, it was all a show. Usually, I don’t care for such reversals and how they seek internal rationales for vibrant surrealism. Though this twist was so earned that it expanded the project’s intellectual mandate. Bashar Murkus and Khulood Basel extend this fetish play to Genet-like questions of social permission and performativity. 

Murkus’s direction cleverly distorts Majdala Khory’s scenography, a system of large boards. These boards transform into the foyer, the laundry room, and at times, all boards are cast off stage. As two acts of artistic courage, the two performers anchor the project. As the handsome escort, Anan Abu Jabir is charming and dignified, though he also commits fully to embodying the son and mother figure. As the father, Makram J Khoury offers one of the performances of the Festival. In acts of extreme vulnerability, he maintains a steady commitment to the work. He is, at times, heartbreaking and perverse. Though this performative power comes from their mutual exchange. The two performers push each other into extremes of intimacy and vulnerability that left the audience, potentially, as voyeurs. Though, as the play reminds us, it’s all pretend.

Photo Credit: Christophe Raynaud de Lage / Festival d'Avignon

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