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Enter Achilles is something like a combination of all of these. Wickedly funny, fiercely brilliant, the hourlong work makes a pass at the way men treat women, but it concentrates on the way men treat each other. Newson holds a graduate degree in psychology, but he doesn't bludgeon us with analysis, for which we should all be unendingly grateful. Achilles makes good on the company's mission to deliver their ideas clearly and unpretentiously; rather than muddling through all the reasons why, DV8 give us bad behavior simply as it is, setting it in perpetual motion and letting us draw our own conclusions.
Newson juxtaposes the macho high jinks with homoerotic overtones and brief glimpses of aching vulnerability and fear. Most of Achilles is set in a pub, where men in suits swill beer and watch TV. A movable set with mirrors, ropes, see-through doors, and a rising floor is integral to the action. Manly gestures like the headlock, the dog pile, the exaggerated karate chop, the crotch grab, the backslap, and air guitar are woven into fast-paced, high-flying contact-improv physicality. The characters are boorish but likable, possessed of a loose-limbed grace and a joyous, easy camaraderie, jostling for one another's pints to the tune of the English Beat's "Hands Off She's Mine" and bumping torsos to "You Sexy Thing." In one hilarious and inexplicable passage, the men hunch over and stomp around the stage in a pack, grunting and hoisting their beers above their heads, yelling, "Hey!" Newson goes so far as to have the men step out onto the stage lip and get in the audience's face: "We can see your tits through that blouse," yells one to a woman in the balcony.
We have the restless sense that things are going to get ugly, and they do. When two men try to pick up the same pint glass between their teeth, they find their lips too close together to be socially acceptable, and separate abruptly. Swift and brutal violence erupts when a stranger whose colorful suit contrasts sharply with the rest's drabness dances solo in the middle of the bar. Newson contends that men police each other, not allowing in others what they will also not allow in themselves; it's not a new idea, but Newson gives it a fresh twist when the effeminate guy rips off his suit to reveal a Superman costume underneath.
This same Superman pops up in delightfully surreal ways throughout the rest of the piece: on the roof playing accordion, or dangling acrobatically from the ceiling by a rope. At one point, he fashions the rope into a swing for one of his attackers, who briefly loses his macho bravado and becomes a carefree kid again. The tension climaxes when one friend discovers the other's female blow-up doll and drags it into the crowd as blackmail. Glasses are smashed, epithets are hurled, egos are shattered, and the doll is destroyed. You wonder how these men who debase their friends this way would treat their enemies. Newson leaves us with one last strange and indelible image, of the humiliated man clinging desperately to his linoleum floor as it tilts up toward the audience, scattering debris in its ascension.
DV8 screens its films Strange Fish, Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, and Enter Achilles Wednesday, Nov. 12, at 7:30 p.m. at the Pacific Film Archive, 2625 Durant, Berkeley; call (510) 642-1412.
-- Heather Wisner
