Before going to see Sibyl Kempson’s newest play, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, you’d be best served to spend a few minutes doing a bit of research. If you start with Sontag and work all the way back to Dust Bowl Era exploitation photography (and probably much further if you're so inclined), the context and cultural pastiche at work in the play can reveal itself to you and you can buckle yourself in for everything else that’s coming your way.
In other words, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag may not be for the novice theater-goer. The inaugural production of Kempson's 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co., it focuses on a family of croppers who have been ravaged by a natural disaster, and the slick, cigarette-smoking photographer and bleeding heart journalist from the Big City who come down to observe and record the damage. Even though the play carries a very tongue-and-cheek attitude towards most of its subject matter, there are glimpses of reality that peek through in choice scenes, like a conversation about the economics of having children ("They don’t start earning a profit until 5 or 6”), or the scene in which the family requests that the journalist and photographer come back later, after they've had a chance to clean up, or the moment when truth gives way to exploitation. Borrowing from several different cultural touchstones, the story blends meta and non-meta situations; one moment the actors are fully invested in one another and the next they’re using anachronistic language and winking at the audience. At times, this creates the illusion that we are as complicit in the exploitation of the family as the journalist and photographer. Yet this is often lost with everything else that is going on onstage: people walking up and down the stairs carrying 2x4s, actors destructively marching through their set, the little tray of junk belonging to each character. It is, at times, an entire symphony of spinning plates.
Like the junkyard of metaphor and allegory that this play is, there are hidden gems everywhere. The unsung hero of the play is the wonderful live band complete with a clarinet and harp (fronted by the aforementioned Slick Cigarette and Bleeding Heart on guitar and piano, respectively); the songs by Ashley Turba are surprisingly refreshing. Let Us Now Praise Susan Suntag is fun, once you settle yourself in to the world Kempson creates.
