A disembodied voice in Mike Corrao’s new play, Smut-Maker, proclaims amid a Fruit Stripe gum-like cacophony of vomit, jazz, and psychogeographies that “smut is where everyone is satisfied.” Subtitled as “Theater of Impotence,” it’s unclear Smut-Maker has much interest in satisfying its readers. Instead, the text offers an explosive escape from poetic convention, a revolt against lyrical linearity and the dead romances it promises: “disembodied voices map the actions of a beheaded deity.” Phantasmagoria unleash themselves onto the surface of every page. An accelerated dread propels the play’s action.
Each full-color page spread of Smut-Maker comprises an act, across which flow groupings of fragmented text and incomprehensible shapes. These shapes behave like the residue of language, Charles Olson’s projectives turned projectile, splashed onto the page, staining its surface. Something like a narrative ties the acts together. The play progresses elliptically like a demonic carousel, but stories emerge in piecemeal. Three failed romances haunt the “narrator-fool’s” consciousness, structuring the unfiltered emanations. These boys—Blondboy, Tommyboy, and Beatboy—maintain a messianic aura, as if in each instance their love might bring the narrator-fool’s salvation. Other structuring devices include the sun, which morphs shape and changes color throughout the play, and sets of recursive references to Corrao’s pantheon: Sun Ra, Seurat, Bolaño, Bergson, and Wittgenstein, among others.
Corrao’s prosody collaborates with the reader’s attention. Song is fractured into non-lyrical statements that can be read in any order. The lines do not relate to each other vertically, horizontally, or syntactically, but kinesthetically. Clusters of words catch the eye coincidentally. They shift in size and volume, and symbiosis substitutes for line breaks. Some lines cohere like city blocks into strange rectangles. Others fluidly squiggle into the domains of other voices. Meanwhile, in a neonesque trick of the eye, the color contrast between text and background allows the letters to seemingly vibrate when you look at them.
And though the voices lack bodies, they are grotesquely bodily. Together they compose a viscera. The clusters of text bleed like organs. “Pink matter spills from their head” (Act 28). It’s as soft as your favorite Seurat. A repeated, “OOOOO” (Act 49), performs momentary pointillisms on spreads too digitally sleek to show pixels. Instead, the elaborate shapes glow against their backgrounds like plastic maenads. A voice recalls objects, “in the tradition of Katrina Fritsch” (Act 41). Incessant references to artists and philosophers—while at times, heavy-handed—provides signal posts for interpretation. The vastness of the play’s textures and concerns should not be underestimated. Some acts feel like watermelon candy. Others like highway billboards for sex shops. All this renders a psychosphere syncopated as the music of hallucinatory infrastructures. Responses from an absent audience, (fade), (applause), (laughter), emerge from vibrant nooks.
In this way, the play is a dérive through a terrain of disembodied speech. Debord describes the dérive as a “technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.” It is a methodology for observing landscape or geography in synchronicity to your surroundings. In reading Corrao, one feels fixated “on new habitual axes to which they will constantly be drawn back.” One returns again and again to utterances embedded into the narrator-fool’s psychogeography. One is doing poppers, listening to Sun Ra’s Nuclear War. One feels aerial, omniscient. Debord quoting Marx: “The very landscape comes alive.” Smut-Maker dallies in its excesses, meanders through a paranoid myopia of intimacies evaporated, huffed and vomited back up again: precise memories of Blondboy “standing outside the laundromat again” (Act 8), or when “Tommyboy and smut-maker fuck on the floor,” how “they tangle in a cradle of limbs” (Act 28). The fractured architecture of these voices become something like “a skyline draped across the horizon,” “the materials of its construction pooling together” (Act 6).
Projecting a mind onto the space of a place is a decidedly futurist gesture. Corrao achieves in his play the semblance of a built thing. It is not like the monumental or crystalline vapidity of today’s imperial neo-futurist architecture (think Zaha Hadid or Norman Foster), but something which probes the violent and imperceptible throws of our times’ ruptured consciousness. It’s closer to Sant’Elia’s unbuilt La Città Nuova, how it inspires a seminal haunting. The motion of the eye is not ever-forward overriding even the cessation of breath (as in a Mayakovsky poem), but diffused, scattered, and entropic (like the voices from the Arkestra in Rocket Number 9). This results in a sickly feeling of spectral discomfort and inexhaustible obsession. A voice says, “your projection is weighed down by dataplasm” (Act 42). This is a futurism of impotent resurrection.
The play’s deterioration occurs continuously, arriving from the hidden corners of every act. You know from the start the bright colors are lying to you. There’s no easy way out of this “cosmic apparatus” (Act 30). The chromatic gradients on the cover and foredge allude to an impossible circulation. Towards the end of the play, the voices deteriorate to streams of alphanumeric nonsense: “AehkoPE#8p@9” (Act 60). Mike Corrao’s poetry enacts the extreme and hyper-accelerated conditions of our perception, while rejecting anything utopic about those conditions: “I don’t have any dreams”; “They are not a currency I can justify holding onto” (Act 48). The frequent refrain of “no more boys,” embeds the fear of another false messiah into the same landscape as the narrator-fool’s obsessive yearning. Whatever uncanny ecstasy in “rockets slowly inching towards the upper atmosphere,” (Act 48) entails as well a hopeless anxiety. Something necrotic suffuses these rainbowed utterances.