British playwright Mark Ravenhill doesn't have much use for his fellow artists, at least not the ten underground artists he depicts in his 2006 play, Pool (No Water),which is now running at the Flight Theater as part of the 2012 Hollywood Fringe Festival.
A scruffy, foul-mouthed bunch known only as The Group, they are proudly anti-establishment and collective-minded -- that is, until one of them, a queenly figure (played robustly by Jessica Lamprinos) achieves fame and fortune with her latest work. Her mega-success triggers an eruption of jealousy and hatred.
Things get worse, not better, when the queen has a diving accident and ends up in a coma. After shedding a few crocodile tears, they start plotting how best to turn her plight to their advantage. Soon, like vultures, they feed off her paralyzed body by trying to turn it into a commodity that can be sold to the public.
Ravenhill tells his mordantly satirical story by having his actors chant and sing their lines as they move around the stage, sometimes in unison, other times individually. The timing and choreography must have been fiendishly difficult to bring off, especially in a full-frontal orgiastic scene involving the entire cast.
The playwright wants to say important things about the shallowness of the art world, the dehumanizing impact of media and the internet, but his message is unfortunately drowned in a tsunami of nastiness and snideness.
