Review: The Quickening of the Wax, Chelsea Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Only the other day, a friend was explaining their phobia of dummies, manekins and waxworks: inanimate objects with a human form. The more life-like, she explained, the more disturbing. The power of these objects resides in their uncanniness – the feeling that something is not quite right, that it may or may not have subjectivity of its own. In other words, these objects look as if we might analogously expect them to have an autonomous position on the world and, yet, they do not. Uncanniness is therefore increased by realism and resemblance.

Here Marisa Carnesky, in collaboration with underground New York performer Rasp Thorne, explores the power of waxworks and, while she may not pull together a trenchant thesis, The Quickening of the Wax offers a firm survey. It gives you room to pause.

First, she allows us to experience it, drawing her audience into the room in two groups and delivering a chilling jolt. Invited to amble through and examine the onstage objects – waxworks with organs exposed, model hands, feet and fingers, a guillotine – we stumble into a ghost train moment. The lights plunge down, a camera flashes accompanied by a scream. For all its clunkiness, it delivers a chilling intake of breath. Carnesky has made us aware of her hold over us. We know the trap could snap shut at any moment.

And so, as we observe what becomes a lecture-demonstration, we do so in a state of suspense; guarded and susceptible.

The most obvious strand Carnesky draws out is that of death. The guillotine and electric chair – both of which are employed, albeit in pretence – remind us that to stare at a waxwork is to observe one’s own corpse. And yet, like the executions Carnesky enacts, it is marked by its artifice and approximation. The waxwork is insincere: quite literally, not without wax.

Sweeping through Carnesky flags the dualism inherent in the waxwork, that we fear existence – or the lack thereof – without the body, but also the ache of a body stripped of purpose. As her wax models, two of which are supplemented by an actor’s own body parts poking through holes, writhe and groan, they seem oddly trapped. The body is unable to move, its various parts – organs and limbs – have stiffened and solidified. The prison of paralysis becomes clear.

Or perhaps the effect is the other way around, the inanimate object made animate and the warped fantasy of resurrection. For its final pithy image, Carnesky brings a cleaner onstage, vacuuming around the creaking, observant bodies before freezing herself. Its at once a slow winding down, gliding softly back to the mundane, and a witty flip of perspective.

There is too much breadth in Carnesky’s piece, which seems both scatty and measured in its structure - a rolling miscellany of points - but her content is fascinating. She smartly suggests the –philia that runs counter to the –phobia, exploring the angelic serenity of the waxen face, Snow White sweet and still. She explores the making process and its materiality, the ritual and the objectification of persons. And while that brings about a pensive whole, Carnesky doesn’t quite pull it tightly together. She can’t find the twist to tighten the corset and transform the subject. Intriguing and interesting, then, but The Quickening of The Wax never casts its matter in a new light.