In My Fellow Americans, queer performance artist Peter Carpenter blows apart the cliches of Ronald Reagan’s presidency by bringing out their surreality, tying them to unexpected emotions, or both. But the piece ultimately runs aground on the personal.
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Crammed with music, texts, movement, cultural allusions, and ideas, My Fellow Americans addresses heroism, weakness, violence, theatricality, spectatorship, memory, and the slipperiness of identity. Carpenter and his four fellow creator-performers bring a complex mix of conflicting emotions to bear on the era, including nostalgia, anger, and pity for the powerful man who was ultimately powerless against Alzheimer’s.
These transgressive fantasy images acknowledge Reagan’s iconic stature—and Carpenter’s apparently lingering wish to remake him into something more heroic. At the top of the piece, Carpenter recites some of the lyrics from Tommy Womack’s not-entirely-ironic song “I Miss Ronald Reagan”; later, he admits that he was both moved and confused by Reagan’s first inaugural address, with its lyrical depictions of everyday heroes who were just people like himself. Carpenter, who was a boy then, says he almost cried when Reagan intoned “so help me God.”
Empathy for human weakness—even Reagan’s—opens out the piece, giving it breadth. But that’s lost in the end. Focusing, finally, on the “losses due to AIDS,” Williams tearfully returns to a memory mentioned earlier, of an uncle’s probable lover probably struck down by AIDS. But the tears seem forced: Williams was young, and he doesn’t seem to remember much or have much of a connection to the man. Suddenly narrowing the work’s focus down to a personal reminiscence that’s not really even all that personal makes My Fellow Americans abruptly smaller, just as it has burgeoned into the present.
