Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – John Kelly’s TIME NO LINE weaves together a living memoir, creating art in the process

• By drediman
• March 11, 2018
• No Comments

John Kelly in “Time No Line” at La Mama.

Last night, I caught one of the final performances of veteran performance artist John Kelly’s theatrical memoir Time No Line at, fittingly, La Mama’s Ellen Stewart Theatre. Sufficiently doing justice to his long, storied career is a daunting task, but Mr. Kelly has done so in a theatrically eloquent, quietly profoundly manner. You see, Mr. Kelly possesses a true artist’s soul. His continuous search for expression and authenticity has led him across several truly disparate genres – classical ballet, the visual arts, opera, drag, performance art, and so on – ultimately creating works that defy description but are unmistakably his in their intense sense of exploration.

What I found astonishing about Time No Line was not only the way it efficiently wove together a series of vignettes – via journal entries over the years – depicting his professional and personal development as a performance artist, but doing so in a way that simultaneously created art. Despite a few understandable lapses in concentration here and there, I continuously marveled at the way Mr. Kelly was able to seamlessly incorporate dance and movement, drawing (the vast Ellen Stewart stage was essentially a huge canvas for him to doodle on), video, and song. In this piece, Mr. Kelly has effectively collapsed time, leaving behind a strong, potent residue of a man who has survived the unspeakable and lived gorgeously through it all.

RECOMMENDED

TIME NO LINE
Off-Broadway, Play/Performance
La Mama at the Ellen Stewart Theatre
1 hour, 20 minutes (without an intermission)
Through March 11