Talk Show (2009)
By Omer Fast
Performa 09: Omer Fast, Talk Show Posted by artreview.com on November 17, 2009 By Joshua Mack After Omer Fast’s one-hour performance, Talk Show, I was looking for a cab, when Rosie Perez, who had just appeared in the piece and was also waiting for a yellow limousine, acknowledged me with a grimace registering resignation and frustration. When I offered to let her take the first cab, she waved me off with the back of her hand. We stood about ten feet apart, a chilly fall wind spinning her hair, until a taxi pulled over, and I repeated my offer. As she went to open the door, I said, “In this case, beauty before age”, to which she responded with the most ego-deflating, ‘get a life’ look I have ever been shot. Fast’s Talk Show is a cross between a chat show and a game of telephone. On a stage arranged like a set for an interview, an unidentified man I took to be Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground and now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told a moderator, played by the actor Tom Noonan, “how he got into this mess”. The mess in question was his radicalisation in the 1960s and his relationship with Diana Oughton, a fellow radical, who was killed in 19…
Watch Talk Show on Fast Ubu