Review: Not in Kansas Anymore: Tornado Tastes Like Aluminum Sting at CATF

It’s hard to discuss Harmon dot aut’s play Tornado Tastes Like Aluminum Sting, being presented by the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV. dot aut shares their principal character’s autism, ADHD, synesthesia, and lack of gender specificity. The play is professedly, and clearly, an effort to speak up for these intersectional identities, but the result is hard to come to grips with, and perhaps harder than the playwright envisioned.

Let me start with this. Theatergoers are familiar with plays in which multiple alternative versions of events are given equal dignity. Think of Nick Payne’s Constellations, for instance, in which a man and a woman flirt, don’t flirt, marry, don’t marry, break up, don’t break up, and in which, especially, the woman dies at the end, and the same woman recovers from her illness. Tornado pulls the same kind of trick, with, among other things, the tornado of the title, which perhaps kills the protagonist’s parents, or then again perhaps the loss of the parents is just a narrative expedient of the protagonist functioning as the auteur of a movie about their own life.

dot aut definitely fudges as to what happens. Much of the time the story of the protagonist Chantal Buñuel (née Gil Agnew) is framed as the experience of Chantal (at 11 and 19 years of age) shooting a movie of their life with their parents. But sometimes the parents, Dad and Mom (Roderick Hill and Jasminn Johnson) are fictional characters in the movie, and sometimes they are the performers enacting themselves, just as Chantal (Jean Christian Barry) is sometimes the director and sometimes the object on the other side of the lens. Adverting to the tornado, Dad and Chantal have the following exchange.

DAD: Can we, pause. I’m sorry, I don‘t get … Is the tornado actually happening or is it just a metaphor?

CHANTAL: Not “or”. And.

DAD (snarky): Okaaay.

CHANTAL: Don’t stay stuck. Binary. A thousand things can be true at the same time. A million. Infinite uh uh ideas forces. Contradictions in my brain, my experience. All the time.

Yeah, well, this is one instance in which a choice of conjunctions really matters. But in purporting to clarify it, Chantal and dot aut muddy it. The tornado can be both a metaphor and an actual happening. But if “a thousand things can be true at the same time,” then the tornado can also be real and not real within the play’s universe. I think we’re supposed to assume the worst, but that is just not clear enough. If Dad is being “snarky” after being killed, that seems to make his death real and unreal at the same time.

It’s not just that Chantal entertains contradictions within the narrative reality; given their role as auteur, Chantal has created these contradictions and rendered themself the classic unreliable narrator. Now, narrators and/or auteurs contradicting themselves and presenting alternative perspectives and facts when reconstructing their lives are nothing new. Think of Fellini’s 8-1/2, for example, which also highlights the movie director at the center of the story flashing back to a variously-presented past in his reveries, revising on the fly, perhaps in the service of accuracy, perhaps in the service of less accuracy but a more photogenic story, or maybe just to demonstrate the director’s irresolution. We see that here as well, where the central character, filming a representation of his story, will stop the other characters, their parents, to revise what the parents are doing.

So, narratively speaking, despite the action being set in the same state as The Wizard of Oz, like Dorothy we soon find ourselves not in a recognizable version of Kansas anymore. 

In showing the story this way, even if that way is not unheard of, dot aut is rebelling against the way audiences generally like to be treated. But there’s even more to dot aut’s assault on audience expectations. dot aut also has set out to run the story largely through a neurodivergent perspective, with such behaviors as stimming (repeated self-stimulating behavior) and camouflaging (masking Autistic presentation). On the evidence of the play, stimming can be extremely challenging for others, including families and (more to the point) audiences, to deal with. When the ultimate narrator is perseverating in behaviors that obscure what is happening, we may be tempted to tear our hair.

In the service of critical solidarity with all perspectives, I can applaud the originality of imposing this neurodivergent perspective upon a narrative for general audiences, but I’d be more excited if I thought it improved the storytelling for this particular story. I’m not convinced that’s true here, however.

There’s a fairly compelling story and definitely compelling characters in this play, and I think they’d all benefit from more straightforward narration. It’s worth getting to know this family. Dad and Mom and Chantal form a surprisingly close and admirable unit, as they jointly deal with having or being such an exceptional child. I would think that any child who insists on being called by a name of a different gender from that assigned at birth, who frequently and exasperatingly cannot be addressed at all because they are perseverating in focusing their attention on other matters, who can never be trusted to go outside on their own because of various vulnerabilities, and who tend to relate every issue to Hollywood classics of the pre-color era (pedantically identified by year of premiere and director), would love to find parents as understanding and nurturing as these.

For instance, in a passage that replays “family movie night,” Mom and Dad are sitting at the coffee table, and 11-year-old Chantal presides in front. “Uh! Welcome to Sunday Movie Night Curated by me. CB.” The parents applaud. “Tonight,” Chantal announces, “we have a double feature.” Meanwhile, the parents, relishing the opportunity to be a bit childish themselves, are working up to making out. Dad heckles a bit: “How long is movie night?” Chantal proceeds: “Tonight’s double feature features two feature films byyyyy …” and the parents make a drumroll on the coffee table – “Chantal! Akerman, News From Home, 1976. And Luis Buñuel! The Exterminating Angel, 1962.” It is impossible not to love a family like that. If their child exhibits nerdly savantism, they lean into it and affirm it – while attending to their own needs on the side.

But when the characters step out of frame, and even more in those moments where it’s hard to figure out what point in the story or in Chantal’s life we’re looking at, we have little reaction except frustrated disorientation that produces nothing positive that I can see. At one juncture, 11-year-old Chantal is interviewing Dad about his dad, and his suicide attempt (told in Star Wars’ Yoda’s voice repeating Willy Loman’s justification for his suicide), and then Chantal breaks in to say that they are getting confused, at which point Dad breaks off, and Chantal, now inexplicably 19, is interviewing their mother. This is not a very helpful mode of storytelling, no matter whatever other dramatic merits it may have.

None of this is of course any discredit to the actors. Let us give due credit to all three of them Barry, Roderick Hill, and Jasminn Johnson, who present us with wonderfully nuanced and rounded depictions. For all their exasperating qualities, Chantal is a captivating character, ingenious, creative, empathetic with their parents when they can spare the mental bandwidth. And Oliver Butler’s direction, in retrospect, seems to have done as much as could be done to render this confusing script as intelligible, and, even in those moments that that was probably impossible, still do mostly convey dot aut’s vision to the audience.

I’d also like to mention that there is an amazingly-rendered tornado in this show that calls upon the talents of the scenic designer (Britton W. Mauk), the lighting designer (Kate McGee), the sound designer (David Remedios), and the projections designers (Caite Hevner and Paul Lieber), and a host of uncredited stage hands. I don’t usually mention special effects, but this memorable one deserves it.

And the title? That is, we are led to understand, the experience of a tornado in the mind of a person with synesthesia. Or at least in the mind of one particular person with that trait.

I hope that in future productions of this play, dot aut can be persuaded to render it more comprehensible. That said, I do recommend it, warts and all. Even the auteur’s perspective at its core is valuable, if overdone. And the story is captivating.

Tornado Tastes Like Aluminum Sting, presented through July28 by the Contemporary American Theater Festival, at the Frank Center, 260 University Drive, Shepherdstown, WV. Tickets $70, $60 for seniors, available at https://catf.org/2024-play-tornado-tastes-like-aluminum-sting-by-harmon-dot-aut/#tornado-tickets, or at box office, boxoffice@catf.org. Contains discussions of historical violence, bullying, PTSD, suicide, rape, and white supremacy.

Production photo credit: Seth Freeman.

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