Random notes Ain’t that bobrauschenbergamerica BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	bobrauschenbergamerica By Charles L. Mee. Directed by Stephen Buescher. With Aja Nisenson, Jenna Horton, Colin Baker, Farrar Ungar, Elliot Quick, Christian Luening, Leta Hirschmann-Levy, Austin Campion, Ellarose Chary, Kurt Roediger, Alec Clifford, Zoe Chao, and Carla Michelle Coley. At Brown University Theatre through April 24.

Robert Rauschenberg, the Pop Art pioneer, isn’t really the subject of Charles L. Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica, but his imagination is. Brown University Theatre and Sock & Buskin have the iconography of Middle America’s loves and loathings to pick through like they’re finding mementos in an old attic trunk, and they make a party of it.

Center stage is a discarded refrigerator on its side, as if in a vacant lot, and the opening action swirls around it like a rock in a stream: "Bob’s Mom" (Aja Nisenson) in polka dots and apron mows away, a newspaper girl bicycles through, and a roller-skater joins the bustling crowd. Mute witnesses are time machine detritus, such as a trunk with USO stenciled on it, an old-fashioned bathtub, and a 1960s console TV in wood as blonde as Marilyn. Of course, Old Glory waves proudly above it all on a second-story porch as all-American as a white picket fence.

All that is the visual equivalent of a Rauschenberg collage of quintessential Americana (in which bicycles recur like hiccups). The attentive Texan pulled himself up out of the Abstract Expressionism era and into representative paintings like the first fish crawling onto land and sniffing around. This play has been staged and acted with that curiosity by director Stephen Buescher, dramaturg Hannah Lee Miller, and the 13 actors.

At the outset, Rauschenberg’s mother says, "Art. Art was not a part of our world." What follows is an attempt to show how art can be forged, hot and steaming, out of the most everyday moments and relationships.

Not that art can help us figure out what it all means, the play points out. Early on and toward the end a chicken (Jenna Horton in swept-back tutu and red rubber glove on head) clucks at length to us amiably, not at all frustrated that we clearly do not understand. This play is an unapologetic pastiche of disconnected vignettes that accumulate for collective effect rather than, many of them, standing on their own. "Let It Be" is lip-synched by two guys in shower caps with back-brush mike. Allen (Colin Baker) shares with friends his freshman dorm bull-session profundities, such as that we are older than the person we see in the mirror, because of the speed of light; but the notion remains undeveloped.

The permutations and complications of love are the main matter under the spotlight here. Susan (Farrar Ungar) is so carried away with her hunger for romantic love that she practices by dragging out a mattress, leaping onto a stranger, and covering him with kisses, all but devouring him. Her boyfriend Wilson (Elliot Quick) tries his best, but his best isn’t good enough. They’ve lived together, but he’s just not the dependable, silently wise man she thought he was. Their knock-down-drag-out fight tumbles all over the stage. As they maul each other, the rest of the company gradually gets more delighted and rambunctious in their mob pillow fight.

For this play to examine this country without riffing on violence would be like not mentioning money when talking about politics. So we get a glimpse at the kind of bonding that led to such all-American exploits as the Charles Starkweather and Caril Fugate killing spree. Optimist "Phil the Trucker" (Christian Luening) tells his girlfriend (Leta Hirschmann-Levy) that he’d like to make love on a pool table. She says she’d like to do it in a parking lot so that "the whole world can see you’re not ashamed of me." She tells him that every 15 minutes, for no reason, she feels ashamed of herself. We don’t know where this conversation is going until she then asks if he ever feels like hurting someone. "Do you feel like getting even?" Bingo.

Playwright Mee is also known as a historian, mainly for his cynical revisionist takes on the Potsdam Treaty and the Marshall Plan. In his plays he hasn’t just slathered on historical concerns as intellectual icing but has placed them center stage, pumping blood: as social critique in Orestes, as political argument in The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador.

As the playwright wouldn’t deny, bobrauschenbergamerica is rather random. At one point an actor steps out to defend such loosey-goosey plays, saying that it can be enough to just watch actors having fun. But however many empty calories this production offers, the moments that stick around are well-worth digesting.