Getting and Spending

Marty Pottenger explores the drama of credit card debt

"I bought the Armani when the Banana Republic looked just fine," confesses a middle-aged guy, weary from chronic extravagance. One nervous wreck of a spendthrift decides to destroy all her credit cards but balks when it comes to her indispensable MasterCard. In an expiatory frenzy, an African American woman takes a pair of scissors to the Prada sweater she really couldn't afford in the first place. ("Giving it away," she explains, "would be like passing on a virus.")

Is this a performance piece or an evening at Debtors Anonymous? The short answer is both. A program note describes Marty Pottenger's Abundance as "a community arts project about money and America" (see for details). Based on interviews and workshops with everyday citizens (ranging from millionaires to undocumented workers), the civic-minded production employs an ensemble of six, who impersonate a number of characters in serious financial straits.


The gang's all in arrears.
photo: Carol Rosegg
The gang's all in arrears.


By Marty Pottenger
Dance Theater Workshop
219 West 19th Street


None of the competent actors transcend the earnest material. The most one can say is that they remain committed to their mission of enlightening in an educational-theater way. What's needed, however, is a deeper synthesis of the cultural conditions that leave us in perpetual need of a consumer fix. Perhaps Pottenger will soon distill her sociological discoveries into artistic patterns that can diagnose the source of our bankrupting cravings.

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