REVIEW: The Complex Whole So Formed, at the Neo-Futurist Theater
If you'd come up to me right after my performance of Ryn Hardiman's The Complex Whole So Formed, their new techno-theatrical memoir playing right now at The Neo-Futurists, and asked me to sum up the show in one word, I'd likely have said "dense." Not in any kind of pejorative sense, mind you, but rather in its most all-encompassing definition; The Complex Whole So Formed, in both its most successful and unsuccessful moments, attempts to swallow you whole, engulf you in its digital orbit, using a variety of profound tools to gobble up your heart and mind and senses in an effort to meet it at its level. It's a joy to get lost in the show's web of complexities, but you are still getting lost at the end of the day.
Is this sensation a result of some "content dictates form" dictum, though? In collaboration with Anna Gelman's thoughtful and filmic direction, Hardiman - a former Technical Director for the Neos - uses a collection of audio & visual hardware, alongside pre-recorded film and projection, to relay their long and harrowing experience of attempting to get a double mastectomy. This quest begins initially for precautionary health reasons, but the intentionally labyrinthine and misogynist methodology of the American healthcare system causes them to readjust their stated purpose for the surgery. Now, it's for Gender Reasons. Hardiman's justified frustrations with this journey become coupled with their own genderqueer journey, their quest to get various letters of approval from doctors and therapists itself unlocking their own specific revelations of identity, their "gender incongruities" emerging more and more the deeper and deeper they dig.
Gelman and Hardiman's collaboration is nothing short of a technological delicacy, the Neo's State Park lobby space bifurcated into two separate audience banks enveloped by screens that shimmer and blur and delight. The line between live performance and digital presentation intentionally blurs in a way that recalls Hardiman's mid-performance treatise on their own sense of living in the in-between of gender. Hardiman's text, too, finds itself ever shifting, typically between second-person narration that guides us gracefully through their narrative, and more poetic shifts that threaten to lose us within a show that is already knee deep in artful artifice.
Unlike other recent mainstage shows at the Neos, The Complex Whole So Formed blissfully makes no attempt at shielding its whole-hearted mission behind any type of structural meta-text or post-ironic sheen, its earnestness and artistry entirely upfront for all to see. The only irony then is that this open-hearted show is almost entirely hidden behind curtains and screens, our literal proximal connection with Hardiman practically walled off until the show's conclusion. Liberating, yes, as the end of the show is arguably the only moment when we truly "meet" Ryn at their most truthful state, but it does require a lot of work from us an audience to get to the production's level. There's a natural catharsis watching Hardiman walk us through this meaningful, if terrifying, moment in their life. It's not an easy experience to wade through, but I suppose it wasn't that way for Ryn either.
The Complex Whole So Formed runs an estimated 65 minutes, and performs at The Neo-Futurist Theater (5153 N. Ashland) through August 29th 2026. Tickets are available HERE.
