The Bald Altuus

Kat Mustatea & Peter Burr / United States & Romania

“The Bald Altuus” is an auto-fiction portrait of a Romanian immigrant family settling in the United States in the 1980’s, presented as an infinitely-generative video game. Staged as an American TV sitcom on endless repeat, stock digital avatars perform increasingly dysfunctional variations of a family drama while haunted by memories of the Ceaușescu regime. The story’s framework explores the formal language of theater and of cinema as they meet inside a game engine, in pursuit of a new Theater of the Absurd for the digital age.

The point of departure is “The Bald Soprano,” a play by Romanian playwright Eugen Ionesco, which was written as a textual loop and has been staged continuously since 1957 in Paris until the present day. In the tradition of absurdism-as-critique of totalitarian systems envisioned by Ionesco, this work updates his concept of the “anti-play” for a modern game engine environment.

NPC’s—non-player characters—with each their own set of automated behaviors, are set in motion to enact infinite variations of the protagonist family’s domestic conflicts. “The Bald Altuus” extends the notion of a non-fiction portrayal of a particular family and of a larger diaspora alienated even from itself by geo-political forces. Modular scenes of two or more characters act as containers in which different aspects of dramatic conflict are unpacked, in endless variation. The characters speak in a made-up language called Românglish, a blending of English with Romanian linguistic morphologies, that offers access to partial, but not full meaning of what is being expressed.

The characters that inhabit this world have a deliberate, agonizing everybody-ness about them. While they stand for specific historical figures, they are nevertheless imbued with an allegorical sense of humans as cogs inside systems of power much larger than themselves. Their awkward gestures and linguistic brokenness point to an invisible, systemic dysfunction.