Checkmate is a single act performance piece dealing with control, solipsism, voyeurism, and the relationship of these aspects of the human psyche to sexual repression. This minimalist theater exists within a symbolic inner space, set outside of time or direct narrative experience. While moving towards an extremely dark crescendo, it maintains a structural circularity, creating “modes” of existence aesthetically linking this nearly silent sequence of imagery from beginning to end. Cinematically, its dramatic core, set to the first movement of Gustav Mahler’s 9th Symphony, commences with a chess game between “the chess master” and his mysterious female opponent. This symbolic dialectic of sexual energy gradually descends into a nightmarish ritual of sadomasochistic eroticism, displaying the meta-game of winning and losing inherent in the willful dichotomy of man and woman.
          
           In opposition to the twisted ritualistic nature of “the game”, we witness the solitary relationship of the chess master to his object of iconographic worship, the television set. This segment of hypnotic entrapment enwraps the central dream sequence with an introduction and conclusion of sobering reality. After hearing the chess master espouse his philosophy of control in one of the few verbal sound bites cutting through otherwise serene audio space like a serrated knife, we watch this darkly clad figure sit catatonically in front of a lone television set announcing its own supremacy with the slogan “Television Is Watching You”. This four word phrase introduces Checkmate’s silent movement and abruptly shatters its sadomasochistic climax, becoming the beat of a nearly masturbatory channel surfing finale pounding out the tyrannical notes of media bombardment.

          This piece has its formative origins in German Expressionism, removing kinetic drama from any sort of real or presentational theater. The plastic nature of its form exists in a strange interzone between cinema and television, reminiscent of early 1960’s surreal, absurdist programs by Ernie Kovacs, and stylistic, atemporal drama serving as the backbone of Alaine Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. Conceptually, Checkmate replaces Resnais’ love triangle with a triad of man, woman, and media. The classical relationship of husband, wife, and Supreme Being has been modified into winner, loser, and machine, a post modernist approach to the normal narrative erupting from desire and divine intervention. In Checkmate real physical contact is replaced by the phallic intersection of the chess piece held by the gloved hand of the chess master who is torn between lust and stylistic sterility.

          Ultimately, the visual uniformity of the wardrobe, lighting, aesthetics, and dreamlike actions coalesce into one fabric, one moment outside of cause or meaning, represented by the sound of the ticking clock, signaling the true beginning and end of the act. Visually, the character of the chess master is a fusion of a Chaplinesque silent movie actor and Peter Sellers’ Doctor Strangelove, combining romance and antiseptic removal. Checkmate conjures the subliminal collective memory of a time when film was an escape into other worldliness and fuses that time with the pre-apocalyptic present of the twenty-first century. Just as Marcel du Champ turned the chess game into a Dadaist “doing”, Checkmate transforms the theatrical elements of chess play through emotive tension, combining action, eroticism, and a sinister message into one distinct mood, transcending its own medium.