Theater Review - The faces of Michael Hickey

A woman weeps. The skin of her face is impossibly pale and glossy. Spiral tears are painted on her cheeks. A crown of painted feathers shrouds the top of her head. She turns, releasing her despair, and her face opens up like a pair of French doors, the halves creating a halo of feathers. Revealed is a face that smiles brightly. But as time passes, the woman bows under the heavy onslaught of age. Revealed in the secret shadows of her crown is the horror of a ghastly green face.

“Faces of the Moon” is one of the performances in Illusions, a retrospective of past shows by the local masked theater company Gateway Performance Productions, and it features one of Michael Hickey’s most complex and haunting transforming masks.

Hickey, who founded Gateway Performance Productions with his partner Sandra Hughes, is one of the most accomplished carvers of theatrical masks in the country and was among the vanguard of artists responsible for the American revival of masked theater in the early ’80s. The art form has proven to be the perfect forum for the culmination of Hickey’s many talents.

The child of a painter and an actress, Hickey had his first gallery show — an exhibition of surrealist and expressionist oil paintings at St. John’s College in Cleveland — when he was only 12 years old. He went on to train in painting and sculpture, but eventually turned his attention to the performing arts in the ’70s, when pantomime gained popularity. In 1974, Hickey and Hughes started the Great American Mime Experiment, a mime theater company in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

At that time, they were the only theater in the country devoted exclusively to mime. Four years later, after relocating to Atlanta, Hughes decided to incorporate masks into the performances and convinced Hickey to apply his sculpture and painting skills to mask making.

“I did want to work with masks, but I didn’t know how to go about it. My first thought was, ‘I can’t do that,’” Hickey recalls. But not long after, while on an 18-week residency in Milledgeville sponsored by the Georgia Council for the Arts, Hickey started experimenting with papier mache and felt masks. “At that time in Milledgeville,” he says, “there was really nothing else to do.”

Before long, masked theater eclipsed in their company — later renamed Gateway Performance Productions — and brought the group invitations to perform in Mexico, Slovenia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Canada and Ireland, as well as all over the United States. Hickey soon developed a national reputation as a mask maker, winning awards at national competitions and exhibiting at galleries and museums, including the High Museum.

With the massive forearms and burly chest that come from carving blocks of wood into delicate faces, Hickey has an imposing physical presence. But he speaks of masks more like a Zen monk than the pub-brawling merchant mariner his appearance might suggest.

Masks take us to the places “where the veil between the worlds grows thin,” Hickey says. Stripped of the familiar features of a face, a masked performer summons an archetypal essence. A mask, Hickey says, “hits the places where ordinary stories become mythic stories, where mythic stories become the stories of gods.” In Illusions, that translates into a many-horned god that invokes death upon the land with a serpent staff, a dazzling gold dragon that stalks his domain with haughty reptilian command and sisters who hold the balance of the seasons in the machinations of their ancient sibling rivalry.

Freed from the grubby minutiae of realism, the masked vignettes in Illusions — most choreographed by Hughes — invite a conversation on the larger questions of existence. “We have to participate in the big things to pull us out of our tiny worlds,” says Hickey. “Not to escape, but to engage more, to realize we are connected.”

Some of Hickey’s simplest masks are also his most haunting. Adorned with nearly subliminal brow ridges and masterful curves of lip, these masks demand much of both performer and audience. “A mask creates a vacuum that the psyche can’t handle, so you invent yourself into it,” he says. Hide a face, and a hidden identity rushes forth to replace it.

The masked performances of Illusions are not for those in search of simple distractions. Most of the pieces have no dialogue. Robbed of words and facial cues, audience members must engage and participate in the creation, contributing their own essence to the vacancies before them. But it’s worth the effort. Hickey’s masks define a wholly different mode of communication that addresses issues inaccessible to conventional theater and language. By obscuring the face and eliminating language, he manages to reveal deeper truths in the silence and emptiness that remains.

Illusions runs through June 16 at The Mask Center, 1083 Austin Ave. in the Little Five Points Community Center. Sat. at 8 p.m., Sun. at 3 p.m. $10. 404-982-9922. www.masktheatre.org.??