World Series

Description:

World Series is a multimedia performance by Anna Banana, co-written and performed with Ron Brunette, that uses satire to critique consumerism, corporate greed, and the environmental impacts of modern industry. Emerging from anxieties about the erosion of agency and free will under capitalism, the work unfolds as a rapid-fire sequence of surreal skits—like flipping channels on television—with Banana and Brunette shifting characters, costumes, and sets at dizzying speed.

The piece opens with a mock therapy session in which Banana and Burnett smash an upholstered form topped with a globe using a baseball bat, venting rage against a world in crisis. The two then stage a parody “think tank” of the Atomic Energy Commission, exposing the hypocrisy of attempts to save the world while shielding extractive industries. Donning fat suits, Banana and Burnett play couch potatoes binge-watching baseball— a caricature of gluttony and passive consumption.

In the climactic skit, Banana and Brunette are wed by a wooden cow whose spots are painted to spell “GNP” (Gross National Product). Voice-over narration guides them through a ceremony that involves lighting candles for increased earnings, honour of debts, and obedience to consumption, while a ring from the cow’s teat seals their union—not only to each other, but to the cow itself, symbolizing devotion to growth at all costs. They exit the stage as Pink Floyd’s “Money” (1973) plays.

The scenes that follow critique the commodification of health, wellness, and bodily autonomy; the environmental consequences of consumer products such as sunscreen, single-use plastics, and cigarettes; and the influence of mass media and propaganda on independent thought. Featuring slides, voice-over narration, and original songs, World Series plays hardball with the ideology of exponential growth—turning America’s pastime into a metaphor for complicity, contradiction, and unchecked desires.

Video documentation is available upon request.