I Care if You Listen (.com). One of the most unexpected works on the program was Lasse D. Hansen’s Face the Music (2016), an experimental theater piece that journeys through the psyche of a composer (wonderfully played by actor Matthew Lieff Christian) lecturing on the topic of how people perceive music. Over the course of the piece, Christian’s character journeys from the lecture hall through chaotic realms of the conscious and sub-conscious, the formal facade of the professor-expert rapidly dissolving into a mess of inner turmoil. While the self-abasing inner-dialogue of the neurotic male artist/academic is as well-used as the expression “face the music” itself, Hansen embraces kitsch and cliché with a sense of humor. There were many enjoyable moments that highlighted absurdity of academia—“Music can keep you in the same place or take you to a different place”—or the humor of the inner psyche—at one point the main character is hypnotized by a disembodied female voice he calls “mother.”
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