“Les Singes” [The Monkeys] is a passion play in reverse. It includes a soundtrack by Maria Minerva, and a video piece, “Traffic,” by Vanessa Place. “Les Singes” was first performed in Silencio, David Lynch’s private club in Paris, a contemporary version of an eighteenth-century salon. Entry is by membership or invitation only, and there’s the allure of a select nightclub after the play’s cultural causerie. “Les Singes” ends with Place reciting her own autopsy report from a teleprompter as a dozen select audience members drink champagne to her demise. Toth, wearing a full-face chimpanzee mask and playing the part of The Hostess, carefully chose these audience members, who wear children’s monkey masks and eat pastries in the shape of plump nuns. Seated along the edge of the stage, their backs to the audience, these chosen few become disciples at a last supper, as seen from behind. Previously, the Hostess had encouraged the entire audience to celebrate carnival with toy noise makers and plastic palm fronds, after which Place, as Kafka’s Rotpeter, read an annotated English version of Kafka’s “A Report to the Academy.” “Les Singes” is a false inversion of the human and the animal, superimposed on an equally untrue inversion of the human and the divine– inequalities that this Passion revokes, leaving the dilemma: rescind or reinscribe? In our performance, these inversions betray all the conversions that are constantly promised: that monkeys can become men, that men can become gods, and that there is something to us other than the merely human. The performance reminds the audience that monkeys are the only primates who cannot stand to see the body of one of their own kind dissected, making the ape always the better man. “Les Singes” is completed with a report of the performance to another academy such as this one, reframing the body of the piece as a critical supplement, another indexical gesture between another chosen few.