Alfred Kreymborg | Lima Beans / 1916

food for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alfred Kreymborg Lima Beans in The Provincetown Plays (New York: Frank Shay, 1916)

 

In the summer of 1914, Alfred Kreymborg was invited to the Connecticut art colony named Silvermine, founded by the British art critic Charles Caffin and his wife. While there, the poet and former editor of The Glebe, worked on his manuscript titled Mushrooms, published in 1916, in which several of the pieces were written as prose poems with rhythmic dialogues, an example of which I've reproduced below:

 

                                          IDEALISTS

 

                                          Brother Tree:

                                          Why do you reach and reach?

                                          do you dream some day to touch the sky?

                                          Brother Stream:

                                          Why do you run and run?

                                          do you dream some day to fill the sea?

                                          Brother Bird:

                                          Why do you sing and sing?

                                          do you dream—

 

                                          Young Man:

                                          Why do you talk and talk and talk?

 

     These dialogue poems, in turn, influenced in part by the thinking of Gordon Craig, who argued for directorial dominance in the theater, with the use of actors as mere marionettes, encouraged Kreymborg to try his hand at playwriting. Adding his own love of and knowledge of music as well, Kreymborg wrote a short play, "Lima Beans," one of many throughout his career.

     "Lima Beans," in particular, allowed Kreymborg to combine his poetic talents with his philosophical sense of humor, without applying the stylized poetic conceits that often appear in his poetry itself.

     Kreymborg's comic gem has very little "plot." A wife, recently married, decides to change the basic ingredient of her husband's diet, just for variety's sake. Calling out to the passing Huckster, whom we see briefly only twice from the window, the wife orders up some string beans instead of the usual limas. Upon the husband's arrival home from a day at work, the two fall into what has clearly become a pattern of domestication which, at moments, seems almost as abusive as Helmar's descriptions of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House ("good mouse," "queer little dear," etc.).  But their relationship is still fresh, and they remain in love, each kissing one another "daintily six times."

     Ready for his meal, the husband declares his hunger, as she nervously brings forth the serving bowl. His immediate disgust is quickly established, as he throws out its contents, sputtering out his anger as if he were a Shakespearian King having witnessed the downfall of his kingdom:

 

         I perspire tears and blood drops

         in a town or in the fields

         on the sea or in a balloon,

         with my pickaxe or my fiddle

         just to come home

         footsore, staring, doubled with appetite

         to a meal of —string beans?

         Where are my limas?

         .....

         You would dethrone it?

         You would play renegade?

         You'd raise an usurper

         in the person of this

         elongated, cadaverous,

         throat-scratching, greenish

         caterpillar—

 

     His victim collapses in horror, as the abuser hastily leaves the house. The comic ridiculousness of this domestic spat satirizes not only the role of any housewife who is subjected to her companion's tastes, but demolishes the notion that there can be any experimentation in this couple's relationship—culinary or sexual—making anyone who has lived with another being unable to accommodate changes in his or her life uncomfortable in the way that Henri Bergson argues comedy always does.

     With what Kreymborg describes as "housewifely shrewdness," the woman calls back the Huckster, quickly buys some lima beans, and deftly cooks them, just in time for her husband's return to apologize.

     The slightness of these themes, however, is more than made up for in the musical phrases of the quick-paced dialogue (including the stage descriptions); and, although I have never seen a production of this play, one can imagine the marvelous potentialities of the actors (or, perhaps, even puppets, with whom Kreymborg suggested it was to be cast).

      Evidently, the famed human cast, poet and artist Mina Loy, poet and doctor William Carlos Williams, and artist-designer William Zorach, easily took up the task, reading the "score" with great gusto, Loy clearly sensing the issues of the marriage theme, and Williams, according to Kreymborg, "in terror lest he blow up." Williams writes that Zorach sang his role "with zest and vehemence," looking somewhat like Harpo Marx.

     Both Loy and Williams wore costumes of their own making, Loy stunningly dressed in a green gown and one of her own hand-made broaches, which according to Kreymborg, was "not in keeping with Mrs. Lima." The curtain created by the Zorachs was dressed, apparently, as Kreymborg conceived it, "painted in festoons of vegetables," and performed admirably, coming down—since, the author admits, it cannot see and has no comprehension—in the midst of the husband's final question, which may have been an invitation to sex.

                                

Los Angeles, August 15, 2010

Reprinted from USTheater (August 2010).

John Arden | Serjeant Musgrave's Dance / 1994

pulling down the roof

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Arden Serjeant Musgrave's Dance in John Arden Plays: 1  (London: Methuen Publishing, 1994)

 

With the death of British playwright John Arden on March 28, 2012, I decided to read his most well-received play, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. Productions of this work have been rare in the US, so I'd never had the opportunity to see the play, and this was my first reading—although I read several reviews of the play when it first appeared at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1959.

      The Brechtian-like work, complete with songs (music by Dudley Moore), is a cry for passivism in a time when British and American society were moving full-blown into more and more international conflicts. The incidents which sparked Arden's play occurred in 1958 when British soldiers killed five innocent people in Cypress. By placing his play in a period of pre-Kipling redcoat soldiery, however, Arden shifted the theme of Serjeant Musgrave's Dance into a timeless statement of anti-war sentiment.

      The four soldiers—murderers, robbers, and deserters—descend upon a small Northern English town with vague motives. The locals, none too happy for their appearance, are in the midst of a mine strike, and are fearful that the soldiers have been placed in their town to keep order should their negotiations break down into riot. The local authorities (The Parson, The Constable, and The Mayor) see their arrival as a chance to get rid of the mining agitators, if only Musgrave and his men are able to get them to volunteer into the army.

      For his part, Musgrave keeps his motives much to himself. Although the three other men with him know that he is vaguely planning to spring his anti-war sentiments upon the populace, they cannot foretell his method. Sparky, Hurst, and Attercliffe are simpler men who enjoy drinking, sex with the local whore, and, although they share Musgrave's sentiments about their military past, a couple are not at all as ashamed by their murderous duties.

     The first half of the play is taken up with the local's suspicions and the military men's attempt to allay them. But Musgrave is not at all easy with his own intentions at creating anarchy. A highly religious man, he believes still in duty—even if that sense of duty has shifted to disobedience. Most importantly, he is man of conscience, horrified by the death of a young friend from the very town which they are visiting, a soldier whose skeleton is among their processions.

     In this atmosphere of suspicion and opportunism, things do not at all go right. The soldiers waver in their obedience to the man they have nicknamed "God." And their own desires, particularly their admiration for a local "soldiers whore," Annie, get in the way of Musgrave's mission. Although Hurst and Attercliffe spurn Annie's sexual attentions, the younger Private Sparky lusts after her, and is even willing, so it appears, to desert the deserters, asking Annie to hide him until they might run off together. The other two, overhearing his intentions, try to prevent him, accidently killing him on the point of his own bayonet.

      Trying to cover the "accident" up, Musgrave hurriedly calls for a town celebration, with bunting, flowers, speeches and all, hoping to waylay any further doubts by the townfolk. After the usual flowery banality of the Mayor and Parson, Musgrave begins his "dance," unveiling the weaponry available to murder innocent folk, setting it out, one by one, so that he might, indeed, kill his very audience. To everyone's surprise, he slowly unravels the tale of the soldier's duties, which involved, after the murder of the local boy, pulling innocent people from their houses into the streets and slaughtering them. The town gentry, Mayor, Parson, and Constable, are horrified by the shift of his speech, while the local miners are confused. While they want little to do with the soldiers and are perhaps ready to go to battle for their jobs, they cannot conceive of the anarchy against government Musgrave is proposing.

      Hanging the local boy Billy's skeleton from a plinth, Musgrave tries, with weapons at the ready, to find volunteers for his anti-army. Annie, however, reveals the murder of one of their own, as Musgrave's lofty intentions begin to crumble, Hurst shouting at him: "You've pulled your own roof down!" Suddenly loyal dragoons, called for in case of a riot, appear, arresting the deserters.

      The last scene reveals the imprisoned men, scolded by the innkeeper Mrs. Hitchcock for their lack of understanding. The men's only hope is that when they are hung, a seed from their actions may begin an orchard, that something might grow out of their ineffective but well-meaning words.

      In many respects, Arden's play is a brilliant statement locked away in its own level-minded cynicism. The values it declares are perhaps admirable—a complete shake-up of the militarist British world—but its hero, Serjeant Musgrave, still a product of that world, is not strong enough in intelligence and will to transform it. Arden may argue for a revolt against the class system, but such a revolt can never occur, he reveals, through the principles on which that system was based—God, duty, honor. Musgrave presents himself only as another kind of God, not a true alternative to the system which destroyed his own faith.

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2012).