Jack Richardson | Gallows Humor / 1998

locked up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Richardson Gallows Humor in Douglas Messerli and Mac Wellman, eds. From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1998)

 

With the announcement of the death of American playwright Jack Richardson on July 1, 2012, I recalled how delighted Mac Wellman and I had been to rediscover his play Gallows Humor and reprint in our 1998 drama anthology. I immediately reread the play, and enjoyed it even more this time round.

 

    Richardson's play in two parts is really a study in early 1960s martial relationships more than it is about a murderer soon to be hung. There is a murderer, indeed, Walter, locked away for beating his wife to death with a golf club—"forty-one strokes from the temple to the chin." But Walter was clearly locked-away even before his tempestuous reaction. A man of complete order, he cannot abide the prostitute sent to him by the Warden to take the prisoner's mind off the gallows and lead him to his death with a smile on his face. Walter, who has also just been served up a large chicken dinner, cannot even think of eating it, and is horrified by Lucy's carnal appetites, which includes not only bedding down with him, but consuming the chicken and tossing its bones into the center of Walter's cell.

      Walter is clearly a man of order, determined to clean and organize his cell up to the very moment of his state-determined death. It is not that he is unattracted to women, simply that he has no intention of detracting from the system that has put him into the cell and now has determined the end of his life. Walter is a number, 43556, and like Zero of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine is thoroughly a man of the system, a man whom after the murder of his wife has clearly abandoned the dizzying world outside the prison walls and now is disturbed by "perfume and overpowered flesh" of the female with which he has been provided.  We can only suspect that self-imprisonment, being locked away in an unhappy life, is what led to his frenzied act.

      Lucy, on the other hand, has a job to accomplish, and with philosophical relish attempts to convince Walter to change his ways, to, after twenty years of living a meager existence to seek out his reward in her "mouth, fingertips, and breasts." The first part ends, obviously, with Walter's being seduced by the joys of life which he was clearly seeking in wife's murder.

     On the other hand, the Warden and Hangman are even more locked away in their lives than has been Walter. At least he has gone temporarily mad, has left the confines of normalcy. Phillip, the unhappy Hangman, is so frustrated with his life that he has, as is wife describes it, begun to do hundreds of little things—tossing ashes into his slippers, skipping club meetings, purchasing a pair of red socks—that reveal his determination to change his life or, as he puts it, his desire to "open the window and slither down the drainpipe to disappear forever."

      The morning of Walter's hanging, Phillip is determined to wear a black mask over his head, like a Medieval figure—an idea met with hardy resistance from the Warden and Martha, Phillip's. As he goes off to slip on the mask, the Warden and Martha discuss Phillip's behavior. Sympathizing with what she has had to endure, the Warden reveals his long-time love for Martha, and, eventually, she admits her love for him. The Warden also lives in an unhappy relationship, his own wife having had various sexual encounters with plumbers and other working men. The two determine to have an encounter, but hilariously cannot even find a date when they might meet, so involved are they with the society in which they live. As Phillip returns with his mask, he discovers the two kissing, and, outraged, insists he that can now leave as he long wanted desired.

      Martha off-handedly invites him to first help her with the dishes, and before he can even comprehend what he has agreed to, he perceives he is trapped, locked away in his own staid identity, unable to even open the kitchen door. When it comes time for him to attend the hanging, Lucy must pop the door open, promising him "something very special for dinner."

       At least Walter has had the courage of his convictions, while these "free" figures are more locked away in their determined patterns than Walker is in his cell. As the Prologue, performed by Death, suggests, they too will ultimately die. Walter has lived a freer life in the short time his has to remain on this earth, than the Warden, Hangman, and his wife.

       If Richardson's little masterwork seems cynical, it also represents the intense dissatisfaction with everyday existence that animated other American playwrights of the time such as Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, and Jack Gelber—precursors of the later 1960s generation that would ultimately, in only temporarily, alter definitions of freedom and love.

       Unfortunately, Gallows Humor, was to be the last of Richardson's successful plays. Two further works, Lorenzo and Xmas in Las Vegas closed on Broadway after only four performances each. Although he long served as drama critic for Commentary, the author wrote no new plays. He did help his friend Elaine Kaufman establish her East Side restaurant, Elaine's, suggesting larger tables and promising to provide writers, which he did.

 

Los Angeles, July 11, 2012

Reprinted from US Theater Review (July 2012).

 

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee | The Gang's All Here / 1960

the gang’s still here

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee The Gang’s All Here (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1960)

 

Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s The Gang’s All Here (1959) is a play loosely based on the presidency of Warren G. Harding, remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal involving several of his friends and cabinet members.

 

   Like Harding, Lawrence’s and Lee’s Ohio senator Griffith T. Hastings, name comes forth in the smoke-filled rooms of the Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel as an alternative to candidates (in 1920, General Leonard Wood and Illinois Governor Frank O. Lowden) who have Republican Party members deadlocked. Engineered by Walter Rafferty and other cronies in Lawrence and Lee’s play (in 1920 by Harry M. Daugherty) Hastings is elected and fills his major governmental posts with his “Ohio gang.”

     In the play Hastings is presented as a man modest enough to admit to his limited capabilities and honest enough to claim that he is not up to the position; but through the intervention of his friends and strong-willed wife (who Hastings and others describe as “The Duchess,” Hastings, despite his misgivings, determines to run.

      Once he is locked away within the presidential quarters, however, he hasn’t a clue how to begin governing, hiring on the spur of a moment a man employed to oversee his transition, and demanding the immediate presence of his cronies, who quickly fill his ears with speedy decisions concerning the issues with which he is now forced to grapple. In only a few weeks after becoming President, we see him sneaking away from the White House to play poker with his cronies—now all political advisors—and ready to sign on nearly any dotted line put before him.

     Strangely, the only honest man surrounding him is Bruce Bellingham, the interim assistant he has hired. Bruce, along with Hastings’s wife, Frances, attempts to warn him away from his gang—his own Attorney General, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of the Interior, and Head of the Veterans Bureau. By this time, however, Hastings has become so dependent upon their advice that he has no one else to whom he can turn and fires Bellingham, the only one willing to tell him the truth.

      As the Hearn committee begins investigations, it becomes clear that Hastings must act; as he attempts to query the honesty of members of his own cabinet and staff, Rafferty reminds him that he has knowledge of Hastings’ sexual affairs which he’s willing to reveal. Rafferty’s moral jingoism, his long justification for his immorality, reminds one of Harry Lime’s argument with his friend Holly Martins in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man of ten years earlier:

 

           He [Sam Cavendish] can afford morality. He’s rich enough. I’m not.

           Neither are you. The “land of plenty” for everybody except a politician,

           who sticks his head through the hole in the canvas and lets the

           goddamned free press sling mud balls at him. He can’t run his business

           like a business, because it’s never his business. It belongs to the blessed

           American public that doesn’t give a hoot in hell until some poor bastard

           gets his pinky caught in the cash register! Name me the job that demands

           more and pays less than serving the American taxpayer. The Customers’

           Man can screw ‘em blind on the Big Board. That’s o.k. The Oil Boys

           can simmer the fat out of the ground, the Real Estate Sharks can bank

           a six-month million—everybody gets rich except the poor ass of a “Public

           Servant.” (Straight at Hastings) And you’ve got the gall to scream because

           a few of your friends are smart enough to do exactly what everybody

           else in the country is doing.

 

In the context of Rafferty’s argument, the actual president Harding’s campaign slogan—“Return to Normalcy”—seems bizarrely appropriate.

     With the news of Ax Maley’s suicide (head of Hastings’ Veterans Bureau), Hastings must face his own political and real death as well. In Harding’s administration it was an assistant to Daughtery who committed suicide, while Fall, Miller, and, Forbes were convicted of fraud and bribery. In the Lawrence and Lee play, all other consequences remain in the future.

        Harding clearly knew his presidency had been destroyed by the scandal, and in 1923 set out across the country to boost his own ratings on what he described as a “Voyage of Understanding.” Understanding for whom, one might ask: the electorate or himself? In Lawrence and Lee’s version it is Hastings who comes to the “understanding,” ultimately seeking the resignation of Rafferty before drinking a deadly medicinal concoction left behind in his Surgeon General’s bag. Harding’s illness was simply attributed to food poisoning—and his death soon after to a heart attack. At least Hastings dies with some recognition, with some sense of dignity.

      The published volume of The Gang’s All Here begins with a short piece by the playwrights published in the New York Herald Tribune of September 27, 1959, warning the public to take the lessons of their play to heart in the upcoming elections. That election between Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy was even more fateful in several respects than the 1920 race between Harding and the Democratic nominee James A. Cox. One candidate of the 1960 race clearly was a man (particularly in his later administration) with a notorious gang—the other a man with a notorious family.

      Lawrence and Lee’s work functions as a terribly old-fashioned drama, and creaks in its historical underpinnings. Given that the 1960 election, for the first time, depended heavily upon television news coverage as opposed to the simple workings of backroom politics, the play seems particularly old-fashioned. With a cast that included E. G. Marshall, Howard Smith, Melvyn Douglas, and Jean Dixon the stage theatrics must have been almost magical; but reading it in 2003, the dramatic action seems to be missing.

     What struck me most, however, as I read this play was that in terms of politics little has changed. The gang is still with us. President Bush won the 2000 election, in fact, by machinations that Rafferty and company could not even have imagined. The three R’s with which Bush and Cheney now control our country—Rove, Rumsfield and Rice—far more than those basic areas of learning, Reading, Writing, and ‘Rithmetic—serve the President as a gang whose personal agendas far surpass those of Harding/Hastings’s petty greed. Lawrence and Lee ask a naïve question, but one that should not be glibly answered by Americans today:

 

                  If the man we fondly X’d in a voting booth turns out to be

                  a struggling incompetent, whose fault is it? The President’s?

                  ….It’s too easy to blame the gang around him, because oppor-

                  tunists are always waiting to fill any governmental vacuum.

                  Perhaps the real trouble lies in our own reluctance to think

                  about history except on that November Tuesday

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2003  

Aimé Césaire | Une Saison Au Congo (A Season in the Congo) / 1968

trying to be everything

by Douglas Messerli

Aimé Césaire Une Saison Au Congo, translated by Ralph Manheim as A Season in the Congo (New York: Grove Press, 1968)

Beginning as a beer salesman for Polar beer, Césaire’s dynamic Patrice Lumumba, is a simple man who grows more and more complex with each scene in this Brechtian drama. Through song and framed scenarios of central events in the last two years of his life, the author charts what appears to be a single “season,” a first chance to free the Congo from Belgian rule and to make it a force on the African continent.

  

     Although the former beer salesman quickly—and in Césaire’s telling, a little too mysteriously—is transformed into a liberating hero, he is still raw at the edges. As he himself tells it, upon the transference of rule from King Basilio to Lumumba, his background, like those of the countrymen is a simple one, having grown up, he insists, as one of the forgottens:

 

lumumba: As for me, Sire, my thoughts are for those who

                   have been forgotten. We are the people who have

                   been dispossessed, beaten, mutilated; the people whom

                   the conquerors treated as inferiors, in whose faces

                   they spat. A people of kitchen boys, house boys,

                   laundry boys, in short, a people of boys, of yes-bwanas,

                   and anyone who wanted to prove that a man is not

                   necessarily a man could take us as an example.

 

     In what others have warned should a gracious acceptance speech for the change of power, Lumumba uses the occasion to create a kind Whitmanian poetic expression of his identification with his fellow Congolese and with all of repressed Africa. From the very beginning, it seems Lumumba attempted to align himself with everything but the white oppression surrounding his homeland. And in this broad association of himself with everything, his ambition was awe-inspiring—and for the more timid leaders such as Mokutu, frightening:

 

 Comrades, everything remains to be done, or done over,

      But we shall do it, we will do it over. For Kongo.

 We shall remake the laws, one by one, for Kongo.

 We shall revise all the customs, one by one, for Kongo.

 Uprooting injustice, we will rebuild the old edifice

     piece by piece, from cellar to the attic, for Kongo.

 That which is bowed shall be raised, and that which is

     raised shall be raised higher—for Kongo!

 I demand the union of all.

                                           

     But it is final statement, “I demand the devotion of every man,” that is perhaps his undoing. A few scenes later, Lumumba, is insisting that his leaders give over their entire lives to the new cause, that they abandon their lives to the recreation of their country. For him, things cannot happen fast enough.

     

     But that is just the problem. Without careful consideration, he has raised the salary of all government workers, while ignoring the army, which momentarily attempts to overthrow him. His solution, to raise them all in rank, is obviously no solution, weakening the very forces he will need to defend his government.

       If, for Césaire, Lumumba is clearly a hero, he is also naïve in his belief that things might be transformed so quickly and thoroughly. Belgian forces, including the bankers, plot to plunder the economy, taking advantage of a vast populace inexperienced in democracy. As Mokutu tries to explain to him, if he is going to raise his spear in defiance, he must be certain that he will kill “the beast,” the powerful Belgian powers that remain in the country and its allies—which in this case include the United States and the “blind” UN leaders, including the admirable Dag Hammarskjöld. In the rich province of Katanga, forces work to overthrow his government.

      Even more internationally disturbing—at least to Western interests—is Lumumba’s willingness to accept the support of the Soviet Union, a government he saw no better or worse the European and American structures.

       In between these powerful encounters are numerous songs of the ironic and not always friendly Sanza Player, songs of mercenaries, and fearful fretting from Lumumba’s wife Pauline and other women in his life. Although I have not seen a production of this play, it is clearly a work in which the stage must be in constant motion, as each emblematic frieze gives way to the next, events occurring so quickly that it appears that Lumumba had no way to catch his breath. And, in the end, of course, he was trapped in the vast forces he had let loose. In trying to be everything—

 

                             I will be field, I will be pasture

                             I will be with the Wagenia fisherman

                             I will be with the Kivu drover

                             I will be on the mountain, I will be in the ravine—

 

Lumumba has rendered himself from a leader to an emblematic martyr for his own cause. Too late,  Hammarskjöld comes to perceive that he, himself, has been betrayed, painfully realizing that Matthew Cordelier is a man, in the General Secretary’s perception, who would, like Pilate, have arrested and put to death Christ, making an obvious parallel between the hero of this tale and the Christian myth.

      Msiri and Mokutu kill Lumumba, with the later now leading the country, hypocritically calling upon the country to carry forward in the memory of “Patrice, martyr, athlete, hero.” In reality, the new Congo head, changing the country’s name to Zaire, continued to economically exploit the country’s finances, just as had the Belgians. The short “season” of new possibilities did not allow enough time for Lumumba’s immense dreams to be realized.

 

Los Angeles, January 18, 2013

Adrienne Kennedy | Funnyhouse of a Negro / 2011

hersevles: a chamber piece

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adrienne Kennedy Funnyhouse of a Negro (New York, Samuel French 2011)

 

One is tempted to describe Adrienne Kennedy’s 1964 play, Funnyhouse of a Negro, as a kind of chamber piece in black and white. The play takes place in the bedroom of a young woman, Sarah, lit in harsh white played behind a bright white, torn, cheaply-made curtain. Surrounding this spot of “ghastly” white is an “unnatural” black, in which the various imaginary encounters with other “herselves”—the Duchess of Hapsburg, Queen Victoria Regina, Jesus, and Patrice Lumumba—the interior companions of Negro-Sarah, as she is referred to in the cast listing, take place. Accordingly, the very stage set sets up the central tension of this play, an interchange of black and white. And interestingly, despite Sarah’s self-detestation of her own “blackness,” it is in the “unnatural” darkness where all her creative activity occurs. The “white room” of her world is only vaguely defined by the author: “Her room should have a bed, a writing table and a mirror. Near her bed is the statue of Queen Victoria; other objects might be her photographs and her books.” It is a world, in short, of commodities.

     

     Yet Kennedy’s startling play is not simply about the basic dichotomies at the heart of this work—the American culture’s long history of breaking down everything into black-and-white (both racially and intellectually)—but is more about all that lies in between, both in terms of racial makeup and in terms of reality—or perhaps what I should speak of as “surreality.”

      Sarah might be to the society at large a “negro,” but to herself she is of mixed heritage, her mother appearing so white that her hair as not even “frizzy,” evidently the product of a mixed marriage. Sarah’s father, whom she detests and is terrified of, is described of as very black, a man haunting Sarah each night from the jungle he once inhabited. Through bits and pieces of dialogue and various retellings from the imaginary characters of Sarah’s mind, we begin to perceive that, upon marrying Sarah’s mother, the father moved his family to Africa where he might, as his own mother wished, “save the race.”

 

                              You must return to Africa, find revelation in the midst

                              of golden savannas, nim and white frankopenny trees,

                              white stallions roaming under a blue sky, you must walk

                              with a white dove and heal the race, heal the misery, take

                              us off the cross…..

 

Her vision of this paradisiacal Africa, in short, is as absurd as Sarah’s own desire to live at the edges of things, in anonymity:

 

                              I am an English major, as my mother was when she went

                              to school in Atlanta…. I am graduated from a city college

                              and have occasional work in libraries, but mostly spend my

                              days preoccupied with the placement and geometric position

                              of words on paper. I write poetry filling white page after

                              white page with imitations of Edith Sitwell. It is my dream

                              to live in rooms with European antiques and my Queen

                              Victoria, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books, a

                              piano, oriental carpets and to eat my meals on a white

                              glass table. I will visit my friends’ apartments which will

                              contain books, photographs of Roman ruins, pianos and

                              oriental carpets. My friends will be white.

 

Sarah, in sum, wants everything that a bourgeois consumer might desire. Yet each night she is haunted by the return of her dead father—a man whom we are told by the other two “other” figures of this play hung himself in his Harlem hotel upon the death of Patrice Lumumba, but whom Sarah insists she herself as killed by bludgeoning him with an ebony mask—reminding her of her societal position as a “nigger,” and all that dreadful aspersion signifies in a racist world.

     Sarah’s desired world contains no love, and she herself is unable to forgive. She admits to not particularly liking her friends, and makes it clear, despite her occasional sex with him, that she does not love her neighbor, Raymond. She is a product of both passion and hate, born from a mother who ceased having sex with her husband and a father her raped her. Her own writing is pointless, an imitation of a poet, Edith Sitwell, who, dressed in velvet and turbans, poured out often abstract rhythmical works, which, despite their modernity, often earned her the label of poseur.

      A major problem, one shared by all “herselves,” is a clearly Freudian one; each of them is losing their hair, like Sarah’s mother, now locked away in an asylum: fear, humiliation, failure, and embarrassment is at the center of Sarah’s life.

       Yet it is these very fears and the almost mad manifestation of Sarah’s fractured selves that is at the center of any real love and creativity she exhibits. Unlike the white frozen world of objects and vague relationships at the center of her “dream,” the horrible terrors of her own past and the dark world with which she is associated—her always “knocking” obsessions—are at the core of this play, a work which critic Deborah Thompson has observed is “‘founded’ in groundlessness, alienation, errancy, transience, and multiplicity,  written, Kennedy has explained, during a sea voyage: "Away from all my old books, but now besieged and surrounded by a myriad of real, astounding new imagery (ocean, staterooms, the decks, standing at the rail), my unconscious and conscious seemed to join in a new way."

     Tragically, in the world in which Sarah lives—a world filled with a gossipy and uncaring landlady, a cold cynical lover, and those white friends, “shrewd, intellectual and anxious for death”—there is no way to mend the rents and tears of Sarah’s fractured world. The society, in its racist distinctions, does not allow such bourgeois aspirations from a woman of color. And, accordingly, Kennedy’s play must end in Sarah’s destruction, another victim in a culture that does permit one to accept the multitudinous realities of life.

      In full gothic irony, Raymond suggests at play’s end that, in truth, Sarah’s father did not hang himself in a Harlem hotel, but is a “doctor married to a white whore”: “He lives in the city in rooms with European antiques, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books and oriental carpets. Her father is a nigger who eats his meals on a white glass table.”

 

 

Los Angeles, January 9, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2013).

Wallace Shawn | Our Late Night and A Thought in Three Parts: Two Plays / 2007

even the thought

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wallace Shawn Our Late Night and A Thought in Three Parts: Two Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2007)

 

     Although this book contains two plays by Wallace Shawn, I discuss here only the second play, A Thought in Three Parts.

     Wallace Shawn’s triptych, first performed in 1977 in London, was visited by the London vice squad, led to calls from The House of Lords to cease funding to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and nearly resulted in Shawn’s expulsion from the country! A hue and cry far beyond the nudity and simulated sex of all sorts performed in the second part of this work, “The Youth Hostel.” I’ve never been to a youth hostel, but I’ve stayed—a year or two after this play’s premiere—at the New York Sloane House YMCA, where I lived through homosexual events not far different from the heterosexual ones played out in Shawn’s play. I guess the Brits just weren’t ready to know what went on behind those easily opened doors. A more recent, 2007, production in Austin, Texas’ Rubber Repertory—although much written about—received a far more felicitous reception.

 

     If sex is apparently behind the linking “thought” of the three parts of this play, two of the play’s sections talk about it rather than representing it. In the hilarious “Summer Evening,” a couple in a foreign hotel, speaking sometimes to themselves and at other times simultaneously in a pace that the author describes as “very fast, much faster than people really speak,” cautiously tiptoe around the subject. David and Sarah at first appear to have a felicitous relationship, as they carefully maneuver their attempted conversations by trying to outguess each other’s feelings before they can be spoken:

 

                              David: —I just thought we might go down to the— (Sarah

                                   enters.)

                              Sarah: What?

                              David: —to the restaurant and—Love dress, love—the—

                              Sarah: Well? Don’t you think just our chocolates, maybe? Do

                                   we really—

                              David: Well—it might be nice—Some sort of a soup, or one

                                   of those—

                              Sarah: I’d rather—my skirt’s ripped—

                              David: Oh really, darling? I was only thinking that maybe some

                                   toast—

                              Sarah: Well then why not go down—

                              David: I—

                              Sarah: You probably—

                              David: —what?

                              Sarah: You could still get some—

                              David: What? I know, but I really rather would—what? Did you

                                   want to wash?

 

 

     The conversation continues like this, each interrupting the other, exploring tonal changes and emotional responses so carefully as to make their conversation almost painful. In fact, it gradually becomes clear, David would love to have sex, but Sarah is so involved with denial and contradiction that we can only see her as frigid, her seemingly friendly conversation soon turning sour, as she attacks the appearance of the room, the hotel, the country which they are visiting, and, ultimately, David: “Maybe I will burn you.” The frothy conversation of the first part is revealed as only a cover for each of their fears and hates.

      If this first part represents a permanently precoital sparring, the second part is all about coitus itself, The five men and women of “The Youth Hostel,” Dick, Helen, Judy, Bob, and Tom, move in and out the two rooms of the set as they jump into bed with one another, seeking out any pleasurable combination of sexual acts. Coitus transforms into masturbation, masturbation into voyeurism—all peppered with obscenities about the other partners, present and past. Despite the comic sexual posturings of these figures (and, although I have never seen a production of the play, I presume they are presented comically), they find cold comfort in one another:

 

                                  Judy: “Here we finally are, Judy.”

                                  Tom: Do you want to help me now. I could use a

                                        a fuck.

                                  Judy: “I think I understand you, Judy.” (They sit for a long time.

                                        Both feel cold. Judy shudders. Silence)

 

     Surely these characters have everything that both David and Sarah were seeking in the first scene, but this quintet doesn’t even have the lightness of possibility that the language of the earlier couple attempt to express. In “The Youth Hostel” everything is coldly coarse, with excrement, sperm, and verbal venom covering every bodily crevice.

      By comparison, Shawn’s last short monologue seems positively romantic, as the dreamer “Mr. Frivolous” awakens to his morning breakfast, following the flights of the birds outside his window and posting a comical put-down of all the joys to be found in nature. But Mr. Frivolous’ post-coital conversation soon becomes even colder than the sexual splendors of “The Youth Hostel”: “I ask you to love. I ask you to love. I ask to be taken, out to the toilet. And washed. And cleaned. And washed. And cleaned. I ask. I ask. I ask. I ask. I ask. For your arms. To be there. And your shoulders. There. ….Our bodies slippery. And cold. And cold. And cold. And cold.

      Suddenly what has seemed a kind of prayer of heterosexual love shifts to a paean to abusive love, to illicit love, the love of priests: “Then I speak, to my priest, and I say, Priest, touch me. Priest, Father, I have asked you to come here, to tell you, these clothes of yours have stayed here with me too long. Lie down here beside me. (Pause.) Precious are the priests who lie by the side of their lovers.”

      But even the illicit love between priest and confessor, between Father and son is insufficient to this desperate romantic, as he imagines a love with holy beings themselves, a sexual interlude, with which he closes his monologue, with angels: “With wings unfurled, our angels scattered light across the grass. …You, the littlest angel, ran under my robe and held my legs.” 

      So is love, future, present, and past explored by the playwright in a world where the sensual seems always allusive, never fully satisfying, seldom fulfilling the desperate desires for bodily embracement. How such a dire statement of sex might be interpreted as societally immoral is incomprehensible. But then, for some, just the word is enough. Even, as the title suggests, “a thought.”

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2013).