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).

 

 

 

 

Stacey Levine| Susan Moneymaker, Large and Small: A Ten-minute Play / 2007

the good house

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stacey Levine Susan Moneymaker, Large and Small: A Ten-minute Play (Brooklyn, New York: Belladonna Books, 2007

 

Certainly no one might make claims that fiction writer, Stacey Levine’s first (and I believe only play to date) is a major contribution to theatrical literature; it is the work of a writer trying-out a new genre, and is a piece that is highly connected to her considerable achievements in short and longer fiction. One can most surely assert, however, that Susan Moneymaker, Large and Small is a true delight which leads one to hope the author will try her hand at other theater pieces.*

      The “excitable” Moneymaker family—middle-aged Uncle, Aunt, Mother, and Father—begin and end their minutes on stage discussing and observing their young niece and daughter, Susan. Each member of this family is slightly disappointed in Susan, particularly since she has not yet found a husband; yet, as all doting families believe, she is beautiful and smart, a “magnificent girl,” a student at “the top of her class.” She could become a veterinarian or lecture in physics.

     While the family “enjoys” breakfast—if you can describe their series of near-meaningless non sequiturs as joyful—they recall events around and about Susan, including Mother’s “loss of confidence” during her long-ago pregnancy by peering into a tub of eels. But the friendly smile of a policeman has healed her, and now she is strong, even though she hates the neighbors! At one moment Susan, so declares the family’s ornery Grandfather, is fifteen, while others claim that she is much older. Indeed, the Grandfather, the most comical figure throughout, is generally not to be believed as he yells out several attacks upon family members: “You pack of cretins! Get out of town!”

      In their determination that Susan will marry rich and become famous—presumably to help support them—there is something detestable about this toasty and Tastee cake-chewing bunch, who when Susan does show up, declare just what they’ve been up to:

 

                      mother: Susan? Oh, Susan Lynne Moneymaker! We’ve been chatting

                                      and planning, do you know? We want so much for you,

                                      angel.

 

What began as a droll conversation, suddenly turns absurdly frightening as the family declare that she must marry the milkman’s son, Lad, eventually throwing the two together on the couch, where the couple seem to either fall asleep or into death:

 

                      aunt: Everyone, everyone, look at Susan and Lad!

                      mother: So still. They’re like angels, aren’t they?

                      father: Soon their life will begin.

                      aunt: I say it’s sweet!

                      Pause.

                      father: Why aren’t they moving?

                      Pause.

                      aunt: Could they be dead?

                      Pause.

                      uncle: Oh-ho, give ‘em a minute, those young tigers. Their

                                   lives’ll begin in a just a moment, I’m telling you.

 

     Only the Grandfather, in his memory of their life when they lived by the river, near a “brilliant house”—wherein lay hanging bridges, birds in the windows, and rooms that slightly sway— comprehends, so it seems, that the family has abandoned something near paradise. “It was near our own home, all right. Close enough. But then we had to move away, you pack of louses, and we got farther way from the good house.”

     Obviously, all that is left is a group of determined bourgeois voyeurs to which the younger folk cannot even respond. If Susan is large in their dreams, she is made small by their selfish behavior.

 

Los Angeles, January 22, 2013

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

 

*Levine notes that she also wrote a radio play, “The Post Office,” performed in Seattle. “Susan Moneymaker” was also performed in a Settle theater festival.

 

John Hawkes | The Innocent Party: Four Plays by John Hawkes / 1966

the empty pool

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Hawkes The Innocent Party: Four Plays by John Hawkes (New York: New Directions, 1966)

 

Novelist John Hawke’s fascinating play, The Innocent Party, seems, at moments, to be channeling elements of Tennessee Williams, particularly in its location—“patio of an abandoned motel in a subtropical area of the United States”—but also in its central character, a strong survivor very much the mode of Clarissa Foxworth of Williams’ last play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere. I could almost hear Shirley Knight’s voice behind Hawkes’ Phoebe, a fabulously wealthy and world-weary woman who inexplicably has descended upon her brother and sister-in-law’s down-and-out motel after years of sailing around the world, seemingly, it appears, just to get a glimpse of her part-Tomboy, part Aphrodite niece. The strangeness of the family and the unpredictability of their comments, moreover, help the work feel akin to Williams’ world.

 

     Despite all of the play’s apparent relationship with Williams’ works, however, the play seems even more linked to another, far more traditional American playwright, to whom, stylistically Hawkes has little kinship. For what we begin to perceive early on in this dark comedy is that the central character, Phoebe, is perhaps less of a real figure than a figment of this fallen family’s imagination. Like “Uncle Ben,” the mythical elderly brother of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, who when he was 17 walked into a jungle only to walk at 21 as a rich man,” so is Phoebe an wealthy woman who has traveled the world, while her brother Edward stayed home to “go under,” losing his small business of selling cheap cameras, and turning to collecting shells. He and his coarse wife, Beatrix, spend most of their time creeping around of their empty lives, by the empty pool, half filled with garbage, trying “not to mind” about the normal adolescent activities of their daughter, Jane. In short, like the Loman family, they have lost all hope of achieving the American Dream, spending most of their time moping around or pointlessly praying for a miracle of changed fate.

      And just as Ben, in Miller’s play, seems to be figure of hallucination, so too does Phoebe seem to be the family’s hallucination. They nearly all worship Phoebe’s white car, peering into it with lurid desire. It may be that Jane herself has called her aunt up in an act of utter desperation, since she has no possible alternative in the closed and timid poverty of her parents’ lives and minds. As she puts it, she wants to “go under” too, not financially, but under water in dare-devil dives, somewhat like, as her aunt describes her, a mermaid able to alter her boyish young body. She has already begun to steel from the neighboring black boys, playing out a sense of endangerment in a world in which parents neither drink nor dance, but simply complain and collect fragments of old sea-life.

      Although Phoebe attempts to throw a party, the participants ignore all attempts at celebration. Having already stolen from her aunt, Jane is banned from the party until Phoebe calls her out, pretending, in private, to both help the young girl learn to dance, but at the same time hinting at much more carnal desires. Despite Jane’s adolescent turmoil, however, she is still innocent, and, in her refusal to participate in her aunt’s lascivious Salomé-like activities, the party itself becomes an innocent remnant a sinister world which her youthful imagination, possibly, has whipped up.

       As suddenly as she has appeared, Phoebe, her large pocketbook filled with cash, and the hammock upon which she has slept all night and much the afternoon, disappears, while the young Jane repeats her fervent pattern of rising, holding her hand before her eyes to sniff out the flowers before looking, like narcissus, into the pool at her own being, magically swimming away into a kind self-loving paradise.

      At curtain’s fall, however, we realize that this young innocent is as deluded as her horrific parents: for the pool is, after all, empty; any dreams it might have proffered drained away before she has come to life. And so this dark comedy reads as tragedy at last.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2013

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

Djuna Barnes | Biography of Julie von Bartmann / 2020

freeing the family

by Douglas Messerli

 

Djuna Barnes Biography of Julie von Bartmann (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2020)

 

Written in Cagnes sur Mer and the Maritimes Alps in France between November 1923 and April 1924, Djuna Barnes’ three-act play, Biography of Julie van Bartmann, related to several of her early stories—particularly “A Night Among the Horses”—and to her 1928 fiction Ryder. Like the father, Wendell, of that book, the father of this early play, Basil Born, refuses to let his children attend public school, and faces down with the school authorities, challenging them with their teaching methodologies: he wins. And like the early short story, one of Barnes’ best, a strong and sophisticated woman verbally destroys her “bestial” horse groom, which ends in his death.

 

      Yet it is hard even speak of “events’ such as these in Barnes’ work. Unlike most US plays, which lay out a “story” through their character’s lives are revealed, Barnes’ highly artificed theater is centered in what one might describe as “revelations,” most long statements about oneself and life, alternating with a questions or sparring conversations, such as those between the powerful opera singer Julie van Bartmann and the strong-minded “landholder,” Born. And even the “revelations” are less revealing of how the characters think than how they perceive the world morally and philosophically; yet since these statements are presented in a highly literary language, filled with aphorisms, puns, extended metaphors, and dualities, we cannot even be sure that the character is speaking honestly or attempting to play out a desired notion of themselves.

       Barnes begins the play in simple anticipation as Born’s two sons, Gart and Costa (like her language, Barnes generally stocks her works with strangely named figures—not unlike her own name and those of her brothers) who await the arrival of their father and a new boarder, Julie, who is apparently staying at the house—the boys do some farming, but Born seems to have retired—to rest up before she returns to the stage. Evidently, she is not the first grand person to stay with them, women who, throughout the years, have had had passionate relations with their father, even while their mother, now dead, was still living.

       Gart, the elder son, is thin and handsome, a gentle soul who plays the organ well. The younger son, Costa, is shorter and broader shouldered, a figure described as a kind of “beast,” having a connection with the soil. The daughter, Gustava, nineteen years of age, is an excitable young woman who cares for pigeons and garden. All three are in awe of their dominating father.

      The rest of the drama plays out various encounters between these figures, in which each fall in love, in some respect, with the grand Julie. The first such “encounter” is understandably between Basil Born and Julie, and she questions him about himself, his children, and the house in which she is to stay. These passages, in particular, have the feel of a tennis match as each of these strong figures sends out charged and even barbed messages about their temperaments and sexualities:

 

                                                                       julie

 

                                   I am not married, that is—not married. I have not money worries.

                            I love—peculiarity, perhaps you would call it vice (she raises her

                            eyes watching him). Nothing astonishes me. In the night, when it

                            rains, when the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls, I do no not

                            draw my toes up, I sleep, and leave terror and superstition to the

                            people.

 

                                                                      basil

 

                             At a pinch madame, I can be a little peculiar myself.

 

                                                                    julie

 

                             It begins to be something of which I am aware. I have heard

                               that you are savage. Is it so?

 

                                                                    basil

 

                             Not at all. I have a certain influence with my family, but the

                                state does not like me.

 

At this point, he goes on to explain his encounter with “peoples in places of dictatorship” (i.e. the local school board). But the passage also clearly suggests Basil’s interest in her, and she in him. The act ends indeed in a kind a double entendre as Julie suggests “I am willing you should play a little,” suggesting that she might hear him play a hymn upon the organ they have their home; but with the end of that sentence, “but—I am noted for my detours!” hints that the “playing” and “organ” might mean something else. Basil’s command to his daughter, “Show that splendor to bed!” makes his desires, if not intentions, quite clear.

      But the second scene of Act I, it is not Basil who visits Julie’s bed, but Gustava, who snuggles up to Julie before pouring out a biography of the woman as she has been following her for years in fan magazines. Indeed, perhaps she has been following the career of the diva, since she is seen in another moment of the play as cutting out a picture from a magazine, several of which are posted on the Born walls. The vision she has of the grand lady is almost an inhuman one:

 

                             Wait, don’t laugh. It is like this: You were born. You were laid

                             in a bassinet, you did not cry. You learned to walk before other

                             children, you watched everything, and then one day, when you

                             were three or four, you realized that you were terrible, a child

                             of destiny.

 

As Julie quickly perceives, Gustava is not quite simple country girl she appears to be, soon moving even closer to the beautiful woman: “Let me put my head on your arm, your perfume is so strong, and so sweet—“ And by the end of their long conversation, she has hinted that Julie must come to terms with her—and her brothers—with Julie suggesting “I have never reckoned with children,” and Gustava responding, “Now you have to it, we are here, wat are you going to do?” Julie sends her away.

     The second act begins with an extended conversation between Gustava and Costa, in which recounts her morning activities to the girl, both admitting their admiration for her (“She is beautiful.”). When, soon after, Julie approaches Gart in an attempt to the seemingly shy twenty-year-old out by describing her own past selves, Costa ends their conversation by striking his brother, the two of them violently wrestling, while Julie looks on, clearly recognizing the emotion chaos she has created in them: “It has begun.”

      In the second scene of Act II, Barnes again creates a strangely ambiguous sexual scene, wherein Gart, troubled and unable to sleep, crawls into his father’s bed, querying him about the dazzling visitor in their house (“Is Julie von Bartmann a good woman?” “Beautiful, damaged, there more beautiful.” Finally moving to his own perceived condition, “What is passion in man?”)

     The father, strongly demeaning Julie, is quite obviously trying, as he puts it, “trying to make Gart safe for tragedy.” Nothing, however, can calm the excited young man, who almost dares his father to kill him (“No, you must finish my life. You have begun it and you must see it through.”) before he threatens either suicide or murder: “I have come to something that I do not understand, or only in one way, I think it would not be your way. …Whether I must kill myself, or you.”

      There is only one way this tragedy can now play out. For the first time in the elder Born’s life, he has meant less to a woman than his now nearly-grown children. At the age of 50, time has changed everything. In an attempt to demand she chose him, what he describes as demanding “victory,” she fends off his invitation to his bed off, ultimately proclaiming she prefers “the shy, gentle elder son, half musician, half human.”

      By the end of the play, Born has shot himself, dying before the towering Julie, while Gustav demands the intrude leave:

 

             Go, go, it is all over. You see what he has managed—accomplished. Go,

             go, take everything and go. You see yourself—we are reunited—we need

             nothing—it is all finished—settled.

 

Leaving, Julie’s slightly inexplicably reply, “Immense! Immense!”, seems to suggest she perceives Born’s act as a sort of sacrifice, an attempt to keep his family as a tightly knit unit opposed to the ridiculousness of other’s lives. Yet one can only wonder if his act is not also a highly selfish one, the act of, as he describes himself, the Beast, desperate to hold onto what he has created and his insufferable pride.

       Barnes does not answer the question, but surely we recognize, at play’s end, the father’s symbolic death, which closes both his and Julie’s biography, freeing these isolated orphans to enter the world, to now lead their own lives, if slightly wary of the foolishness that may face them. And in that sense, Barnes’ theatrical family drama, ends, like Chekhov plays, with a somewhat comedic, rather than tragic, resolution.

 

Los Angeles, January 15, 2013

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

John Glassie | A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change / 2012

purposeful misunderstandings

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Glassie A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (New York: Riverhead Books, 2012)

 

By coincidence, just as I completed reading Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès fiction, Where Tigers Are at Home—in which one of the central stories concerns the seventeenth century priest Athanasius Kircher—my companion brought me home from the local Barnes & Noble a 2012 biography of Kircher, A Man of Misconceptions, by John Glassie.

 

    Like the Blas de Roblès work, Glassie recounts Kircher’s very active life, from his birth in Fulda in the then Holy Roman Empire (as Voltaire quipped, “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor a Empire”) to his long tenure as the caretaker of his celebrated museum in the Vatican. And like the fiction, Glassie one by one recounts Kircher’s vast array of interests, from his fascination with geology, optics, microbiology, sculpture, medicine, languages (in particular his attempt to read the Egyptian hieroglyphs), philosophy, mathematics, theology, and all things Chinese. Kircher has often been described as the last man to have mastered all knowledge. But in the age of Tycho Brahe, René Decartes, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton—in short at the beginning of what we now recognize as modern science—nearly of all Kircher’s theories regarding these numerous topics have since been proven wrong. A determinedly brilliant Jesuit, Kircher misread texts, jiggled facts, and theorized through fantastical conjectures a world in which everything was interrelated pointing to the hand of God. Although for most of his life the priest was seen as one of the most learned men of the world, and was sought out and corresponded with nearly every major figure of the day, including his friend, the artist Gianlorenzo Bernini, John Evelyn, Queen Christina of Sweden, and several popes for his encyclopedic knowledge, by the end of his life he was perceived by many as a kind of crack-pot, famed for his theories based on little experimentation and great imagination.

      As Glassie engagingly recounts the events of this “adventurer’s” life—a man who at one point had himself lowered into the erupting cone of Mount Vesuvius—he reveals Kircher’s numerous “misconceptions” along the way.

 

                      Many of Kircher’s actual ideas today seem wildly off base,

                      if not simply bizarre. Contrary to Kircher’s thinking, for

                      instance, there is nothing occult or divine about magnetism.

                      There is no such thing as universal sperm. And there is no

                      network of fires and oceans leading to the center of the

                      the Earth. It’s fair to say that from the viewpoint of modern

                      science Kircher has been something of a joke.

 

    The author, nonetheless, paints a somewhat positive picture of the “lying scientist” simply by giving us a larger context of how science in this dawning modernist world was generally perceived. As Glassie points out, “Of course, modern science didn’t exist in 1602,” the year of Kircher’s birth. Despite his wondrous ideas, Galileo was wrong about a great many things. And Newton, apart from his influential ideas, continued to practice alchemy throughout his life, while Kircher dismissed alchemy early on.

      If nothing else, Kircher’s utter fascination with all forces of the earth might stand as a grand testament, akin to the Renaissance thinkers, to connect all knowledge, perceiving thought in general as “the art of knowing.,” which he attempted to delineate in dozens and dozens of Latin tomes. If nothing else, is was Kircher who inspired Bernini to sculpt “The Fountain of Four Rivers” in Rome. And as Glassie reveals, Kircher’s grand misconceptions influenced scores of writers and thinkers throughout the centuries.

     Kircher’s theories of magnetism, for example, were highly influential upon the eighteenth century physician Franz Anton Messmer. And the priest’s fascination with magnetism seems somewhat prescient today in a world where “magnetism…has taken on ever-increasing significance in almost every scientific and technological field.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz claimed that Kircher influenced much of his early thinking and inspiration. And although the old priest was utterly wrong in his interpretations of Egyptian hieroglyphics, he was right to associate them with Coptic, and had he further studied that relationship he might have cracked the code that was later achieved through the discovery of the Rosetta stone by Napoleon’s forces in Egypt. Poe quotes Kircher in his story “A Descent into the Maelström,” and Jules Verne’s famed A Journey to the Center of the Earth was almost entirely based on ideas by the “German egoist,” a character also in the story itself. Nearly all of the writings and teachings of the nineteenth century “psychic” Madame Blavatsky, expressed in Theosophy, are cribbed from Kircher’s writings. The list of later influences, misguided or benign, continues through the centuries.

     Finally, one simply has to pause in awe and wonderment with regard to Kircher’s voluminous activities. Although one might perceive his as nearly always misguided and often a fraud, science certainly would have been less interesting without him.

 

Los Angeles, May 11, 2012

Reprinted from Rain Taxi