listening
by Douglas Messerli
Gertrude Stein, adapted by Marissa Chibas, Erik Ehn, and Travis Preston Brewsie and Willie / performed at
the 7th Floor Penthouse (533 S. Los Angeles Street), Los Angeles / the
performance I saw was on Saturday, July 24, 2010
Published in 1946, just weeks prior
to Stein’s death, Brewsie and Willie began
as a series of essays, published in The New York Times, expressing the feelings and worries of young
soldiers still in Europe. Stein’s observations were based on her own
conversations with American G.I.s, with whom she had spoken on the street and
at dinners in her own home to which she had invited numerous of them.
While the work is dominated by the thinking and commentary of Brewsie,
egged on by the most obstinately ordinary of the group, Willie, this dialogue
fiction eventually becomes filled with the voices of numerous young
soldiers—Jo, Henry, Donald Paul, Ed, Jimmie, Richard, and, through Willie’s
constant evocation of him, even the dead Brock—and military nurses—Janet,
Pauline, and Jane.
In Stein’s original these men and women discuss everything, although
often just in passing, from issues of race, cultural identity, immigration,
history, economics, politics, and, in particular, their own uncertain future.
Stein’s skillful interweaving of these various subjects is both humorous and
powerfully moving, as one by one—some of the soldiers clearly having never
spoken of these issues before—they reveal their minds, tell stories, and share
their family lives and upbringing. It is the complex matrix of these issues
which allows this seemingly transparent work—a work which Stein enthusiasts and
scholars might describe as too accessible in relation to her more experimental
writing—to become a poetic chorus of fearful and thoughtful voices that links
this to her most challenging work.
Although I might have liked to have the adapters tackle as many of these
issues as possible, Chibas, Ehn, and director-author Preston skillfully and
faithfully focus on issues economic and historical while suggesting the
numerous other topics the original tackles. Indeed this performance was so
excellent that any qualms I might have had in the adaptation of Stein are
allayed by the powerful evocation of the young soldiers on the eve of their
“redeployment,” a word most of them find meaningless, if not terrifying.
The youthful cast of the Poor Dog Group, most of whom are just two or
three years out of the theatre program at CalArts, are precisely the age of
Stein’s young Americans, and their fresh faces and simple beauty—as the men,
sweating in the summer heat, briefly strip off their shirts to cool off, some
of them having jumped in and out the windows of the top floor playhouse,
literally unable to control their energy and, as we quickly discover, their
worries—almost brings one to tears.
Having all faced two world wars back to
back, and having lived through part of the Great Depression, these men of what
Tom Brokaw has described as “The Greatest Generation” are terrified that upon their return there will
be no jobs or, if there are jobs, the economy will be built up once more to
again collapse. An early conversation between Brewise and Willie summarizes the
situation as they envision it:
“B:
How I hate that word job.
W: You’re right to hate that word,
hate it good and plenty, but can you afford to hate it Brewsie, fellows like you dont need a job you just
live, eveybody’s got to see to it you live and live you do but fellows like us,
well we got have jobs, what you want us to do, nobody’s going to feed us, you
just watch them not feed us dont we know, no we got to have
jobs, talk all you like and talk is
good I like talk I like to listen to you Brewsie, but when we get home and dont
wear this brown anymore we got to have a job, job, job. Yes job.
B:
I know, I know, I know Willie. Yes I know, you got to have a job, and it’s
all right but it’s not all right, see here let me tell you about jobs. Some
have to have jobs, some have got to be employed and be employees, but not so
many Willie. Listen to me not so many, when everybody is employed.
W: God, if they only just could not
be employed. I aint forgot that depression, no not yet.
B: Yes
but Willie, that’s what I want to say, industrialism which produces more than
anybody can buy and makes employees out of free men makes ‘em stop thinking,
stop feeling, makes ‘em all feel alike. I tell you Willie it’s wrong. …”
In a world where, for the first time, they have had to look about, to
compare their lives with others, and evaluate what it all means, these young
men and women have gradually begun to think, and before long, they are as
active as Brewsie in observing, commenting upon, and questioning the world
around them. And all, in turn, begin to fear that the new workaday world which
they will soon face will not allow the time to think. Will they, like those of
the past generations, forget all about the lessons they have learned? Will war
break out once more? Will the nation overproduce to create a new depression?
One could almost hear the sighs of the audience in their silent recognition of
Stein’s soldiers' prescient concerns. This play is terribly significant even
today.
The on-stage rapport of these actors, their ability, so necessary in a
production such as this, to work almost as a single breathing mass of beings,
is, as another reviewer commented, “a miracle, pure and simple.” And the interaction particularly of Brad
Culver as the loveable Willie and Jonney Ahmanson as the pondering, somewhat
befuddled Brewsie made this play, for me, one of the most memorable in years.
So intense is their sense of camaraderie and love that, at one moment, the
director sends the entire male cast to the floor in a mass wrestling match that
momentarily releases both their tensions and sublimated desires.
As Stein reiterated upon her deathbed, there is, obviously, no answer to
the questions the soldiers pose. Donald Paul’s Thoreau-like logic to go back to
the simple ways of living and surviving by oneself, as Brewsie realizes, will
not work for most of these men. One very young soldier is determined to stay in
France, but the others, despite their fears, want to return home. One or two
suggest that they might embrace Socialism or even Communism, but Brewsie and
most of the others realize that these are not true solutions for a country in
which these ideas are so foreign.
With the help of the women, the men gradually begin to embrace another
kind of possibility for their futures. Some of them, at least, come to see that
it isn’t just a matter of finding a job, but of finding something meaningful to
work toward. One of them suggests that their goal should be to “pioneer.” But
where is the wilderness? Willie scoffs. Clearly Stein is using the word here
not as a noun, “a pioneer,” but as a verb defining action as a process of pioneering,
of discovering the world all over again. But this concept, as brilliant as it
is, seems to emanate from the voice of author, not from the characters and, as
such, brings a halt to their startlingly real interchanges.
The last speech, spoken by one of the women characters, in the book is
pure Gertrude Stein crying out to her “G.I.s and G.I.s and G.I.s,” like Susan
B. Anthony or others of her women heroes, with a patriotic, rhetorical
flourish. Perhaps this ending was the only way to have successfully closed the
work, for the soldiers have been called home and are on the move, already
missing the voice of their thoughtful friend Brewsie, who has challenged them
all, again and again, to “listen”
“Janet: And tell me, wont you miss
talking when you go home, you do know dont you all of you nobody talks like you
boys were always talking, not back home.
Jo: Yes we know.
Jimmie: Yes we know.
Willie : Not Brewsie, he’ll talk
but, Brewsie will talk but we wont be there to listen, we kind of will remember
that he’s talking somewhere but we wont be there to listen, there wont be
anybody talking were we will be.”
Perhaps, as Jo suggests, “they will talk now, why you all so sure they
wont talk over there, perhaps they will talk over there.” But the stubborn
realist, Willie, is convincing: “Not those on the job they wont, not those on
the job.”
Thank heaven for a production such as this that helps its audience to
listen, to listen attentively while loving nearly every word, if only for a
couple of hours.
Los Angeles, July 31, 2010
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2010).
