fear of sleeping
by Douglas Messerli
John O’Keefe All Night Long / directed (with scenic design) by Jan Munroe at
Open Fist Theatre Company at the Atwater Village Theater / the performance I
saw with Pablo Capra and Christina Carlos was opening night, September 14, 2018
Although I published John O’Keefe’s 1980 play,
All Night Long, in the anthology From the Other Side of the Century II: A New
American Drama, edited by Mac Wellman and me in 1998, I had never before
seen a production of the play. Thankfully, Open Fist Theatre Company determined
to present it at Atwater Village this season, and I immediately put it on my
schedule.
I
don’t think it’s the kind of comedy/drama that one might describe through plot
for those who have never seen it. First of all, the “plot,” such as it is,
keeps shifting, events happen without explanation (for example, at one moment
Eddy’s [John Patrick Daly] previously-loving family turn on him, sending him
out into the night for the punk rockers to get him, yet he soon after reappears
through an upstairs wall; the family’s eldest daughter, Tammy [Caroline
Klidonas], seems to be sleeping with her father Jack [Philip William Brock],
but at other times it all just seems to be a joke or even a game; although this
family stays up, so it appears, the entire night, terrified to go to bed, hours
go by in minutes and occasionally slip back in illogical reversals of time).
The publicist and director refer to this play as a “surreal” work. And,
indeed, it does often remind one of Thornton Wilder’s surrealist American
comedy, The Skin of Our Teeth,
suggested by comments by Tracey Paleo, writing in a review.
Yet
I might characterize it a bit differently, as a sort of absurdist mash-up of
O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night
with the 1950s television family-oriented The
Donna Reed Show, along with elements of other such TV situation comedies as
Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Costume designer Kharen
Zeunert even hints at the standard pearl necklace worn by actress Barbara
Billingsley with the mother Jill’s (Alina Phelan) outré necklace. Certainly
Jill represents the implacableness of Donna Reed, Jane Wyatt, and Billingsley;
nothing quite ever perturbs her sunny outlet of a kind ditsy housewife view of
the world except when, challenged by her son, she claims all the contents of
the house to be “hers,” declaring her son as not only having a voracious
appetite (a bit like All in the Family’s
“Meathead”)—throughout the plays he downs masses of bologna and ham, at one
point even retrieved from the stage floor, a task that no actor might ever have
imagined; the entire cast dines on blue jello!—and proclaiming:
You! You twerp! You
don’t even have the stuffing to be a homosexual!
You pre-ejaculatory squirt! You’re the one that really fucked up my life!
I
haven’t even yet mentioned the existence of yet another daughter, Terry (Cat
Davis), evidently a procreation from some alien medical procedure, (a “test
tube daughter” born after Jack and Jill could no longer have children), which
perhaps explains her preference for hiding out in a closet wherein she
undergoes several monstrous transformations before she returns, dressed in
slightly metallic-like toppings over her cutesy dresses. Despite her utter
strangeness, Terry obviously is a thing of the future who may long outlast
these battling dinosaurs.
Yet, for all that, in their pared down and often frantic pronouncements,
father, mother, son, and daughters do make clear their fears, their values, and
sometimes even their dreams in a not-so-acclimatable world. And by play’s end,
they greet the new day with a kind of Beckett-like sense of “going on,” even if
they feel that that can’t, the mother serving up her own body, symbolically, as
their breakfast.
As
a woman behind me suggested in the intermission, this all makes so much more
sense in the context of where we are now in a society having to deal with
Trump. I’d agree, but perhaps we should recall that the US has always been a
strange and scary place, particularly in the post-War years in which O’Keefe
was simply trying to survive as a child. The very pulls of the society of
1950s, between content affirmation of family and familial roles (I’ve long
argued that women, despite their having to deal with the hubristic idea of male
domination, were often really the forces of power in those years) and the
horrible political terrors of the “Red” threat and all that might be associated
with that, are well represented in O’Keefe’s powerful play, beautifully
realized by the direction and scenic design, at the Atwater Village Theater, by
Jan Munroe.
The acting, in all cases, is exceptional, and the company expresses in
this revival of the San Francisco Magic Theater production the freshness of
this 38-year-old play. O’Keefe himself, remains, perhaps a little more grizzled
than when I last saw him, a powerful and intelligent figure who seems, at the
moment to be making a kind of comeback, with another play, Don’t You Ever Call Me Anything But Mother appearing this fall at
Zombie Joes Underground.
Los Angeles, September 17, 2018
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2018).
No comments:
Post a Comment