what have we reaped?
by Douglas Messerli
John O’Keefe Reapers,
Odyssey Ensemble Theatre, Los Angeles, July 16, 2005
In the program notes for his new
play, Reapers, playwright and
director John O’Keefe describes the work as a “memory of a fantasy,” “What in
Greece was the island, in Iowa is the farm. The farmer is the king, his wife,
the queen, his daughter, the princess, and his son, the prince. Joey Beam is
the chorus. The storm has already happened. The play is being performed by
ghosts.”
Indeed, life down on the farm as presented by O’Keefe has as much in
common with the Furies as it does with any Norman Rockwell portrait of a
country family at table. For the Fox family, working a hardscrabble plot with
nothing to farm but hay, everything has gone rotten before the play begins.
Hulda, the mother, is catatonic, a wheelchair bound manikin her son describes
as having been stuffed, but who from time to time awakens to terrorize all.
Mildred Fox, the matriarch of this Orestesian brood, is a brutalized housewife
longing to kill either her husband or her son, it doesn’t seem to matter which.
Her daughter Deirdre is a sometimes innocent but more often flirtatious young
woman on the prowl. Son Bruce, whose major activities include raping the sleeping
daughters of nearby families, nightly dueling with his father, and ultimately
killing his best friend, characterizes his behavior as one of “startlement,” an
activity which consists mainly of popping out from beneath the bed of a young
man, Tom O’Brien, whom the family has obtained from the state juvenile home to
help with the three-day endurance test described as reaping. Locked in the
basement between long stretches of hard work, Tom is subjected to homoerotic
“startlements” by Bruce as well as the love-starved blandishments of Deirdre.
The father is the kind of farmer my own Iowa grandfathers were, men who did
little but work themselves into death.
As we observe this loving quintet at their evening chowdown (“dinner” is
too polite a word), we witness their simple home-bound pleasures: washing their
hands, chewing slices of white bread, and verbally abusing one other. Other
than the nightly father-son fights in the barn, temporary escapes—the son’s
“running” with his friend Dickie, the daughter’s quick forays into the local
town for fresh admirers, the father’s insistent consumption of alcohol, and the
mother’s brooding day and night-time visions—are the only possible “pleasures”
available to them.
But there is no escape, obviously, for young Tom. He is their temporary
prisoner, and as an outside agent caught in this spinning web of horror, is
called upon to witness their unspeakable deeds and unwillingly participate in
their disgusting visions and acts. At moments, O’Keefe brilliantly crystallizes
the absurd but utterly logical political conclusions of right-wing America:
it’s time to stop allowing foreigners to come here and take over our jobs, and to start sending Americans
overseas to destroy the foreigners’ homes and cities and take over their jobs, their oil wells, their
manufacturing plants.
The satire of this play, however, is at other times too broad. Religious
fervor, racial prejudice, violent political values—the author has perhaps
created too many vectors for this wacky, ultra-dysfunctional family to
successfully embrace; and the final furor of nature, madness, and personal hate
take the play to a mountaintop of hysteria that the wide-eyed audience can
merely endure—all belief in and sympathy for its characters having long been
erased.
The “hero” of this fantasy is nature itself, the forces that every
farmer knows are at the center of his existence. Like O’Keefe, I grew up in
Iowa. Even living in a city, as I did, the constant subject of daily life was
the weather—there was never enough rain and there was always too much; it was
always too hot, too cold. Every farm family had tales of relatives being killed
by or surviving tornadoes.
The single-man chorus of this play, Joey Beam, poetically conjures up a
world of just such forces—clouds that shout, winds that whisper, earth that
cries out from its daily abuse. And at the center of the horrible fury of this
play are characters desperate themselves to sing out for the joy of living and
the praise of nature’s gifts. Deirdre and Tom both sing lovingly at moments in
the play, and in one short scene, hidden away in her upstairs bedroom, the two
remind one almost of another young couple, George Gibbs and Emily Webb of Our Town, discussing their lives and
futures. We quickly realize, however, that, unlike the world facing the
Thornton Wilder figures, the couple of this current-day fantasy have no real
lives, no real future to embrace. Tom
attempts to describe his family as a “broken” one, with a dead father and a
mother who “forgets” him for long stretches in state orphanages and juvenile
centers. Deirdre decries his metaphors as mere euphemisms. What is “broken”
about a relationship where a mother refuses to retrieve him? The “relationship”
is one of hostility, not a “break,” which might suggest a possible mending.
For, as she knows from her own insufferable life, there is no longer any hope
for love. It may be that, given the “relationships” these would-be dreamers
have had to endure, there is no longer even a possibility of hope. As the
author describes the changing forces of nature in our real global-warmed world:
“Diseases spread, spring arrives earlier, plant and animal range shift, the
coral reefs bleach. There are downpours, heavy snowfalls, flooding, droughts
and fires.” Let us hope, O’Keefe seems to argue, that we awaken before the
Apocalypse arrives.
Los Angeles, August 1, 2005
Reprinted from The
Green Integer Review, no. 1 (January-February 2006).
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