Harold Pinter | The Homecoming / 2008

the homecoming gift

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter The Homecoming / 2007 / the production I saw was a matinee of January 20, 2008 at the Cort Theatre

 

While in New York City in January 2008, I attended the revival of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming at the Cort Theatre.

     Although I’d read the play upon its first publication in 1967, I’d never previously seen a production of the play, and I’d forgotten much of its dialogue. The plot is not what this play is about, but I’ll briefly recount it for those readers unfamiliar with Pinter’s great work.

     Teddy, a professor of philosophy now living with his wife, Ruth (Eve Best in the production I saw) in the US, returns to his North London childhood home in the middle of the night. He suggests they retire to his old room—checking first to be sure it’s still “there” or, at least, empty—but Ruth prefers a short walk, the first sign there may be something amiss between the two, particularly when she promises Teddy, she’ll return. He goes to bed, and as she reenters the house she encounters the first of Teddy’s brothers, Lenny, a small-time pimp, who relates several violent stories about his relationship with women before he challenges his sister-in-law by insisting he remove her glass of water. Ruth refuses to give it up, suggesting he take a sip, and even offering for him to sit on her lap before she climbs the stairs to bed.

     Upon discovering the next morning that his son has returned home, Teddy’s father Max (Ian McShane), is outraged at not being told, and when Ruth is presented to him, vociferously insists that she is a tart until they can convince him that they are, indeed, married, blessed with two children. By the second act, Ruth has been introduced to Max’s third son, Joey, an inarticulate young man who desires to become a boxer, and Max’s brother, Sam, who works as a chauffeur. Except for Sam, this “family,” it soon becomes apparent, is more like a jeering and leering cannibal clan than a gathering of a loving father and sons. It also becomes apparent that, although she appears rather refined and well-dressed, Ruth fits quite easily into this brutal situation: she is, as she admits, originally from the neighborhood, and soon after we discover that she was, in fact, a prostitute in her previous life. Before long she is languidly embracing Lenny and sexually fondling Joey on the living room floor. By play’s end she has bedded down with Joey in the upstairs bedroom, and Lenny has offered her a flat where she can ply her trade a few hours every day in order to help pay for her boarding in their house. Sam collapses in a heart attack, revealing that the boy’s mother, Jessie, had sex in his cab with Max’s former friend, MacGregor. The nearly speechless Teddy leaves, to return to his two children, alone.

     This rather bizarre series of events was obviously quite shocking to theater goers in 1965, and many equally bizarre critical theories of the play’s meanings arose, including a suggestion by some critics that Ruth and Teddy were not truly married—an idea that is given no credence by the play itself. In fact, the “events” of this play seem, as strange as they are, almost inevitable given the grungy conditions of both house and inhabitants and the obviously stifling life and the husband Ruth leaves behind. While Teddy seems oddly unaware of any unusual behavior in his family, and has little to say about anything—he is proud of his “intellectual equilibrium,” his ability to operate on things, not in things—his family members are absolutely quivering with love, hate, sexuality and violence, which they brilliantly express to one another not only in their actions but through their lively language. Pinter’s play, accordingly, is not truly about what happens, but about how it happens and what is said.

     At the center of this linguistic battleground is Lenny, brilliantly played by Raúl Esparza. If in last year’s Company he was given little to do as an actor, in this play he is at the center of the verbal fireworks, pushing and probing through language for each character’s weaknesses. While his brother teaches philosophy, but has a focus so narrow that almost any issue is outside his “province,” Lenny is ready to consider the major questions of Western thought such as “a certain logical incoherence in the central affirmations of Christian theism,” and the “business of being and not-being.”

 

“…I’ve got a couple of friends of mine, we often sit around the Ritz Bar having a few liqueurs, and they’re always saying things like that, you know, things like: Take a table, take it. All right I say, take it, take a table, but once you’ve taken it, what you going to do with it? Once you’ve got hold of it, where are you going to take it?”

 

When asked what a table is, Teddy can only respond, “A table.”

     Max may not be brilliant, but he is hilariously clever in his never-ending abuse of those about him. To his brother, Sam, he lectures:

 

“Look what I’m lumbered with. One cast-iron bunch of crap after another. One flow of stinking pus after another. Pause. Our father? I remember him. Don’t worry. You kid yourself. He used to come over to me and look down at me. My old man did. He’d bend right over me, then he’d pick me up. I was only that big. Then he’d dandle me. Give me the bottle. Wipe me clean. Give me a smile. Pat me on the bum. Pass me around, pass me from hand to hand. Toss me up in the air. Catch me coming down. I remember my father.”

 

     Even the near mentally-handicapped Joey is a philosopher of sorts; when Lenny discovers that after two hours in bed with Ruth, Joey has not gotten any “gravy,” he calls her a “tease,” to which Joey responds that a man can be “satisfied” without “going any hog,” recognizing the fact that sex is far more than ejaculation.

     In short, these men may be self-destructive criminal-types, Max, a violent braggart whom Pinter hints may even have sexually abused his children in their nightly baths, Lenny, a misogynistic voyeur, and Joey, a brutal oaf, but they nonetheless are stimulatingly alive, and in the end, Ruth inevitably prefers their company to her frigid scholar.

     There is even a suggestion that Teddy has brought Ruth into his home and now her new home as a gift to his family, as a sort of return token of his esteem. His suggestion that she is very popular with the other faculty members hints that Ruth may have been sexually involved with his fellow faculty, endangering Teddy’s position. That would certainly explain his aloofness throughout much of the play, and his attempt to quickly escape his family’s embrace.

     By play’s end, however, Ruth has found much more than a home, she has rediscovered a career and is in control of this miserable family. As Max screams out for her attention, Joey fondles her knee, and Lenny stands simply watching, we recognize that she will not have too many familiar “duties” when it comes to her new household, that she can easily fulfill their desires for wife, mother, lover without ever having to give much of herself. Like Jessie, Max’s former wife, she will easily be able to have her own way.

 

Los Angeles, February 3, 2008

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2008).

Béla Bartók and Béla Balázs | Bluebeard’s Castle / 2014

locking up being

by Douglas Messerli

 

Béla Bartók (music), Béla Balázs (libretto, based on a story by Charles Perreault) Bluebeard’s Castle / LAOpera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the production I attended was a matinee on November 2, 2014

 

Béla Bartók’s quite terrifying opera of 1911, Bluebeard’s Castle, steals from elements of the original Charles Perreault story, but expands the work into a psycho-dramatic work that shows the influence of Freud, whose writings on William Jensen’s novel Gradiva, a work which has links to the Bartok work in the sexual obsessions of its hero, had just recently been published in 1906-1909.

     One might make interesting parallels between the Jensen and Bartok works in how Judith (Claudia Mahnke), recently married to Bluebeard (Robert Hayward) struggles throughout this short opera to cure him, in the latter case by attempting to open up all the seven rooms of his castle which he has purposely locked. The rooms are, obviously, different aspects of himself, elements of his past that he no longer wishes to consciously admit in his present life. Her hope is that by opening each of these rooms, she will bring light into Bluebeard’s castle once again, while psychologically curing him of his inability to face the past errors of his ways.

     Yet librettist Béla Balázs makes his story more complex by suggesting that Judith is far more than a naïve do-gooder. In terms of this version of the story, Judith has been “raped,” carried off by Bluebeard unwillingly from her family, perhaps when she has already been promised to another man. Moreover, she has heard rumors of Bluebeard, including the suggestion that he has murdered his former wives. Despite these facts, however, she declares that she loves him and that her intentions are all directed at changing his life for the better.

      Even if we ignore the fact that as a “victim” she parallels the behavior of what we today describe as individuals suffering from the “Stockholm Syndrome,” wherein the captive bonds with the captor, we cannot ignore that Judith’s quite obviously tortured love of Bluebeard—quite brilliantly choreographed under Barrie Kosky’s direction as a kind of brutal dance in which the characters pull and push against one another, falling, embracing and drawing one another in opposite directions that reminds me of figures in certain Fassbinder films or American artist Robert Longo’s paintings of the late 1970s and 1980s—is inevitably fraught with emotional suffering. Although it might be difficult to pin down Bluebeard’s major psychosis, he is most certainly a kind of misogynist, both in his sexual objectification of women and in his violence against them. He may also be a closet homosexual—he lives, after all, in a completely closeted world—which also helps to explain Judith’s determination to “help” him. We all know of women and men who believe that can cure what they perceive as sexual aberrations in the opposite sex, one of the most noted examples in literature being Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire, who unintentionally helped to cause the suicide of her youthful suitor. 

     Going room by room throughout his castle, demanding the keys to his empire which he reluctantly but also somewhat willingly awards her, she uncovers his terrible history that includes torture, violence, great wealth, but also a secret garden, other vast land-holdings, and a lake—all built upon the blood and tears of those who have come before. Indeed, every surface of Bluebeard’s castle is described as oozing water and blood.

     While in most productions of this opera the various contents of the six rooms are expressed with corresponding colors—red, yellow, golden, blue-green, white and black—Kosky has chosen to forego these for what seem to me as a few cheap tricks such as vines being pulled from the sleeves of inexplicable male alter-egos of Bluebeard (perhaps also suggesting Bluebeard’s male companions) for the garden scene and hands full of tinsel tossed to suggest Judith’s discovery of Bluebeard’s treasury. I have no difficulty with the round, moon-like sphere upon which the actors circle in their door-opening treks; the director has presented us with a kind of planetary manifestation that immediately tells us that this tale takes place outside of time and space. But the colors might have helped in clarifying what Judith actually witnesses, while the occasional props Kosky chooses to present are simply distracting.    

     The colors also seem to me to be of importance because they represent a kind of progression of tonal hues we might associate with the morning, noon, evening, and night which are emphatically reiterated by the three former wives Judith discovers in the seventh room.

     Each is linked up by Bluebeard as representing the time in which he first met them, and, accordingly, is associated with the passage of day from sunrise to sunset. In short, in marrying and then locking away these three women, allowing Bluebeard to gradually close himself off from any daylight routine in his determination to “kill time.” If he now lives in the shadow of time, his only hope of putting an end to it all is to also lock up the night, which he suddenly reveals is the modality he associates with Judith. Ironically, despite her attempts to bring light into Bluebeard’s life, she has actually brought him the one missing element he needs to bring an end to his existence, the pitch black of midnight. By locking her up as well, he locks away being itself.

     Here, once more, Kosky simply fails to comprehend the story in his directorial decision to keep the stage lit while the curtain falls. It seems to me that the moment Bluebeard has revealed Judith’s role, the moon-light orb upon should suddenly be plunged into darkness. But this is another minor flaw in an otherwise outstanding production of a work that should be performed far more often.

 

Los Angeles, November 4, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2014).

 

Amiri Baraka | The Toilet / 1964; reprinted 1998 [reading of play]

 essential dichotomies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amiri Baraka The Toilet, first presented in New York at St. Mark’s Playhouse, on December 16, 1964; reprinted from 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)

 

On the surface, Amiri Baraka’s short play of 1964, The Toilet, appears to be nothing but a documentation of a bullying incident in a high school, with a majority of black boys beating a frail white boy, Karolis, who has apparently written a kind of love letter to the head of the black gang, Foots (or Ray). It might be superficially represented as a kind of abbreviated “rumble” scene out of West Side Story.

 

     But the authenticity of Baraka’s language and his briefly catalogued “types” at the beginning of the script, quickly—and the play is performed, surely, at nearly lightning speed—transforms this work into a drama which, quite subtly, explores a whole series of dialectical issues: masculinity and its inverse, weakness, power and powerlessness, futility and hope, justice and brutal punishment, leadership and rebellion, and, most importantly, love and hate.

      The play begins, strangely enough, somewhat offstage, as several members of the gang, the “short, ugly, crude, and loud Ora” (a.k.a. Big Shot), the “tall, thin, and somewhat sensitive,” Willie Love, and the “big, husky, somber, and cynical” Perry report to each other that their would-be victim is upstairs hiding in various classrooms as others of their group attempt to seek him out. Like young, angry youths everywhere, these boys not only report the goings on, as they meet in the stinking, high-school boy’s bathroom, but swear at each other, and pretend to battle, all the while showing off their supposed virility and strength through their acts of urination and other uses of their sexual members. The following “attack” on Karolis, accordingly, is not only a response to his homosexual challenge to their leader, Foots, but is to be a kind of proving of the only thing these desperate kids have left, their “manhoods.”

     Through their jests with each other, we quickly learn that several of these young men do not even have parents, others live lives of destitution, and nearly all of them are doomed to failure in their future lives. They describe each other the way the society around them has, with words like “bastid,” “punk,” “muthafucka,” “sonofabitch,” and, yes, “nigger.” These are the lost boys of the street, forced to gather in the institution which they so detest.

      Only Foots (Ray) seems to have any intelligence, as he reports that the authorities, evidently, think highly of him, and hope that we will prevent any attack of another student. Baraka describes him, quite poetically, as “short, intelligent, manic,” a “possessor of a threatened empire.” That empire, of course, is a mean-spirited gang, ready to implode or explode, depending on which series of emotional responses they take. They have already exploded by the time they bring Karolis to their lair, having beaten him so badly that for much of the play he cannot even talk.

      Foots wisely refuses to beat him any further, insisting that to do so would be meaningless, since the white boy is already sprawled out upon the floor. But the others, particularly Ora, are determined to see more blood in revenge for his daring. Another white boy, Donald Farrell (“tall, thin, blonde, awkward, soft”)—who seems tangentially part of the gang, but is not very welcome in its midst—tries to talk them down from doing any further damage, bravely refusing to leave the toilet unless Karolis goes with him. He fails, and is literally physically expelled from their group.

     Foots, accordingly, is in a difficult position. If he does not show enough outrage for Karolis’ challenge, he will be seen as weak, possibly even in cohorts with the boys offer to “blow him.”; yet he rightly sees no pleasure in fighting someone who has already been felled. A lesser playwright may have had this character throw a couple of more sucker-punches and left it at that. But Baraka intensifies the situation by suddenly having Karolis demand a fight with Foots, a fight he knows he cannot win. It may be that the gay boy has even a lower self-esteem than the blacks in this work; or, at least, in fighting he might have some sort of physical contact with Ray, whom he describes as “beautiful.”

     Foots, now gradually being described by Karolis and the others by his ordinary name, Ray, continues to refuse to fight. But Karolis, quite eloquently (described by the playwright as “Very skinny and not essentially attractive except when he speaks”) continues to challenge his “rival,” bragging that he will “kill him.” Suddenly everything changes, as the gang members, eager to see the fight, move in on the two, egging on the fight Ray is trying to prevent. When the fight does get underway, it is Karolis who gets Ray into a stranglehold, while the gang head is rendered inoperative; when his power is suddenly thrown into question, the others, in response, enter into the fray, beating Karolis again into submission, as Ray lays also flattened across the floor.

      Finally getting their revenge, the others move off, as Karolis drags himself into a toilet cubicle to recover. And, here again, Baraka surprises us, as with the last of his stage instructions:

 

                    After a moment or so karolis moves his hand. Then his head moves

                    and he tries to look up. He draws his legs up under him and pushes

                    his head off the floor. Finally he manages to get to his hands and knees.

                    He crawls over to one of the commodes, pulls himself up, then falls

                    backward awkwardly and heavily. At this point the door is pushed

                    open slightly, then it opens completely and foots comes in. He

                    stares at karolis’ body for a second, looks quickly over his shoulder,

                    then runs and kneels before the body, weeping and cradling the head

                    in his arms.

 

I don’t know how this scene is represented in the stage production—I’ve never seen the play performed—but the way the scene is written seems more appropriate for film than for stage, simply because we are, at first, not told that it is Foots who is about to enter the cubicle, the fact of which is kept from us, in the directions, until the very last moment. Similarly, his actions—reminding us of both a kind of crucifixion and pietà, as well as an expression of sorrow and, finally, homosexual love—startlingly reveals that the young “skinny” white boy has won this battle, at least, that the bullied has defeated his tormentors through his unconditional love. What we might have perceived as a set and predetermined series of events is, in fact, flexible. The realities of youth, as we must always admit, are never quite what they seem to be. And with one fell swoop, this gifted playwright dispenses with the very essential dichotomies which he seems to have created. Everything in this play, we suddenly recognize, is not so “black and white” as it originally seems.

      That the angry revolutionary of 1964—by this time Baraka had already traveled to Cuba, arguing that art and politics should be indissolubly linked, the same year as The Toilet writing his screed of white and black hate, Dutchman—is equally surprising—unless you know the Baraka I and others knew—a man who might continually be seen, as The New York Times obituary yesterday reiterated, as a “provocateur”—but as a true “optimist,” even though he admitted his optimism was “one of a very particular sort.”

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2014

Reprintted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2014).

 

Giacomo Puccini, Guelfo Civinni, and Carlo Zangarini | La funciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) / 2018

going west

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giacomo Puccini (composer), Guelfo Civinni and Carlo Zangarini (libretto, based on the play by David Belasco) La funciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) / New York, The Metropolitan Opera / the production I saw was the MET live-HD production of Saturday, October 27, 2018

 

Rather oddly, given Howard’s and my adoration of opera, I had never previously seen a production of Giacomo Puccini’s 1910 opera, commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera (a production conducted by Arturo Toscanini, with Emmy Destinn as Minnie and Enrico Caruso as Dick Johnson), La funciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West). I’d heard many of its pieces on disk and radio, but never actually experienced the production itself.

     Howard, who was to have accompanied me for this MET live-HD production at the theaters in Century City near Beverly Hills, discovered at the last moment that he had committed to a walk-through of the Merion Estes show he had curated at the Craft and Folk-Art Museum near us. So, Howard returned his ticket, which coincidentally was purchased by a local gallerist friend, Ruth Bochofner, who became, quite by accident and most pleasantly, a replacement friend.

     I’d always thought about this late-career Puccini opera as a kind of last gasp, followed only by his La rondine and his series of three short operas, also first performed at the Metropolitan in 1918; yet, I now realize this was a terrible misconception.

     Supposedly Puccini thought that this David Belasco-based opera was his very best, and almost all of the performers argued for its difficulties and complexities, with Eva-Maria Westbroek, arguing that it was one (if not the) very favorite of his works in which she had performed. The personable Italian conductor Marco Armiliato, who directed the score from memory, seemed impassioned about its intricacies and argued how more contemporary, given Puccini’s highly romantically-based operas before this, it was.

     I must agree that this work, given the remarkable vocalizations of Westbroek (as Minnie), Jonas Kaufmann (as Dick Johnson), and Željko Lučić (as the sheriff Jack Rance) is something I had never before imagined. And yes, this is definitely not the usual Puccini concoction of beautiful arias and character types as in La bohème, Tosca, or Madama Butterfly—even if, clearly, there is some of the last-named opera’s exoticism that creeps into his vision of Belasco’s wild west, with many quick references to his later Turnadot, wherein, like the proud queen of Peking, Minnie refuses her love to the minors from all over the world who have gathered in their mad desire for gold to offer her their treasures.

     On the surface, in fact, they seem mostly to be good friends, almost making up the foundation, sans wives, of a future civilized community. They gather in the local bar to drink, gamble, and to release some of their aggressions, but their trust in their mother/potential lover, owner of their bar, Minnie, is so very touching that we quickly comprehend why they use the lower shelves of her bar, overseen by the gentle bar-tender, in which to hide their life savings. The local Wells Fargo rider tries to get them to bank their wealth in his company (terribly ironic today given what we know of that institution’s 21st-century actions), but the stagecoach has often been robbed by a local bandit, Ramerrez, and they trust the virginal Minnie as the better banker.

     Together they vie for her attentions, Rance believing, just because of his position as a sort-of-law-and-order ex-gambler and heavy drinker, he has the best chance of wooing her. While Sonora (Michael Todd Simpson) believes he might be her favorite, given his status as a kind of group representative of the goldminers. If the various challengers for Minnie’s love sometimes break out in violent confrontations—this is after all the violent West of Hollywood myth which still suffers brawls and violent interchanges when a gambler is found to have been cheating—they seem to be a rather affable group, with even an ability to help out a fellow, very depressed miner, who is desperate to return home to England, by taking up a collection to send him home. We might almost imagine that this will soon be the “well-intentioned” Western town of Hadleyville if only some women were to arrive. What might be the desire for immediate violence could eventually turn into a refusal to get involved if you give these crude believers enough time.

     In the meantime, the gun-toting Annie Oakley-like figure of Minnie has to serve as both the vision of law-and-order and the mentor/educator of this rough community, calling them to order, serving up their liquor, and then reading to them from the Bible about King David and other major biblical figures. She’s a tough teacher, scolding them for their lack of memory, but also a loving and caring being who, we later discover, has served as nurse, confessor, and supporter of many of these toughs.

     If we sense this mix of a lesbian-like woman facing off with a gang of randy, isolated males might become a kind of tinder-box of pent-up emotional and sexual feelings we wouldn’t be far from wrong.

     But if Minnie, herself, as she later puts it, is a kind of gambler/capitalist, one of the boys so to speak, a woman who even sees herself as a kind of coarse, uneducated woman surviving through her instincts—without even realizing it, it is her true kindness and intellect that has allowed her continued existence. For she is, surprisingly, a reader, having stashed away a complete library in her mountain cabin, reading late into the night, mostly, she admits, love stories—while still rejecting the advances of many of her would-be suitors such as Rance (with the angry and moving “Laggiù nel Soledad,” her expression of an attempt to find “true” love.

     Minnie, accordingly, is a remarkable combination of a tough Western survivor and a naïve innocent, who goes through her life protected simply because of the armor of those contradictions.

     Given this rough-and-tumble world, and Minnie’s and her community’s own mixed emotions, Puccini must have realized that he had to create a different kind of opera. Here, for one of the first times in his music, beautiful wrought musical passages are again and again interrupted, as if almost suggesting a kind of modernist composition, as characters cut across each other’s would-be spiritual expressions. It’s a bit like an early intonation of jazz: the moment a phrase begins, another instrument (in this case an intrusive voice) interrupts to express his or her own viewpoint. People in this opera get in the way, constantly, of all the others, shouting down the arias they may have sung, refusing to hear any of the melodic sentiment of a standard Puccini opera.

     We are presented with wonderful flourishes of romanticism—the whooshing theme of the golden girl, the almost Rodgers and Hammerstein-like, somewhat clumsy American-intonations of the miner’s greetings of “hello,” the painful interludes between the past and present when the bandit Dick Johnson and Minnie recount their early accidental meeting as almost kids—constantly interrupted with musical expressions of the forceful, often physical and violent interactions between the miners and outsiders.

      Minnie becomes almost so girlish after inviting Dick to come to her isolated cabin in the sierras, that she truly does remind us of the corny Doris Day film when Annie Oakley tries to dress up for Wild Bill Hitchcock. It’s the trope: suddenly get out of your slickers, put away your gun, and put on a dress (in this case with a rose stuffed into your bosom) to attract the man of your dreams—even if, she quickly discovers, he’s worse that you might even imagined him to be, a simple bandit who has been consorting with a local Mexican whore.

     As one of the commentators noted between the acts of this marvelous production, this opera projects the sense of a kind of early movie, with the music and events tumbling over upon one another so quickly that sometimes you can hardly catch your breath. Musical phrases literally pile up only to collapse into more profane chords of everyday commentary. For what seems like hours, a tense three-hand poker game—during which Minnie cheats Rance to escape his intended rape of her and to assert her own attempt to claim her own man, somewhat like he was a gold mine she has suddenly discovered and determined to claim—tamps down any sustained lyrical musical refrain except for a sort of percussional tempo that is unlike anything one has encountered in Puccini’s previous scores.

      Minnie’s final song of love in Act II, after she illegally wins, might almost be perceived as a kind of mad scene out of Strauss’s Elektra or Salome.  Puccini has suddenly moved away from the late 19th century into new territory, made even more remarkable by the performance I witnessed. Even Westbroek had to admit, during an intermission chat, that she had completely “nailed” it.” It was a moment of opera to remember forever. And the audience went clearly appreciated it.

      Finally, unlike almost any Puccini opera before it, this is not a tragedy. Despite the attempt of the miners’ community to get their revenge, the impossible strong woman at the center of this work, returns, guns in hand, to righteously claim her man and help him escape the local noose, despite all the odds releasing her lover from their actual legalistically-justified arguments by reminding these locals bumpkins of all she has done for them.

     In the end, the freed couple walk off together into the rising sun to never return, perhaps moving on to a new southern paradise, I’d like to think, of Santa Barbara or the then-nascent Los Angeles. No snow there, which, after all, is what almost got Dick killed in the second act.

      I now agree, this may be, as Puccini himself believed, his very best opera, not a work that displays his immense melodic skills at music-making but expresses a kind of new Italian-Wagnerian notion of what opera can become. Had he only lived long enough to continue that transformation!

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2018).

Martin Sherman | Bent / 2015

talking sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martin Sherman Bent / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum / the performance I saw with Howard Fox was the August 23, 2015 matinee

 

Martin Sherman’s 1979 play, Bent, revived recently by Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum begins almost as any gay work of the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly Mort Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), but also like Doric Wilson’s A Perfect Relationship (1978) and Robert Patrick’s T-Shirts (1979, works described aptly by Eric Marcus in his Out in All Directions as being about issues concerning “the loneliness that caused older men to turn to hustlers, the debauchery of innocents by urban gay life, the insularity of the gay ghetto, and the neurotic entanglements and complicated sexual victimizations that occurred among friends, partners, and frustrated would-be lovers.”

      A slightly “monogamish” couple, Max (Patrick Heusinger) and Rudy (Will Taylor in the production I saw) awaken past noon after a long wild night, Rudy somewhat peeved by his partner’s behavior of the night before while pretending nonchalance. Max can remember nothing, until a well-endowed, naked male (Tom Berklund) appears from a back bedroom (how Max has missed his obvious bedmate is unexplained), as Rudy gradually explains how Max, completely drunk, first invited all the waiters of the gay club run by the drag-queen, Greta to come home with him, before falling to the floor upon a black leathered young man, Wolf, whom we soon discover is one of Ernst Rohm’s Sturmabeilung troop members. But it is only gradually that we discover this fact, and, at first, we might well as be in a Manhattan apartment, with the two occupants arguing about their messy lives. If Max is a wild drunken cocaine uses, Rudy is a naïve dancer at the local cabaret, no more responsible, and even less able to find money to pay the rent, than his would-be lover.

      Wolf, for his part, is eager to join the two young men at the home in the country which the drunken and drugged Max (describing himself as the Baron) has promised him a drive in his shiny new car. Max, in short, is clever con-man, capable, as he admits, of convincing people of things that lie outside reality.

 

     In short, the whole first scene plays like a light-hearted, slightly camp presentation of just what Marcus describes, and Sherman’s drama, accordingly, reads as a light-hearted comedy. And surely, when the play first premiered, when few (according to the program notes of this play*) seemed to know about the Nazi incarceration of homosexuals, the play must have read even more normative.

     Today, at least, when most of know more about that era—the moment we recognize that this scene is played out in Berlin in 1934—we perceive that the play is soon to shift in a very different direction—although the folks sitting behind Howard and I seemed to have no idea as they guffawed straight through the next few moments, when Nazi soldiers break down the door and slit the throat of Wolf in continuation of the Night of the Long Knives (which I describe in the essay above), part of Hitler’s purge of Rohm and his Brownshirts, a political act which his government obscured as a crackdown of gay perversion. In terror Max (dressed only in his bathrobe) and Rudy skitter off to the club.

       Suddenly the play shifts again, presenting us with a scene that might have been in the musical Cabaret, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s successful musical of 1966; the song the club’s performers, led by Greta (Jake Shears), sing, “Goodbye to Berlin,” is also the title of one of Christopher Isherwood’s Weimar-based novels, upon which Cabaret was based. All right, we get it, this is the razzle-dazzle sex-crazed Berlin. Although Sherman’s cabaret number is not nearly so tawdry and convincing as the songs sung originally by Joel Gray.

      As if realizing the play has again come again to a standstill, Sherman offers up his clueless heroes who have gone into hiding as they attempt to find shelter from the mean-spirited Greta, who has actually sent the Nazi’s searching out Wolf to their apartment. Although he (as Greta makes clear, he is safe, since offstage he is a married man) gives them a bit a cash, he is not convinced that they will be able to escape the new Nazi purge.

     Finally, Sherman’s play begins to settle into its real subject matter; but it’s already a bit too late. Although the couple have forced into the forest, camped out in tents, they continue their gay-life patter, arguing over their limited choices of food, the condition of living quarters, and complaining about their inability to even touch one another—appearing as if somehow they still have not completely assimilated the complete horror of their situation. Rudy is particularly dense, it appears to me, although I couldn’t be sure that his absurd innocence was due, in part, to with understudy Taylor’s almost amateurish performance (playing Rudy as a kind Midwestern American) or whether Sherman simply couldn’t quite create figures that were convincingly of European birth.

      Max, apparently, is the son of a wealthy Amsterdam button manufacturing family, who is upbraided by his gay uncle for embarrassing his family by his extravagant behavior. And Max, skewered throughout most of the play as a spoiled, selfish being, is even willing to marry the window of another button manufacturer if Uncle Freddie (Ray Baker) will only get him two sets and new papers and tickets to Amsterdam instead of the one he offers. Yet it is hard to believe that Max in either of Dutch birth or might possibly be so unselfish as to put himself in such endangerment for Rudy’s sake. If he is willing to “ditch” Rudy once they reach Amsterdam, why, we have to ask, is he so protective of him now?

     This soon becomes an even more profound question which the author is never able to answer, as both Max and Rudy are captured, and, in transport to Dachau, Rudy is tortured before the Nazi commando demands that Max, to prove he is not Rudy’s friend, beat him. In order to save his life, Max not only complies but almost seems to get a strange sadistic pleasure in the act; and, soon after, when asked to prove that he is not gay (worthy only of the lowest of the emblems sown upon the prisoners’ uniforms, the pink triangle) demands he have sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl, recently murdered, as the other Nazi’s voyeuristically stand in watch. In reward of his sexual virility, Max is awarded, ironically, the Jewish yellow star, which, oddly enough puts him at the top of the Dachau totem post, garnering him a better chance of surviving the ordeal.

     In other words, Sherman has chosen a nearly impossible monster as his hero, whose redemption—in this case by a scrawny pink-triangulated Horst (Charlie Hofheimer), whose major sin is that he signed a petition in support of the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld—appears nearly impossible for the play’s start.

     Mysteriously—and this is a continual problem with Sherman’s seemingly naturalistic tropes—Max gets Horst transferred to from the brutal tasks of breaking down rocks with a pick-axe, to the nearly existential task of moving a pile of stones from one place to another before returning them back to the other, again and again, ad infinitum—a job which, Max.suggests, is intended to make him mad. Although, I would like to know whether or not Sherman had any evidence that such a task was really given to prisoners at Dachau, it seems a kind of perfect metaphor for the madness of the camps themselves.

     Yet Sherman is not a writer of someone like Beckett’s stature, and in the first of what are far too many scenes in which the actors are forced to heft stones back and forth across the stage, returns us to the kind of catty gay couple arguments of the “comedy” that Bent begin as. And later, as his character’s conversations increasingly become infused with talk of sex, the author does not share Beckett’s abilities to transform the inane into a poetically rich language.

 

    There is something almost thrilling, particularly the first time through, when this odd couple attempts to make love while standing next to but apart from one another through the art of speech. It reminded me, a little, of those early network chatrooms wherein participants talk about sex in order to actually experience it. But in front of a primarily heterosexual audience, which I assure you the elderly Taper patrons mostly consist of, the scene seemed at once more prurient and tamed-down than any actual sexual act performed on stage might have been perceived. Later, when the freezing and sickly Horst lamely refuses to go through the same verbally sexual encounter, Sherman reaches to the bottom of his often jokey quips—“I have a headache”—in response, turning what might have been a someone creative dramatic trope—particularly for a basically voyeuristic audience—into a sit-com situation.

     Again, some of the audience members, chirruping at this and other cheap quips, laughed half-way into the final scene where the Nazi guard commanded Horst (whose cough proves that the medicine Max had obtained from him through the present of a blow-job to the Nazi guard was actually intended for his co-worker) to throw his hat at the nearby high-voltage electric fence. We have already been told that such a command doomed whomever it was directed, for if the individual chose not to retrieve the hat, which would surely cause his death by electrocution, he would be shot. We are not surprised when the events are inevitably played out.

       What we are surprised about is that Max—whom we have finally come believe has truly begun to understand love as something different from mere sex—once more stands by without being compelled to aid his friend. That he is forced to bury him and, at the very moment of the pieta like enactment wherein he begins to carry his dead lover to his grave, he is forced to stand still while looking forward (a ritual described as “rest time” dictated by the timed screeches of a whistle) while holding Horst’s body before him, gives evidence to the fact that this is the first time in this play (except perhaps for the cabaret dance—but even if you look at the photo above, it does appear the directly Moisés Kaufman forced his figures keep to keep their hands off one another) where anyone has actually touched anyone else. When the whistle signals a resumption of action, he seemingly puts Horst into the ditch with the voiceless howl of Brecht’s Mother Courage. Just as with Rudy, Max has in large part, once again, in this man’s death.

      We must conjecture that he will no longer to be able to live with himself, so that, accordingly when after moving a few rocks, he returns to the ditch to remove Horst’s shirt with the pink triangle, and, removing his own yellow starred garment, puts it on—although it is a truly moving moment, an acceptance not only of his sexuality but of his recognition of love—there is something empty in the act. A small group of the audience members could not resist this symbolic transformation of character and applauded the event.

      But for the others of us in the audience, I believe, that symbolic expression comes simply too late. No matter how Max has been transformed, his recognition—in part because of the author’s literary devices—has simply come too late. And even his rush into the wall of electrified death at play’s end, seems to be a melodramatic aftermath. Perhaps if he had really dared death earlier on, had actually reached out to touch the other instead of simply imagining him, we might have truly been able to celebrate what Sherman’s play certainly intended to convey: W. H. Auden’s contention that “We must love one another or die.”

           

*Although I may be mistaken, I am almost certain that I had long before 1979 known that homosexuals were imprisoned and killed in the Nazi camps. Surely, I and others, might have known the details, but I can’t believe that Sherman’s play was the first to actually brooch this subject. Perhaps in the popular theater, yes, but not if one read one’s history.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2015

Reprinted from American Theater, Opera, and Performance (August 2015).