the verge of possibility
by Douglas Messerli
John Steppling Sea of Cortez, the performance I saw was at the Workhouse Theater
Company, New York in 1993
To Dr. Cousa’s seedy laetrile
clinic, located on Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, come Eddie and Malone, the first in
search of a father—or at least his inheritance as a son—and the other in search
of a son—or at least the son he would have inherited. Rejected, down-and-out, temperamentally
explosive, and sexually starved, these two have entered the “standard” John
Steppling territory: a dark world in which instances of illumination and poetry
only underscore its bleakness.
Dr. Cousa, sophist and sham dreamer, has reached the end of his long run
from the clutches of officialdom he expresses in the acronyms confronting every
paranoid: CIA, IRS, AMA, FBI. The patient, Mance, sits out his last days in
stony hate for the human race. His adopted son, Eddie, desperately courts the
disgusting porno distributor in search of financial remains.
In the hands of a lesser playwright, say a David Mamet, the results of
such encounters would be predictable: a play filled with accusations,
suffering, and ultimate forgiveness. Although Steppling’s play contains all of
these elements, the various interchanges between these figures and Eddie’s
communications with a neighboring fortuneteller (who speaks in an eerie and
magical gibberish) and his sensual translator result in no answers, no real
communication. For in Steppling’s world people are what they are, doomed to
suffer their own predetermined destinies. There is no hidden money; no escape
from the forces that be—natural or man-made. Guilt is inexpiable.
The little love to be discerned in this landscape is perverted: Dr.
French ineffectually strokes the shoulder of his only young patient, the naïve
Russ; Eddie pays the fortuneteller for a few inane words from his translator;
Malone, a former lover of Eddie’s mother, pointlessly regrets he did not take
over the responsibility of raising the child.
The author reiterates these issues by ending each of the dozens of
character “encounters” with a possible—if illusionary and epigrammatic—question
or answer; but as the director, he stymies that connection with an immediate
frieze and blackout. In each scene the characters must begin all over again. At
times this is extremely frustrating, and overall, it slows the play down to an
almost excruciating crawl. The ultimate effect, however, is to point up
Steppling’s underlying Romantic sensibility. For even while the figures of this
play have no actual hope of communicating, they forever remain on the verge of
possibility. Face to face the figures almost scream out not only for
communication, but for a simple caress, even a touch; but the dark surrounding
silence serves as a kind of coitus
interruptus, and the characters are forced to sink back into their
determined alienation. Desire is all they have left.
It is precisely this desire which takes The Sea of Cortez in an entirely other direction. For although the
characters seldom communicate with one another, their flights of poetic
language represent their feelings brilliantly to the audience. Steppling’s
crippled beings reveal to us what they can’t to the rest of the world at large:
that they are capable of and desperate for love. Full of humor, dreams, and
crazy belief, they live linguistically (and imaginatively) in a place where
their physical beings cannot inhabit. The role of Eddie, in particular, demands
that a vaguely incoherent anger be converted through language to a kind of
dreamy poesy, but unfortunately the actor in this production recited his lines
instead of discovering them. Overall, however, the New York production
confirmed the Los Angeles recognition of Steppling as one of the major
playwrights of our time.
Los Angeles,
1993
Reprinted from El-E-Phant:
A Language Arts Review (August 1993).
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