Eugene O'Neill | Early Plays (Three Glencairn Plays) / 2013

the endless voyage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill Early Plays (Three Glencairn Plays) performed by The Wooster Group and New York City Players / the performance I saw was a matinee at Los Angeles, Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) on February 24, 2013

 

Although I highly admire O’Neill’s later works, including the majestic tragedy, Long Day’s Journey into Night, I have always been slightly embarrassed reading his earliest works, particularly The Glencairn Plays, three of which were performed this past week at Red Cat in Disney Hall. First of all, they are obviously slight works with fairly stereotypical characters and plots, which ultimately reveal little about what being a sailor is really about. Lonely men desperate for a drink find both in the 1918 work Moon of the Caribees, two loyal lumps of clay express their devotion for one another in my favorite of the works, Bound East for Cardiff (1914), and a young man determined to return home in Sweden gets tricked by the proprietors of a local bar and is shipped out on what is near to “slave” ship in The Long Voyage Home (1917). Even worse, however, is the language O’Neill gives these lugs to speak: each of them, representing different races and countries, are revealed in a painfully dialogue-based argot that makes one wonder, at times, whether O’Neill had really heard men like his characters speak. Any casual reader, I believe, would declare them “fake.”

     Accordingly, these early O’Neill plays are rarely performed, and, I, like most others, had never seen them upon the stage. How wonderful, I reasoned, be able to see a production under the direction of The New York Players founder, Richard Maxwell, known for his productions in which he reveals the very “theatricality” and “unnaturalness” of theater works instead of attempting to pawn them off as “realistic” or “veristic” events. Maxwell’s actors are about as far away from Method acting as you can get.

    Yet, at the same time, Maxwell is emphatically loyal to the original texts. And, in this case, his actors speak every Swedish, Bronx, Caribbean, and British accent that O’Neill has thrown their way. By speaking those lines without dramatic intensity, almost in a monotone, they somehow relieve us from necessity of placing them into a realist world, and, while often calling up laughter, they also highlight the poetic value behind their somewhat incoherent words.

     Particularly in Bound East for Cardiff, in the long dialogue between the dying Yank (Brian Mendes) and Driscoll (Ari Fliakos, who I last saw in the Wooster’s Williams play Vieux Carré), this strange pairing of theatricality and emotionality creates its own intensity, as the two long time sailor friends reveal their love and devotion to one another, while reminding themselves of their various past adventures. Played out in a corner of the stage, supposedly the ship’s fo’c’s’le, the scene requires the audience to listen attentively and peer into the set from a great distance as if they were secret voyeurs. Indeed, they are, as it gradually becomes clear, particularly with Yank’s admission that he had always dreamed of settling down with Driscoll on a farm. Far more believable than anything expressed in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, we sense the intense eroticism of these two “roughs” and the painful denials and acceptances of their own mortality. If they speak often almost incoherently, it is even more painful that the two now so clearly confess to each other their own love.

     The last of the three plays, The Long Voyage Home, is also painful in its chicanery, betrayal, and inevitable imprisonment of the young Olson (Bobby McElver) who, fed up with the hard work, low wages, and inedible food of the several ocean voyages he has suffered is determined to return to his homestead in Sweden, with the hopes of helping his brother and mother on their farm. He has apparently had that dream for a long while, but each time he reaches port, his thirst for alcohol seizes him, and spends his wages, unable to travel back to his homeland. This time, he brags, he will not drink. The sleazy bar owner, Fat Joe (Jim Fletcher), his assistant Mag (the wonderful Kate Valk), and a fellow sailor, Cocky (Keith Connolly), helped by the prostitute Freda (Victoria Vazquez) work to break down the young innocent’s defenses, slipping a potion into his drink that knocks him out. In sad inevitability, he is once again shipped out on one of the worst vessels in port!  Olson’s quiet revelation of his story through O’Neill’s torturous Swedish rendition helps to make the audience feel sad and solicitous for this doomed young traveler, who, like Odysseus takes a nearly endless voyages to reach his destination.

     Outwardly O’Neill’s most poetical short, filled with tropical moons, exotic native music, two Carribean beauties (Kate Valk and Victoria Vazquez), and loads of rum, seemed the least successful of the three plays. It may, in fact, have been that this work was the first of a trio, and we had not yet adapted ourselves to Maxwell’s techniques. But then the relationships between the characters seem innately vague and mysterious. Why is Cocky so distanced from all the others and apparently the only one able to resist the charms of Pearl? Most of the indeterminate sailors, moreover, spend their time in the fo’c’s’le drinking, and when they do gather atop ship to dance, they interrupt their pleasures with what they know best, a chantey—in part simply to drown out the strange and frightening music of the island natives. While there is a forceful dis-ease in their momentary pleasures, there is, more importantly, a disease within them that breaks out in a violent fight, to be quelled by the always squelching officers. Even their momentary pleasures, accordingly, are forbidden and interrupted. 

    In the end, I am not sure that any of these plays represent great theater. But in the hands of the Wooster Group and Maxwell’s New York Players we see them, at least, for their fascinating potentialities, and recognize why O’Neill himself saw them as break-through works.

 

February 27, 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2013).

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte | Le nozze di Figaro / 2014

 

terrifying twists

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (composer) Lorenzo da Ponte (libretto, after the comedy by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais), Le nozze di Figaro / the performance I saw was the Metropolitan Opera live HD broadcast, October 18, 2014

 

Like many an opera buffa, Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro is filled with would-be lovers jumping in and out of beds; late night romantic assignations; flirtations and sexual encounters between maid(s) and master, mistress, and godson (or male servant(s), or any visiting admirer); intriguing switches of amative attentions; startling revelations of heritage and birthright; as well as, quite often, temporary alterations of sex—all undertaken beneath the nose of a highly suspicious husband or another such authoritative figure who is usually the greatest transgressor of the lot.

 

    As anyone who has seen this “follow up” to Rossini’s just as character-leaden and plot-stuffed precursor Il barbiere di Siviglia knows, Mozart’s work offers all of the above in great proliferation. Between Count Almaviva’s (Peter Mattei) attempts to bed nearly all of his housekeepers, and his maid Susanna’s (wonderfully elucidated by Marlis Petersen) and her soon-to-be husband Figaro’s (Ildar Abdrazakov) attempts to get even (or in Figaro’s case, to get revenge) for the master’s unwelcome attentions of the lively “flower of the household,” there is hardly a moment in this heady elixir of amour and feudal abuse that isn’t jam-packed with new plot twists.

     “Twist,” indeed, is the perfect word for the constant story fluctuations, which the Saturday HD broadcast host, Renée Fleming (who has performed in her share of Figaro productions) characterized as “a perpetual turning of the tables.” So many epistles have been written and posted through the pockets of Figaro that, at one point, when cornered by the Count, he admits that even he cannot keep track of the would-be comings and goings of figures, as three notes of assignation simultaneously fall from his pockets. Fortuitously, Rob Howell’s well-oiled swing of the settings and Sir Richard Eyre’s precisely-timed fluidity of direction keep the production moving, even if, at moments, the audience and characters lag behind in comprehension.

     But the “twists” of this busy-bee work lay not only in the turning down of bedsheets by the Count, but in the twisted relationships of various characters, most notably Marcellina (the housekeeper to the pompous Dr. Bartolo) who hankering after Figaro, has long-ago loaned him money attached to a contract stating that if he does not pay her back, he must marry her. Bartolo, who like the much younger Count, at one time has clearly employed house staff in roles beyond their job descriptions, is more than delighted to now have the opportunity to get rid of his “old cow,” while simultaneously revenging himself for Figaro’s involvement in preventing him (incidents represented in Rossini’s operatic version) from obtaining Rosina, now the Count’s lovely wife.

      Suddenly in act III we discover that the man Marcellina truly desires to marry is, without her knowledge, her long-lost son, Rafello, fathered by her employer, Bartolo. In short, she, who the Count was determined just minutes before to declare to be Figaro’s wife, would lure Rafello into a horrific coupling, like Oedipus and Jocasta, of mother and son. In the context of Mozart’s pre-Freudian world, such a marriage does not represent a psychological condition but rather serves as a hovering omen about the machinations of the Count, threatening to transform at any moment the comic “pranks” of Lorenzo da Ponte’s and Mozart’s work into a tragedy of epic proportions like Oedipus Rex. The potential parallel between the Count’s and Bartolo’s actions cannot be missed by the man who has just sung a song (Vedrò, mentr'io sospiro) expressing his jealousy of his own servant.

   Similarly, throughout their opera da Ponte and Mozart feature a newly created figure not in the original Beaumarchais play, Cherubino—who the great Kierkegaard described as a figure “drunk with love”—who twists and turns his way throughout this play in a sexual stupor that would dizzy even the most sure-footed angel. Yes, Cherubino, obviously, is a kind of angel, a man so beautiful that—as the writers insist in their script—he must be played always by a beautiful young woman (in this case, the lovely and musically gifted Isabel Leonard). But Cherubino is also a sort of shadow to the Count, a being who aspires to the same status as his master, which also explains why, discovering the young sex-fiend wherever he goes, the Count can only seek his destruction. For Cherubino also has significant qualities that the Count is missing: beauty and youth. Accordingly, like a twisted, fun-house looking glass, the stare of Cherubino, which the Count seems to encounter everywhere, can only remind him that he will soon be an old and ugly fornicator, like Bartolo, who also once challenged him for his wife! 

      Unlike the often clumsy and blundering Almaviva (a long-living soul who actually learns through the long-time experiences of life), who serves always behind his nemesis, the cherub can literally “fly,” as he proves through his escape from the balcony window of his godmother’s bedroom. In short, he can move about in near absolute freedom, not only in space but within his own body, as he constantly shifts gender. Using the former castrati role as a tranvesti character to perfect effect, Mozart and his librettist require that not only every woman in the play be sexually charmed by the young man but must attempt to make every man equally so enchanted.  

    Except for perhaps Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, opera has never before used transvestitism to such wonderful effects. Not only do the Countess and Susanna spend long moments in joyfully dressing up their youthful lothario as a lovely woman whom they hope will satisfy the sexual longings of the Count, but another of the Count’s conquests, Barbarina hides him, when Cherubino has deserted from his military service, by dressing him up as a provincial beauty. Time and again, the woman turn-the-tables, so to speak, on this would-be molester by rendering him neuter, by turning him into one of their own kind.

     Still, the rapscallion Cherubino nearly destroys the day for the penultimate “twist” of the story, wherein the Countess, having transformed herself into Susanna through her costume—while at the same time Susanna hides her eager desire to be embraced by Figaro by wearing the Countesses’ gown—prepares to receive her unrepentant husband. Cherubino’s unwanted attentions reiterate not only the pains the Countess has had to suffer for his husband’s philandering, but those that Barbarina may have to suffer through her Cherubino.

     For the moment, however, the day is saved, and, the final “twist” is played out in all its grand ironic display, the Count unconsciously playing lover to his own wife.

 

    Suddenly realizing that he has become the fool in front of everyone, the Count, at least momentarily, is forced to realize the errors of his way, asking for forgiveness not just from his wife (“Contessa perdono!), but from everyone in hearing range, including the audience whom he has so entertained. The Countess’ proclamation that she is kinder than her husband in forgiving him, results in a beautiful choral work that expresses joy while reminding everyone of the “terrible twists” of reality that they all have almost accidentally escaped. As I whispered to Howard a few moments later: “That is the saddest aria to a happily-ending opera that I have ever witnessed.”

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2014

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

 

 

 

Peter Quilter | End of the Rainbow / 2013

an incautious overdose of life

by Douglas Messerli

Peter Quilter (author, with music once performed by Judy Garland) End of the Rainbow / Los Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre / I performance I attended was a matinee on March 30, 2013

 

Peter Quilter’s play about the last months of Judy Garland’s life—as the beloved and decaying performer made a final singing engagement at London’s Talk of Town, accompanied by her fifth husband, former band leader and club manager, Mickey Deans (Erik Heger)—is little more than a series of documented and rumored events strung together with witty bon mots, mostly centered on Garland’s alcoholic and drug addicted condition: “It’s all about gravity. My chin and tits are in a race to my knees.” Other than Garland, perhaps the central figure might be said to be her piano player, the Scottish born Anthony (an excellent Michael Cumpsty), who as a gay man begins the play with an self-conscious contempt for the aging star (although she was only 47 at the time of her death), with whom he had previously shared a disastrous performance in Australia (“It was a blood bath”), but whom increasingly comes to feel for the terrified woman, who in Mickey Deans has again chosen the wrong man to love. Anthony ends his time with her by proposing an asexual marriage in an attempt to take her away from the circus of her life, although he seems shocked by her question of whether or not they might share a bed. Garland, this play asserts, was distinctly a sexual being.

     To give him credit, Deans begins the play with a strong attempt to make over her life, managing it the best he can (the couple have hardly any money left) while forbidding her drugs (checking in every possible cranny in which might have hidden them) and denying her alcohol. But gradually it is apparent that in order to literally get her on stage, he must return to the regimen of the studio heads of her early youth: “amphetamines to pep her up and barbiturates to make her sleep.” Behind her fiancée’s back, Garland acquires retinol and escapes, after once performance, into a drunken night on the town. There is obviously no controlling—as Garland herself makes clear—someone sick of being put on display and determined to end her life. A few months after the end of her 1968 engagement, on June 22, 1969, she was found dead in a rented London home, the victim of, as the British doctor understatedly described it, “an incautious self-overdose.”

 

    Except for a scene in a BBC studio where Garland answers questions in an outrageous manner and cannot even remember some of the questions she’s asked, most of this sometimes fascinating, but at heart rather repetitive drama takes place in a palatial room (which Garland represents it as being small as a tomb) of the Ritz Hotel.

      But then this small documentary-like retelling has something else going for it: Tracie Bennett. As an uncanny like Garland stand-in, Bennett is quite literally an engine of motion, twisting her lithe, small-body into so many positions that, at times, one might almost think that instead of being flesh-and-bones Bennett, like Gumby, is all rubber. Whether jumping upon the room’s grand piano, suffering in pain on its couch, or crawling upon the floor in supplicant pleading for everything that has been kept from her, the actor is in near constant motion. In one scene, after grabbing a bottle pills—and quickly swallowing a couple—intended for Anthony’s pet dog to cure its mange, Bennett performs as a dog, on all fours, comically barking and lifting her leg high in the air in mock-peeing upon her “captors.” With all this almost frenetic action, it is amazing that the actor can stay in character, let alone continually convince us, as she does, that she is Judy Garland. Unlike many drag queens, however, Bennett does not so much try to sound like Garland—although I’d swear at times she’s channeling the diva’s voice—but convincingly moves the way Garland might. Even at the most neurotically pitched number of the evening (“I’m Gonna Love You, Come Rain or Come Shine”) the actor seems less intent upon capturing Garland’s exaggerations, than she is in expressing the tensions of the singer’s inner demons and outer attempts to please her audience. It is, as she puts it, all in the acting rather than in the imitation. I have read that Garland, like Bennett, a small person, would stand behind the curtain before going on looking like a timid rabbit terrified at what she was about to attempt. Then suddenly she would take deep breaths, puffing herself up so that she suddenly looked taller and absolutely powerful as she entered the stage. So too does Bennett accomplish something similar, belting out a chorus just when you would have thought she had, in the previous moment, emotionally spent herself.

  

     As the play, often quite cleverly, transitions from the hotel room to her performances at the Talk of the Town nightclub, where Bennett belts out Garland favorites in a strong voice that is so dead-close to Garland—or at least similar to Garland’s own best imitator, her daughter Liza Minnelli—the audience was absolutely stunned. Through the clever machinations of these scenes, the audience’s spontaneous and often rapturous applause simulated the audience applause of the original performances. Bennett’s Garland, like the singer herself, may not quite be up to Judy Garland’s Carnegie Hall achievement, but they come damned close. While we obviously know Tracie Bennett is not Judy Garland, the actor, as if by magic, truly convinces us that she is a simulacrum—in that word’s primary meaning, “an image”—of the real thing. There is perhaps no better example of what literary critics have long described as readers and audiences “willing suspension of disbelief.”

       Yet even if Bennett’s rendition of Garland weren’t so “dead on,” her performance would still be a kind of miracle. If you think of her hotel room movements as a sort of kinetic dance, put alongside her great vocal outcries (Bennett declares that she cannot really sing), one might say that this actor is one of the best musical performers alive. After the show, my companion Howard and I tried to remember all the numerous live-theatre moments in which we had witnessed what he might describe as true greatness: I won’t list all of those, but they included the couple of times we’d seen Barbara Cook live, Faith Prince in the revival of Guys and Dolls, Elaine Stritch in her one-woman show At Liberty, Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd, John Hurt in Krapp’s Last Tape…several others, all performances you knew you’d never forget until stricken with dementia or Alzheimers. We agreed that we would have to add Tracie Bennett in End of the Rainbow to our somewhat meaningless compilation.

 

Los Angeles, Easter 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2013).

Edward Albee | The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? / 2014

getting martin’s goat

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Albee The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? / the production I saw was at the Davidson/Valentini Theater of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, on Sunday, October 12, 2014

 

Martin (Paul Witten) and his wife Stevie (Ann Noble), along with their son Billy (Spencer Morrissey) live in a well-appointed apartment in what is clearly a urban (Manhattan or Chicago) setting—in the original Broadway production, their abode was a wealthy suburban retreat, with high vaulted ceilings, an impossible requirement for the tiny stage of Los Angeles’ LGBT Davidson/Valentini Theater—a family one might describe as among the socially and culturally elite. Although they live in casual comfort, the very décor of their cozy living-room bespeaks good taste, as do their clothes and, surely, the bedrooms apparently a level above the public space. Indeed, Martin, a successful architect who has just won the prestigious Pritzker Prize—which his friend, Ross (Matt Kirkwood) describes as the “Nobel” of architectural awards)—has also just been chosen to design a multi-billion-dollar city of the future somewhere in the “wilds of the Midwest.” Their life, it is gradually revealed throughout this play has been near perfect, the couple very much still in love with one another, the couple together representing open-minded, gifted beings endowed with witty intelligence and a well-adjusted son, who declares he is gay, a sexual decision they readily accept—at least outwardly; Albee later hints at some residual reservations in Martin’s thinking.

    As Billy himself later reiterates, he has been well educated in one of the best of schools that money can buy, and is blessed by nearly ideal parents. In short, they are kind of family one encounters throughout the correct-thinking contemporary Manhattan yuppies and now millennials—as well in the wealthy suburbias of Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and Los Angeles—self-satisfied, if artfully modest members of the cultural elite, at home in their empire of the gods.

      In the domestic banter of the play’s first few moments, indeed, the audience might almost imagine that they have accidently wandered into a play, as The New York Times Ben Brantley suggested in his 2002 review, written by one of the most beloved playwrights of these ruling class member’s parents, Neil Simon. But we also immediately sense something is amiss, as if the jokes are there but the actors keep missing their lines. In fact, Martin not only seems absent-minded, but is fearful that he is developing Azheimer’s Disease. About to meet with his old friend, Ross, for an interview celebrating Martin’s 50th birthday and his two recent achievements, he cannot remember, for example, the name of Ross’s grown son. He enters the room but forgets for what he has been searching. Stevie jokingly reassures him, but soon their “banter” gradually is transformed into a kind of comic inspired sketch about sexual infidelity, ending with Martin’s unexpected and somewhat inappropriate quip that he is seeing someone named Sylvia and that she is a goat. If the audience laughs at Stevie’s comeback—“I’ll stop at the feed store on the way home”—it is an uneasy twitter, since by the very title of the play we already know that Martin is telling her the truth: that, as a modern-day Zeus, he has fallen in love with a being outside of his own kind.

     Suddenly we recognize that we have entered Albee territory, and that any laughter the play elicits hereafter will not emanate from punch-lines as much as it does from our ill-ease with the subject and the characters involved. In the very next scene, as his friend Ross attempts to interview him, we observe that Martin is almost purposely subverting any attempt at “real” communication—meaning, in the context of this play, any attempt at a preconceived and canned vision of reality that the media often whips us for its listeners. A man who has never cheated on his wife and, therefore, unlike so many of his male friends, Martin has never had an opportunity to brag about his sexual conquests, and he suddenly seems like an adolescent jock desperate to reveal his newly-discovered sexual prowess.

     Although Martin quickly knows that he about to tread on dangerous ground, he cannot resist revealing the source of his new-found sensations of what he describes as “love.” The tale he tells is similar to all such tales set in bucolic setting in which, along with nature itself, the would-be lover catches the wide-eyed gaze of his soon-to-be lover, with a sudden urge to reach out and touch her, with all the wonder and excitement of not knowing what joys might lay ahead. It might well describe the events of mid-life crisis that strike down many an everyday male where it not that Martin, as he and Albee keep hinting, is not an ordinary being, but a contemporary Zeus, and the object of his affection, accordingly, lies outside of everyday “normality,” while very much within the Greek god’s recorded assignations. Self-satisfied to the point of delusion, Martin simply cannot comprehend why it could be wrong to fall in love again, even if, this time, it is with a goat! After all, the goat does not truly contend with his love for his very human wife.

     Surely, we inwardly gasp, Martin must realize—despite Ross’ reassurances, as his best friend, he is to be trusted—that as a member of the media, whose definition of reality is always the most narrow one, will not keep quiet about Martin’s revelation. But then, the gods of our society are often so used to working hand in hand with members of the media who have helped them to achieve their god-like status, that they are brought down by those very women and men. The shocked Ross rushes out to immediately write a letter to Martin’s wife, outlining, with the expected rhetorical flourishes, his word-for-word encounter with his life-long confidant. If Martin has jokingly thought that he has heard the voice of the Eumenides earlier in that scene, Ross describing it as “a kind of…rushing sound, wings, or something,” it is nothing compared to the fury he is now about to face.

 

     If there is any question that we are now in an Albee play, the battle now re-enacted between the sexes is far more furious even than George and Martha’s pitchforked duels in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Indeed, in the small theater in which I experienced Martin and Stevie’s violent quarrel, the second row, where Howard and I sat, was perhaps too close for the howling and heaving banshee into which the small-statured actress Ann Noble was suddenly transformed. The only temporary ceasefires to the seething, spewing froth of hate she sputters out—along with images of vomit, blood, excrement, and murder—were the tortured interruptions of their properly horrified son, the couple’s narcissistic-like congratulations of one another when, in the midst deep verbal warfare, one of them achieves a moment of stunning locution—the kind of touchés that George and Martha also award one another in their “battle-play”—and Martin’s helplessly prosaic descriptions, once again, of his first encounters with Sylvia the goat and his brief introduction to a self-help group of bestial-offenders, including a man who once but no longer has intercourse with piglets, a multiply abused woman who has sex with a German Shepherd, and a man so ugly that he has found love only with a goose. Martin’s attempts to explain his guiltless emotions of joy appears to his to be the expressions of an alien from a distant planet. His acts, she makes clear, are beyond “all the rules,” representing a behavior that “shatters the glass” of their existence, and which have inextricably destroyed the near-perfect inter-dependency they have both fabricated for themselves. She has been ready for everything, she explains, except for this transgression!

      Exhausted, the audience along with her, Stevie, like Nora, slams the door for what appears to be a forever, despite Billy’s terrorized insistence on knowing where “his mother” has gone. Although a lesser fury, he too rants about having what appeared to be an ideal mother and father, before the latter began digging in the metaphorical basement of their home, hallowing out a hole from which he can never return. But in his youthful angst, we more clearly perceive that Albee is attempting to explore the larger issue of where human beings draw the limits of love. If Billy, who as a now socially-accepted gay, can only realize that in another day his own definition of love would have been damned, he must now, far more than his mother, question, at least, his father’s seemingly absurd search. And that leads them, if nothing else, to admit their own love for one another, expressed painfully in hugs of sorrow and protective embracement, which suddenly for the confused adolescent explodes into a momentary series of full-lipped kisses with his dad—at the very moment when the voice of conventionality, Ross, creeps back to their doorway to observe what he calculatingly perceives as another unforgiveable transgression.

 

    Billy pulls away in a self-hating pang of senseless shame, with Martin attempting, with fatherly love, to relieve the situation by describing a friend who admitted to being aroused temporarily while cradling his infant child, yet, soon after, realizing it was simply a natural and innocent moment that had no sexual component.

     For Ross, obviously, it is simply another explanation of degradation of the former “god-like, friend” a representation of pedophilic tendencies, yet another taboo to be tied to Martin’s tail/tale. “Where do you people stop?” he cries out. Yet Martin, challenging him, makes it clear that it is not the behavior which matters to Ross, but the possibility of public exposure, of the inability to “get away with it.” In short, for people like Ross, for the media, for example, it is not ever a really moral issue but a matter of defining a nonexistent “public” limit, of creating an invisible line that cannot be crossed. The question, of course, really concerns “when is it a sin to love?” Where the society draws those lines, the playwright suggests, defines the limitations of the society’s abilities to express what is perhaps the most important of all emotional and physiological responses to life.

     Despite any chortles of discomfort that some audience members may still utter, we all now realize that this work is a tragedy without an ending. A moment later, covered in blood, Stevie drags in Sylvia’s corpse. Vowing revenge, she has destroyed Martin’s innocent love for her own values and others’ personal definitions of where love has crossed the boundaries of decency; and, in so doing, she has doomed herself to the conventional limits of the living.  Suddenly she becomes a being as dead to love and living as the holy beast she has just sacrificed. 

    As Martin hugs his dead goat-lover to his breast, his tearful silence sings out like a “goat song”—the root word of Greek “tragedy”— a knell for any possibilities for a return to his or any other Eden.

     As my husband, Howard, expressed it: “everything is so sad—all of them, so basically innocent and yet so full of hurt.” In limiting its borders, love has been drained from their lives.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2014

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

David Greenspan | Go Back to Where You Are / 2016

going nowhere

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Greenspan Go Back to Where You Are / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, the performance I saw was on Sunday, August 14, 2016

 

Playwright and actor David Greenspan’s 2011 play, Go Back to Where You Are, now running at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, is a breezy, seaside play that might remind one of Chekov’s The Seagull—if it weren’t for the fact that this author’s works make no attempt at all to create an illusion of reality. As director Bart DeLorenzo notes in a program: despite being “set beside the ocean, following the playwright’s request, you will hear no waves crashing tonight, no seagulls overhead. When night falls, we will have no recorded crickets.” And despite the fact that one character, Bernard (Justin Huen) speaks endlessly of the birdlife on Long Island, we see and hear no birds.

      Indeed, Bernard begins the play commenting, as the playwright, “This is kind of a weird play”; and throughout characters, as in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, take time out to speak asides to the audience. Some figures stand in frieze while others come and go. And one character, improbably sent by God from ancient Greece, who admits to the uncontemporary moniker of Passalus (John Fleck), also transforms himself from time to time into an elderly female actress, Mrs. Simmons, allowing for the actor to quick switch personas and demonstrate his acting skills. Fleck was excellent in the role, but I would have loved to have seen Greenspan himself, one of New York’s very best actors who has often done female impersonations on stage, act the role as he did in the 2011 Playwrights Horizons production.

      The occasion for this get-together of odd characters is the birthday of Carolyn, a figure who, inexplicably, never makes an appearance and who, we’re told, cooks the meal which the characters share. At the center of the get-together is Carolyn’s highly thea-ater-proclaiming mother, Claire (Shannon Holt), who is about to star as Arkadina in The Seagull, a role, for those who recall, of great hauteur and self-centeredness, that matches her own behavior, as, throughout the play she negatively evaluates her friends to their faces and behind their backs. She’s invited her younger brother, who lives in a small beach house nearby—the “obscure” playwright and author of the piece we’re seeing, so he claims—her unconfident and self-loathing actress friend Charlotte (Tracy Winters in the performance I saw), her unhappy son (Andrew Walke) who’s just returned from Los Angeles after the death of his gay lover, and her director Tom (Bill Brochtrup) and his set-designing lover Malcolm (Jeffrey Hutchinson), who also stands in for God. As in Chekov’s drama all of these characters—with the exception, perhaps of Claire—feel inwardly thwarted and unloved; but even Claire is to be pitied, since during the party she receives a phone call telling her that she has cancer which will kill her, so Bernard tells us at play’s end, within the year.  

       It is Passalus’ job at this event to guide the invisible Carolyn on a happier path of life, and he is warned by God not to interfere with any of the others’ lives. But Passalus, who recounts his own unhappy love affair back in Ancient Athens, simply cannot resist, particularly when he hears all their inner thoughts and falls in love with the tender nature-loving playwright. Before this witty 1-hour play comes to an end—alternating between the elderly Mrs. Simmons and himself— he’s sent Claire’s young son, Wally, packing back to LA to find new love and life, sets Charlotte right about her true talents, and temporarily, at least, patches up Tom’s and Malcolm’s failing relationship, as Tom promises to stop playing around with the chorus boys. For his busybody intrusions, God punishes him to continued life—which like Malina Makropulos of Janáček's opera The Makropulos Affair—he’d hope to finally to free himself. But what the heck, he’s fallen in love again and, more importantly, the sensitive Bernard has fallen in love with him. As Bernard finally perceives, instead of almost trying to move ahead of oneself or falling into the errors of the past, you should “go back to where you are,” a phrase that seems almost like a variation of Voltaire’s command to “tend your own garden,” or, put another way, to live fully in the present.

       For such a short work, Greenspan’s play reveals a profound interconnection between dream and reality, between past and present, despair and possibility, and repetition and creation. Writing of the original production, The New York Times critic Charles Isherwood argued that Greenspan’s characters were so interesting that he’d wished that Passalus had never visited them so that we might have more time to discover their inner realities. But, I believe, that is just Greenspan’s point. Life is not an illusion, but a real thing to be grasped even in the vague shadows of our comprehension about where our experiences are taking us. Poor Chekov’s characters are simply trapped in an illusion of the playwright’s creation, while Greenspan’s caricatures continue to intrigue us as we are forced to imagine where life may take them. Perhaps, in the end, we can imagine that even the permanently artificial Claire had to face the reality of her own life.

 

Los Angeles, August 16, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 16, 2016).