Tom Jacobson | Captain of the Bible Quiz Team / 2016

asking questions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tom Jacobson Captain of the Bible Quiz Team / presented by Rogue Machine Theatre, Sunday August 28, 2016 at Lutheran Church of the Master, Los Angeles

 

Los Angeles playwright, Tom Jacobson’s new play, Captain of the Bible Quiz Team, is about the collapse of the small Kandota Lutheran Church in Little Sauk, Minnesota—or perhaps we should say that it is about the end of numerous such churches, since in writing this lovely work, Jacobson interviewed eight ministers nationally, all of whose churches were radically effected when in 2009 the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) voted to welcome the LGBTQ community into their ranks not only as members of the church but as pastors as well.

      Jacobson’s play, with the major role of Landry Sorenson alternating between four actors (two of them women, one black male, and white male; the performance I saw was with Mark Jacobson, no relation to the playwright) takes place in a number of Lutheran churches throughout the city (the performance I saw was at Jacobsen’s own church, the gay friendly Lutheran Church of the Masters in Los Angeles) with a real organist, a program that mimics Sunday Church bulletins, and with the audience itself serving as interactive congregants. Like Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, some audience members were asked ahead of time to take on small roles throughout the play, and at the end, each attendee was named and asked to stand in a final act of unexpected support for the young preacher—not yet ordained as a full pastor—who has just declared he has lost his faith.

     Sorenson is the son of the full-time Church’s minister, who has suddenly been hospitalized and is near death for much of the play. The young preacher, accordingly, comes back to his home-town to bear several burdens: to nurture a basically conservative, mostly Scandinavian congregation, back to health, while simultaneously caring for a dying father whom he has strongly displeased with his collegiate and after activities. He has already told his son, in no uncertain terms, that he does not feel he is fit for the ministry, and throughout his dying he refuses for much of time to even acknowledge his presence.

     The young Sorenson, in his mix of high idealism and his often rambling seven sermons (Christmas Eve, December 2009; Epiphany, January 2010; Baptism of Our Lord, January 2010; Ash Wednesday, February 2010; Maundy Thursday, April 2010; and Good Friday, April 2010), is hardly a fit for a community that is certain to have heard highly structured homilies for most of their lives. But most of all is his dangerous tendency, as he claims was the pattern of the Lutheran founder, Martin Luther himself, to question everything, including the veracity of Bible stories and the fundamental values of his congregants. And, in that fact, this work reminds me some of Robert Bresson’s far greater The Diary of a Priest (see My Year 2000).

      Although he makes some important new changes, including establishing a needed food back in conjunction with other community churches, and even slightly increases attendance, he further grates on many churchgoers by revealing personal information about himself and his relationship with his father, and, finally, admitting that he himself has fallen in love with another man (in the production I saw, the supposed lover was represented as a black man). Members of the congregation retaliate by interrupting him mid-sermon with written messages, arguing for succession from the ELCA because of its decision on the LBGTQ inclusion and proposing Sorenson’s own termination—in particular for his tossing away an ancient couch in the church basement—a couch which as a child, he had often slept upon.

     Even worse, Sorenson discovers some secrets in his own father’s closet: most notably, the fact that, in an attempt to build a pastoral house next the church years earlier, he had taken out a loan in the name of the church, which was never paid back. The church must now attempt to free itself from the larger ELCA simply in order to not be closed down.

Tom Jacobson

     A true believer at heart, however, Sorenson seems to meet these dilemmas with an open mind and a calming heart. But when his father dies, still refusing to even speak to his son and his lover, the young preacher finally begins to break, his sermons becoming even more personal as he speaks of his own spiritual crisis. The only meliorating fact is that his father has left the family farm to the church, and its sale may pay off the church’s debt; the son has been left nothing. But even here, he proclaims, beneficently, that at least his father has given him his faith; what better gift than that, he proclaims.

      By the final Easter Sunday sermon, however, the minister admits his loss of faith, not of God, apparently, but of his fellow beings. The narrow-mindedness and hostility of the congregants themselves has seemingly defeated him. Yet another audience member walks forward with a written message, and the genial Sorenson, quipping on these now regular intrusions, braces for the worst.

      But this time either God or the men and women to whom he has been preaching—Jacobson has left the answer vague—has wrought a true miracle, as the audience members’ names are called out and we all gradually stand up to ask him to create a new church in the living room of one of our supposed members—an act much like ancient Christians who gathered to confess, in just such small, hidden-away locations, to one another. The questions Sorenson has pummeled them with have finally found their way into the minds of his congregation.

      I am what you might describe as a cynical non-believer (I too, however, was brought up as a Lutheran before my family turned to the Presbyterian Church—which I am sorry to say took even longer than the Lutherans to accept the LBGTQ community). I didn’t even bother to attend the Jello-mold party next to the church at play’s end—although I did sing along with the well-known hymns before each sermon.

     Yet there was something moving about being asked to turn to our fellow audience members (as church-goers are often encouraged to do) to shake their hands and, mid-play, express our love to one another. In an odd sense, this simple act was perhaps one of the most dramatic moments of this “play” simply because it questioned what theater actually is and was always, a bringing together of a temporarily sharing community to listen, question, challenge, and react. That acknowledgement of one another’s presence seems to be an important element missing in so much of today’s drama. And for many of millions, that dramatic interchange is what draws them still to church.

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2016).

 

Eugene O'Neill | The Emperor Jones / 1992, 1999, 2009

the emperor awakens

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill The Emperor Jones / performed by The Wooster Group in a video of 1999, stage performances in Hong Kong and Chicago in 2009, and early work-in-progress performances in New York from 1992

 

It will be hard for many theater-goers, surely, to watch any version today of Eugene O’Neill’s early success, The Emperor Jones. Not only is the central figure, Brutus Jones, presented as a vain and foolish black who has temporarily hood-winked the citizens of a Caribbean country, but he speaks in a dialect right out of minstrelsy, that uses the “n” word too many times to count. The first few sentences out of Jones’ mouth says it all:

 

                Who dare whistle dat way in my palace? Who dare

                wake up de Emperor? I'll get de hide frayled off some

                o' you niggers sho!  

 

      The Wooster Group production from the 1990s and the early years of the new century, at least saved its audiences from having to spend an hour with this wincingly painful language coming out of the mouth of black man; in their production, a woman, Kate Valk, plays Jones. But she does so, dressed in a garish imitation of a Japanese emperor’s robe like something out of The Mikado, while in blackface.

     It’s almost as if Wooster director, Elizabeth LeCompte, were taunting the liberal and conservative correct-thinking fates. Surely the NEA critics of Reagan’s day might have had a hissy-fit if they’d seen this show.

      Miraculously, however, the Wooster group and Kate Valk, in particular, have created a work that not only questions the very values of O’Neill’s original, but that actually touches both our intellects and our hearts, partially restoring the intentions of O’Neill’s original. By layering the various levels of white bigotry that has made Brutus Jones such a self-destructive being, we discover his real humanity sometimes hidden by both the original text and the theatrical interpretations of such a figure. Valk majestically takes on this character with all the crazed enthusiasm of the characters in Jean Genet’s The Blacks, and in her interchanges with the sometimes garbled video presentation of “his” white “partner,” Smithers (William Dafoe in the video version and Scott Shepherd and Ari Fliakos in staged versions) speaking an equally exaggerated British brogue that presents him as a kind of Japanese-inspired pirate, Jones reveals his knowledge that any royalty bequeathed him is only temporary.

       Jones, in Valk’s performance, may be a con-man, even a brutal dictator, but unlike so many of real-life strong-men, he is no liar and is not self-deluded: he admits he has only taken on his role to get the money. His fate, in short, has predetermined the greed of the white men and women who behind the ridiculous wardrobe and paint to which sacrificed his reality.

      The decision to have Jones played, accordingly, by a woman in blackface is brilliant in its Brechtian positing of that character. But to successfully navigate the obvious pitfalls of the language you need the brilliance of someone like Valk.

    Hooting (“Hah-Hah-Hah,” in seeming imitation of Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire) and hollering, by turns; seriously terrified by his fate and comically mocking his whole ridiculous “reign,” the Emperor of this work runs the gambit of emotional expressions. Valk is at once a peacock and a wide-eyed child-on-the-run, terrified of being caught and lynched. His own myth, that he can be killed only with a silver bullet, makes him a kind of vampire, which, in fact, he has been playing, sucking the blood from his own kind.

       If Valk’s performance, as Charles Isherwood, has argued in The New York Times is legendary, she is supported fortunately by excellent company actors in Dafoe, Shepard and the multi-gifted Fliakos, but by the memorable costumes and the delicious score of composter David Linton..

      LeCompte’s eccentric direction is not to be ignored. It’s hard to explain it, but a short dance by the Emperor and his hit-man Smithers, in which they enact a kind of synchronized Kabuki mime, brought tears to my eyes. The Samurai-like warrior clearly is courting his (female-male) Emperor. Even the stage-extra figure, controlling the rolling executive chair of the Emperor’s throne, later gets into the act

      The video, which I watched was first shown, apparently, in 1999. But the same DVD contains performances from 2009 at Chicago’s Goodman Theater and the Hong Kong Arts Festival, as well as early work-in-progress performances at The Performing Garage in October 1992. I preferred the taped performances to Christopher Kondek and Elizabeth LeCompte’s video. Both the Goodman Theater and Hong Kong performances were wonderful, but perhaps because of the needs of the audience, Valk more clearly enunciated her words in the Hong Kong performance, giving the role much more clarity. But perhaps, having by then seen so many versions, I simply heard it with more comprehension. Seeing this production so many times, however, is a reward for anyone truly interested in American theater.

 

Los Angeles, March 13, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2016).

John Adams and Peter Sellars (based on Old and New Testament Sources and texts by Dorothy Day, Louis Erdrich, Primo Levi, Rosario Castellanos, June Jordon, Hildegard von Binger, and Rubén Dario) | The Gospel According to the Other Mary / 2012

a body transfixed by the noonday sun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Sellars (libretto, based on Old and New Testament Sources and texts by Dorothy Day, Louis Erdrich, Primo Levi, Rosario Castellanos, June Jordon, Hildegard von Binger, and Rubén Dario), John Adams (composer) The Gospel According to the Other Mary, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel / the performance I saw was on Saturday, June 2, 2012

 

The new opera-oratorio by John Adams and his often-time collaborator Peter Sellars, if nothing else—and there is a great deal more to be said for this work—is a serious and mature contribution to orchestral and vocal music of the 21st Century. Focusing this work on a woman, Mary Magdalene, the "other" Mary (Jesus' mother and Mary the mother of James being two further Biblical Marys), in legend from the town of Magdala, but in this version is described as being, along with her sister Martha and their brother Lazarus, from Bethany.

      The gospels mention her very few times, primarily in Luke and Mark; but her importance is clear, particularly through the apocryphal texts which refer to her several times. She is one of the strongest and most important women who was close to Jesus, remaining with him beneath the cross until his death and accompanying his body to the sepulchre wherein he was buried. Most importantly, however, are the biblical texts that describe Mary Magdalene as the one who discovered that Christ had risen, reporting the news to his doubting disciples. In connection with this role, particularly from the 10th century on, she is referred to as the "apostle to the apostles."

      Adams' and Sellars' piece recounts some of this biblical history, particularly Mary Magdalene's suffering at the feet of Jesus during the Crucifixion and her later discovery of the missing body, Jesus, who she mistakenly took to be a gardener, calling her by name, the event which ends the work. But through the libretto's collage of texts, this piece takes the Mary Magdalene our of biblical context and drops her into numerous Twentieth century contexts, presenting the two sisters first as women who have been arrested and jailed, later as women who run a "House of Hospitality" for homeless girls, and in the Second Act as women picketing along with civil rights activist and union leader César Chávez—a far different César from Caesar Augustus whose call for a census brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem for their child's birth.. This shuffling back and forth in time is an attempt, obviously, by the librettist and composer to link the immediate lessons of Jesus with those who carry his message forth into our own time. And in several ways their condensation of time successfully presents these two important women in Jesus' life in a role in which they embody Christ's teaching, while at the same time emphasizing—particularly in Martha's complaint of being forced to serve alone while her sister lies at the master's feet—the special role Mary Magdalene played in Jesus' life.

      Adams' music, particularly in the first act, as he follows these women's lives and the resurrection of their brother Lazarus, is lush and beautiful, his constantly shifting rhythms reflecting the pushes and pulls of the demands these special followers put upon Jesus. The composer's brilliant concept of carrying much of the narrative through the voices of three countertenors (Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings, and Nathan Medley) allows the story to move forward, while the central figures, Mary Magdalene (Kelly O'Connor), Martha (Tamara Mumford), and the strong-voiced Russell Thomas as Lazarus sing of their own psychological experiences and their personal relationships with Jesus.  

      From the beginning we come to understand Mary Magdalene as a woman of special intensity, having evidently attempted suicide and isolated herself from others after her brother's death—the injuries to her arm healed by the messiah—while later showering her love upon Jesus with the herbs and ointments with which she has bathed her hair and with which washes Jesus' feet. Far from the hard-working and more sensible Martha, Mary is clearly a woman of passion, as the women's chorus put it (in Spanish) "a body transfixed by the noonday sun," which becomes a metaphor of her love for and her personal relationship with Jesus. This Mary—without specifically being portrayed as a former prostitute—is very much an embodiment of Jesus' teachings about love. 

     There are numerous powerful moments in the First Act, including the prophet Isaiah-inspired "Howl ye," sung by Lazarus and the Chorus, the passage in Spanish I just referred to ("En un diea de amor yo bajé hasta la tierra"), the intense Resurrection of Lazarus ("Drop down, ye heavens, from above"), again sung by the Chorus, Lazarus' own impassioned outburst ("For the Grave cannot praise thee,"), Mary's "I wash your ankles" and the Chorus's response ("Spiritus sanctus vivificans vita"), and the absolutely splendiferous Last Supper, sung by Lazarus ("Tell me: how is this night / Different from all other nights?"), a  piece, ending the First Act, which I almost hoped might never cease.

     Unfortunately, not all of the passages that Sellars chose for his collage are as excitingly poetical as those I mention, and, particularly in the Second Act, when the biblical narrative begins to dominate, so too does the music turn a bit turgid, occasionally reminding one of the numerous Hollywood film epics of Jesus' life and crucifixion. Here the Countertenors and their narrative-telling dominate, while the personal viewpoints of the work's three major figures is diminished by the swelling of larger events, including Jesus' own arrest and Mary's and Martha's agitated protests. Accordingly, the action is described in a kind of secondhand manner that affects not only the libretto but the music as well. Only with the Crucifixion, particularly in Scene 4, with Mary's recounting of the falling rain on Jesus' body, and Lazarus' interpretations of the dying Christ's words: "I want no shelter, deny / the whole configuration" does the work again reach the heights of the First Act. And both librettist and composer redeem this act with the stunning introduction of a resurrection of nature itself: "It is spring. The tiny frogs pull / their strange bodies out / of the suckholes," sung by both the Chorus and Mary. The final graveside encounter between Mary and the gardener who calls her name, is so marvelously understated that the audience with whom I saw The Gospel According to the Other Mary was not sure to applaud as Dudamel brought the orchestra to a quiet cessation.

     What I have said above, however, cannot to do justice to instrumental variations of this piece which uses numerous percussion instruments not usually to be found in modern-day orchestras, along with the employment throughout of the cimbalom, creating the sound of an instrument contemporaneous with the Biblical events. Some of the narrative difficulties, moreover, may be solved

when the production is transformed from a piece of the orchestra hall into a blend of opera and oratorio performance, which is planned for the future. I cannot wait to rediscover this work in its new form, and feel blessed to have experienced it in this early manifestation.

 

Los Angeles, June 3, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2012).

  

David Lang and Mark Dion | Anatomy Theater / 2016

where is evil?

By Douglas Messerli

 

David Lang and Mark Dion (libretto), David Lang (composer) Anatomy Theater / Los Angeles, Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in Disney Music Center; the performance Howard Fox and I saw was at the matinee on Sunday, June 19, 2016

 

Composer David Lang’s and designer Mark Dion’s new work, Anatomy Theater, which received its world premiere at the Disney Center’s Redcat theater is more like a Broadway operetta in the manner of Sweeney Todd than being a true opera. Yet the LAOpera’s Off Grand production, the last of this season’s productions, represents a fascinating contribution to the musical canon that cannot easily be forgotten.

     Based on true occurrences in early 18th century, when criminals and paupers were publicly dissected after their deaths to determine where the evil existed in their bodies, this manifestation concerns a young woman, Sarah Osborne (Peabody Southwell), who, beaten and sexually abused by her step-father, was locked out of her own home and was forced to survive as a prostitute. After marrying her pimp, she was regularly beaten by him as well. Lacing her husband’s gin with laudanum, she then proceeded to smother him before hushing her two young children and suffocating them in turn.

       Beginning with the confession in the theater’s art gallery, Sarah is promptly hung before the eyes of the gathered opera audience who have been served up, as they might have in the 18th century, ale and sausages. The Master of Ceremonies, Joshua Crouch (Marc Kudisch) then encourages the crowd (“Follow me quickly, gentlemen”) to enter the theater proper to observe the anatomy itself.

       Accompanied by the anatomist, Baron Peel (Robert Osbourne) and his operating assistant, Ambrose Strang (Timur), the trio then proceed to anatomize the tools they will be using before cutting, yanking, and dissecting the various parts of Sarah’s naked and bleeding body—the work’s program note humorously begins, “No singers were harmed in the creation of this opera—in the attempt to find which of her organs was responsible for her horrific behavior.

       Obviously, there is rank smell of the mob in this theatrical presentation, and Crouch does his best to bring out the bestial lusts of his declared male audience (surely the sight of a beautiful nude woman upon an operating table whose dead body was being, quite literally, raped—her innards being carried away—must have titillated audiences of the day, and even today’s audience began with oddly-placed giggles before settling down to a more serious consideration), and, accordingly, we are made to comprehend, even in viewing this “representation” of the act, our inward lusts. Yet the self-inflated anatomist, Peel, argues that it is a necessary act to prove that all parts of the body must be attune with the others and the world around them in order to allow us to be a good citizens of the world.

       One by one, the bowels, the pancreas, the heart, and even the uterus is removed by Strang and inspected, as blood pours from the dead woman’s body—still the very live singer Southwell, who claimed she had to study meditation to bring her breathing down to a slight pulse for the 45 minutes of her “operation.”

     “Where is evil?” is the question the trio ask again and again. Yet they can find no contagion in any of her parts. It is apparent that the evil they are seeking lies not in the corpse, but in us, the human society which turned a blind eye to all of her abuse. And, obviously, as Lang has hinted in his comments, that fact makes this opera very contemporary, particularly within the context of the mob of haters who embrace a candidate such as Donald Trump.

       Lang’s music, as Los Angeles Times musical roots, as critic Mark Swed has written, is difficult to name. Obviously, as a founding member of the “Bang on the can” composers, percussion is essential; yet here there are beautifully lyrical moments, as well, such as Southwell’s lovely, operating table-aria, concerning the pureness of her heart despite her horrible deeds, where flutes, piano, viola, cello, and even accordion take precedence. At one point there is a rousing trumpet solo by wild Up performer, Aaron Smith. 

     Lang has become an increasingly impressive American composer. My only complaint is that I wish the run of this work had a bit a longer so that I might have returned to hear it again. Maybe a reprise next year? The Long Beach Opera did this quite successfully with Lang’s and Mac Wellman’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2016).

 

 

Philippe Quesne | La Mélancolie des dragons / 2015

elemental theater

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philippe Quesne La Mélancolie des dragons / the performance I saw was in Los Angeles at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater) in Disney Music Center on September 23, 2015

 

As the audience moves to their seats in the production of Philippe Quesne’s play La Mélancolie des dragons, we observe a stage apparently covered with snow, a large white mat of felt on the floor and a series of seemingly dead (or wintry) trees covered with the substance. In the middle of the field sits an automobile attached to which is a small trailer of the kind that reminds one of the traveling performers in the opera Pagliacci, but here arriving in a dead world instead of a vitally excited small colorful Italian city.

     From time to time, we get a notion that there are people in the car, and, as the lights go down, we see there are indeed four individuals in the auto, all with very long tresses, munching on chips and swigging down cans of beer, while the car radio blasts out various heavy-metal, and from time-to-time, even classical pieces, the four nodding their heads in their rhythms.

     It is difficult to perceive the sex of these folk, and, at first, appears that two are males and the others of the opposite sex, perhaps a pair of couples on a strange date. If this small car-bound head-banger fest seems to go on a little too long, it is, in part, because we are voyeurs, watching them without invitation, kept on the outside of their world as we are.

    We soon discover, in fact, that we have been mistaken about their genders, perhaps hinting what Quesne’s play soon reveals: people are not always who or what they appear to be. At that very moment, a middle-aged Asian woman (Isabelle Angotti) bicycles into the glen, the four gradually piling out of the car a bit like circus clowns, revealing that they are all men.

    Three other equally long-haired men soon after exit from the back of the rectangular trailer.. We now might imagine that these are aging band members on their way to a concert, whose mother has just arrived by prearrangement. But, in fact, the woman, in her puffy purple vest, is there to check their car, evidently—given the vast number of engine parts she tosses out into the “snow”—in bad need of repair. As she crawls into the engine to further inspect, followed by a quick telephone call, she reports to this group of strangers that new parts will not be available for another week.

      Were these 7 heavy-metal dudes actually on their way to some gig, the news might have resulted in a great deal of grumbling and even teeth-gnashing, but these are apparently very gentle men, who, speaking English with slightly French accents, seem to be as placid and slow-minded as tortoises.

     When the Asian woman queries them about their trailer, they respond that it is, in fact, a kind of amusement park, and gently invite her to become the onstage audience of their show. Lifting up the felt snowpad, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, they plug in a cord which lights up the trailer to reveal it is fronted by glass, and holds within a selection of wigs all held on rings, as if suggesting a group of like-minded hirsute men. One explains that they also have a video projector to project words on the side of the trailer, helping to explain the objects and their actions.

     Another bemused deadhead displays of a small bubble machine, and yet another shows a small fountain that shoots water into the air. One of their group takes out of the car trunk a carton of books and, setting them up within the trailer, creates a small library of everything from monograms on art and pop-up children’s books to works by Antonin Artaud, Freud, Nietzsche, and numerous others great authors, so they tell her, who have influenced their activities—although, given their doltish use of language, it is hard to imagine any of them having actually read these books.

      A bit later, one of their kind displays a small snow-making machine, suggesting that the winter wonderland around them, in fact, has been of their creation. Presenting her with a pair of skies, the men take her through a ski run by lifting up and rolling the felt padding so that she might pretend to ski down slopes.

      Their small trailer also contains a fan, which they soon put to use by blowing up a large white plastic bag, carrying it ritualistically through the landscape. With lighting and projections, they change the colors of the landscape and suggest possible names for their cabinet of curiosities-amusement park.

       Throughout all of this, the car repair person seems genuinely amazed and absolutely delighted to have been able to immerse herself in their surprising world. Bringing out champagne and glasses, these 8 individuals—who may be, after all, not as simple as they appear—celebrate their success, quickly promising one more grand amusement: shortly after they, one by one, blow up four even larger black plastic bags, uprighting them to look a bit like a black forest of, very possibly, the melancholy dragons of the play’s title, which ends both their entertainment and the “drama” we have been observing—restating what he have recognized all along, that the work’s actions and significance are one in the same.

       The message here, a quite simple one, is that a wondrous and charming theater can be created out of the simplest elements of technology and imagination. As the program notes of Quesne’s Theatre of Vivarium Studio: the author-director’s stagecraft uses “a kind of mechanical research,” is “a technical theatre lab which cleverly modifies the conventions of genre.”

       If all of this is meant to sound like a radical intellectual redefinition of theater, at least as French critic Sara Sugiharabio would have it, in fact, it is rather too simplistic. While La Mélancolie des dragons presents us with the wondrous childlike roots—the innocent amusements—which are at the heart of all theater, as a play it is not that profound. If this is how theater begins—and it is good to be reminded of that—Quesne’s play eschews all the deeper and richer possibilities of dramatic literature, arguing rather that art is most transformative at its simplest.

     The wonder of theater, as playwright Mac Wellman has suggested in his early anthology of plays, Theater of Wonders* is that the greatest of its marvels are often arrived at through the most linguistically challenging and thematically complex of issues, some of which are inexplicable. While elemental theater surely reveals the genre’s charms, it may be at its best as a more highly artificed combine.

      La Mélancolie des dragons, however, is significant enough that I look forward to seeing other works by Phillippe Quesne and his Theatre of Vivarium Studio, and am joyful that Redcat has brought his work to Los Angeles.

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2015

Reprinted from AmericanTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2015).

       

*Mac Wellman Theatre of Wonders: Six Contemporary American Plays (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985),

 

Tennessee Williams | In Masks Outrageous and Austere / 2012

medea’s last dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tennessee Williams In Masks Outrageous and Austere / New York City, Culture Project / the performance I saw as a matinee production on Sunday, May 6, 2012

 

On Sunday, May 6, I attended, with Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, the premiere of Tennessee Williams’ last play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere—uncompleted at the time of his death—at Bleecker Street’s Culture Project. Despite rather dismissive reviews—David Finkel in The Huffington Post, for example, describing it as a “turgid” and “ludicrous” cauldron of "picked-over Williams obsessions” and Ben Brantley of The New York Times summarizing it as inhabiting a “tepid, in-between realm” that permits neither “audacious sincerity” or the permission to “go ahead and laugh,” I found the play and production utterly fascinating and far less problematic that almost all the reviewers had determined. Williams himself, while still working on the text (which he continued to do up until is 1983 death), described it as “important,” “extremely funny,” and “bizarre as hell.” It is, in my estimation, all three of those assessments—but then, one might describe almost any Williams’ play in the same way.

 

   Although the Culture Project’s production suffered a bit from their attempts to encourage the “over-time-top” sensibility of Williams’ text with pixel-projected flat screens, video renditions of telephone conversations with the central character’s advisor and doctor (distorted images and voices of Buck Henry and Austin Pendleton), banks of white, red, and blue lights, and eerie musical interludes by Dan Moses Schreier, this production did conjure up a sense of dreadful foreboding of a world of the edge of the apocalypse, a kind of Key West-like Babylon that might, at any moment, sink (or even be burned up) into the ocean waters so detested by the major figure of the play, Clarissa “Babe” Foxworth (Shirley Knight).

     With the exception of Knight and Alison Fraser’s absurdly comic Mrs. Gorse-Bracken (channeling a slightly hysteric version of Bernadette Peters) most of the young actors of the cast, it is true, have not yet mastered the sort of anti-naturalistic-driven voices so necessary to properly perform Williams’ lines (a problem as well for the language-driven playwrights such as Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Foreman and numerous other contemporary playwrights). But then, except for Babe and Gorse-Bracken none of them truly matter, their characters serving merely as examples of sexual variations upon which Babe and, occasionally, her spiritual opposite, Gorse-Bracken, serve as commentators.

  

     Despite many critics’ assertions that In Masks Outrageous and Austere was simply a restatement of all of Williams’ previous themes, I’d argue that in this play that, even if Williams has returned to all of the themes of his previous plays, he took them much further, almost laying all his cards on the table so to speak, in the process, creating a far more straight-forward and, yes, honest, statement of his sexual obsessions than he previously had.

     There’s no question that behind every Williams male and many of his females is a homosexual, lesbian, or “perverse”—by the general societal standards—sexual being! It is hard to think of the few “normal” individuals (although no such word is truly possible in Williams’ canon, since it is those who believe themselves “normal” who are the most abnormal beings): Stella, perhaps, the gentleman visitor of The Glass Menagerie, maybe. After that, it gets difficult. Even the Big Daddy’s and Big Momma’s of Williams’ world have suffered incomparable torments in their sexual relationships. But in most of Williams’ works, up until his final short and longer plays, these figures were kept somewhat in the shadows, their true sexual identities exposed, certainly, but just so ever slightly blurred that they could escape the deficient attentions of many middle class Americans and even the harsh lights of Hollywood movies. Most viewers certainly comprehended that in the motion picture version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for example, Brick’s real problem was his homosexual attraction to his high school football companion Skipper; but people like my parents and their friends, had they even ventured out to that film (they were not adventurers) might have easily believed Burl Ives' assertion that his son’s problem was immaturity, an inability to grow up and out of his idealized friendship with his former “buddy.” They might even have convinced themselves that Blanche was a subject of small-town gossip and was just terribly misunderstood.

     Such white-washing, brain-washing slips of imagination are quite impossible, however, in this last Williams work. There is Babe, full-face to the audience, announcing one by one the sexual peccadilloes of nearly every figure in the cast: from her gay—and in this Williams play, it is “gay,” not “homosexual” behavior that is the proper description of the character’s acts—husband Billy’s (Robert Beitzel) abandonment of her bed for his ship-board dalliances with his  Harvard-bred “secretary,” Jerry (Sam Underwood) to her own lesbian past (which she characterizes, humorously, in the old-fashioned expression of “acts of Bilitis”). She, a pure sensualist, determined to “gratify everything in me as the luna moth dies at dusk,” announces to us that, as the wealthiest woman in the world, she has purchased her current love-interest to fulfill her needs. But he has failed her, just as her endless cocktails of vodka and champagne have failed her, her dying father has failed her, her nerves have failed her, and, now, even her guardians, the nefarious Gideons—a security force made of up of internally-loving gay boys hired by the Kudzu-Clem corporation watching over her wealth—have seemingly failed her. She, in short, is the perfect exemplar of Mick Jagger’s and Keith Richard’s lyrical wail: “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” So too does she announce, in case the audience has turned a blind eye, that her neighbor Mrs. Gorse-Bracken, living in an invisible nearby house, is obviously engaged in a incestuous relationship with her forever-masturbating son, Playboy; that her maid, Peg Foyle (Pamela Shaw) is a slut; and determines that Peg’s current boyfriend, Joey (Christopher Halladay)—whom Peg has met in a local church—is a stud worthy of her attention. Babe, in short, is the Chorus to Williams’ ridiculous Greek-like tragedy, where the masks fall from the character’s faces as quickly as they might attempt to attach them. Despite its lugubrious title, there are, in fact no “outrageous masks” possible given Babe’s revelatory announcements. 

   If nothing else—and there is a great deal else to be said about this play—Babe’s drunken pronouncements, which Knight delivers in a kind of stammering delight which, at times, appears to suggest that the overwrought actress has almost forgotten her lines, is like a slap in the face, an outrageous howl of sensual disappointment.  That she, along with her slim-waisted and mentally wasted husband, have been abducted and deposited into this seaside hellhole in a manner similar to the Church of Scientology’s alleged imprisonments of their own doubting adherents, only ratchets up Babe’s vengeful dance of truth-telling, until finally, exhausted, she disappears into the strangely lit up aurora-borealis-like sunset to swim in a sea she has so boisterously admitted she abhors. In her absence, her current objects of disappointment are destroyed, murdered, as she, apparently, is freed to move on, like the Capitalistic world she symbolizes, devouring others in her desperate search for love.

     As a comedic-romantic Williams has always secretly equated love with suffocation, desire with greed, the sexual act itself with self-immolation; and in this play, all these tropes become quite visibly apparent. Pumped up on drugs, perhaps satiated beyond his capability to accept any further love, Williams created in Babe a startling rendition of Medea’s dance of death, a song of vengeance for all those who so disappointed this man’s, and every man’s like him, insatiable desires. For Williams’ last lover, the play’s director David Schweizer, the recreation of this text can only have been a painfully poignant reconstruction, one I, at least, felt honored to have experienced.

 

Los Angeles, May 10, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2012).