tails/tales
by Douglas Messerli
Mac Wellman Bad Penny / City Garage, Santa Monica, California / the performance
I saw with Martin Nakell and Rebecca Goodman was on Sunday, August 24, 2008
The New York Times praised the
virtuosity of the play’s language, and the original production, by director Jim
Simpson and produced by the renowned Anne Hamburger, helped to win Wellman an
Obie.
Although Michel attempted to recreate some sense of that original space
through projections upon the walls of Bow Bridge and Central Park, neither she
nor her cast seemed to completely comprehend the dynamic of Wellman’s language.
Whereas in the original production, the props were limited to a boat and a tire
which Man #1 has brought with him into the park from his car parked somewhere
on the East Side of the City, Michel interpolated into the work various objects:
stuffed birds, art easels, paint brushes, umbrellas, shoes, cardboard boxes,
and other detritus that literalized Wellman’s “story” and deflected from the
seemingly manic tales of the various figures who momentarily have gathered at
this spot. While the script seems to call up, for me, isolated figures standing
each some ways from the other as they vaguely interact to their various
tales—the major of which concerns a woman named Kat’s unfortunate act of
picking up a penny lying tails up—
I was having a basically okay
day until I picked
up that bad penny. Now
now it’s ruined.
Now I don’t even know what I’m
saying. Weird. This
is really weird.
—the City Garage performance
seemingly cornered its characters into a concatenation of strange types.
Indeed, Wellman’s characters are very “weird” in their series of
metaphysical postulations and horrific tales of childhood—lived by Kat in a
“part of the city considered unfashionable….a fairly disgusting childhood…with
a gruesome family” (“Gruesome mom, gruesome pop, gruesome cat, gruesome dog”)
and lived by Ray X in Big Ugly, Montana, where he “went to Big Ugly Highschool
and played end on the Big Ugly Football team, which was called the Big Ugly
Metacomets.” But under Michel’s direction these strange experiences are simply
part of a stranger universe where, at several points, rain pours from the sky
and, nearby, a Cezanne-like artist stands by his easel expressing his doubts,
while a southern cheerleader type pointlessly reprimands Kat and warns Ray
against her.
As I later explained to my theater
companions Martin Nakell and Rebecca Goodman, Michel seemed more determined to
skew Wellman’s work into play akin to the theater of the absurd (the City
Garage company has produced several Ionesco plays), and by introducing into the
play various dialects, this production distracted us from the fact that
although Wellman’s world may be “weird,” it is never truly absurd, never
entirely unbelievable. Despite Kat’s often disconnected speculations about what
is real opposed to what we perceive and Ray’s furious attacks against both
nature and urban life, in the original script these characters maintain a sense
of poetic logic. Their imaginative and often ridiculous spins of rhetoric are
always firmly grounded in the American experience, and despite their confusion
and outrage there is always an underlying sense of nostalgia and hope in their
plaints. Even the chorus’s gestural incantation of the incomprehensibility of
all the values upon which these characters have pinned their hopes, merely
reiterate a world more akin to Thornton Wilder’s Our
Town than it is to the enraged human-rhinoceros or the
flying father of Ionesco’s universe.
It is, in part, the open spiral of
disconnectedness of their tales that helps to make Wellman’s characters,
particularly in this play, so grounded in US life.
By collapsing the chorus into one figure—a kind of shaman madwoman—and
establishing her characters as regional types, Michel’s version of Bad Penny loses the dark, abstracted
lyricism that I hear in the original script. And while Wellman’s original work
ends in a frightening prediction of near-apocalyptic results for a country that
buries its people in its various real and metaphoric toxic wastes—
For the Way leads
over from the
Fountains of Bethesda, where
the Lord
performed certain acts, acts
unknown to
us, across the Bow Bridge of
our human
knowability, pigheadedness, and
the
weisenheimer attitude problem
of our
undeserving, slimeball
cheesiness; and
scuttles into the Ramble,
there, of
utterly craved, totally lost,
desperate
and drive
incomprehensibility—friend
neither to fin, to feather, nor
tusk
of bat, bird, weasel,
porcupine, nor gnat.
And we who are not who we are
must forever
bury the toxic waste of our
hidden hates
in the dark, plutonic abysm of
our human
hearts, and be always blessed
in the empty promise
of the sky that looks down upon
us with
a smile, a divine smile, even
as she
crushes us all beneath her
silver foot
—the City Garage production, by
having Man #3 (whom they characterize as an observing artist) repeat Kat’s
first lines, gives the play a false sense of closure, wrapping it up into the
daily repetition of its characters’ acts:
I come here every day, every
single day. I come here, to
this
spot, every single day and
every single day, every single
goddam day, it’s the same or
it’s different or it rains or
it’s
clear or it snows or it’s
bright
and beautiful or it’s dark,
rainy,
and kinda foul. ….
While Wellman’s original promises us a sort of a terrifying
transformation, Michel’s version leaves us in a purgatory of everyday
experience, rendering all the cries of despair and hopeful vision of its
figures absolutely meaningless.
Los Angeles, September 3, 2008
Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (September 2008).
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