complexity out of simplicity
by Douglas Messerli
Michel Seuphor The Ephemeral Is Eternal, adapted by Donn B. Murphy and Judith
Zilczer, sets by Piet Mondrian / performed at the Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., June 25-27, 1982
With sets by Piet Mondrian and a
script by Mondrian biographer Michel Seuphor, the first American production of The Ephemeral Is Eternal, billed as a
"Dada play," could not help but intrigue museum-goers and devotees of
drama alike. In the context of the De Stijl show at the Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, this production inherently raised the question why Mondrian,
the genius of order, harmony, and color, the artist who declared himself as
dedicated to communicating "the imminent order of nature," would have
agreed to participate in an event connected with the Dadaists, who by 1926, the
year in which this play was written, had long since established an
international reputation for their embracement of the accidental and the
absurd. How one answers that question and what this production reveals
concerning Mondrian's attitudes towards Dadaism depend, I suggest, on how much
one is able to separate text from context, critical perspective from
expectation.
For in many respects the play shares the Dadaist love of illogic and its
relish of the gestures of shouting, screaming, and babbling. A conductor,
dressed in white tails, undershorts, and bowler hat, leads his chosen chorus in
groans and songs of gibberish; an actress, attended by Turkish and Japanese
peddlers, soliloquizes nonsense in the style of Sarah Bernhardt; three
robotized Black dancers glissade across the stage; and throughout, the play is
filled with self-referential commentary, statements directed to the audience,
and irrelevant intrusions that one has come to associate with Dadaist theater
and its influence upon and assimilation into postmodern performance art. As
with much of the most interesting of contemporary performance, The Ephemeral Is Eternal seems to be
less a play—a dramatic statement frozen within dialogic plot—than it is a
theater of process, an event occurring in real time and space.
The play begins, in fact, with a metaphor that suggests the play will be
a dialectic between the two: a woman enters from stage left and draws in
pantomine a series of rounded figures—a circle, an ellipse, a disk; a male
figure follows her, erasing her figures and replacing them with angular ones—a
rectangle, a triangle, a square. Momentarily, these acts may appear as mere
Dadaist gestures; but one soon perceives that for Seuphor the erasure has
served less as a meaningless game between the old art and the new, between the
irrational and the rational, between the ideal and the concrete—all polarities
which in Seuphor's days were summed up in the female/male dichotomy. Later,
during the soliloquy of a melodramatic actress, an offstage voice shouts: "No
women on stage"; and soon thereafter the actress, dressed in green (a
color detested by the members of De Stijl), is banned from the play. Throughout
this piece, in fact, the sentimental, the mystical, the circle, the feminine,
all, are opposed to the tree, the horizon, the straight line, the male, the art
of Mondrian.
For Seuphor, I suggest, this was less a sexist statement than it was a
comment on the societal linkage of art to the feminine mystique. Like the De
Stijl artists, the Futurists (Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis), and dozens of
other visual and literary artists of the day, Seuphor clearly felt that society
had connected art for too long with prettiness, sublimity, gentility—to all
those things by which it defined woman. It was not woman Seuphor hated, but
society's notion of art as it related to its sexual stereotypes. What he and
others desired was tougher art, a sparer, leaner notion of the creative act, an
artistic sensibility expressed in his play by a vaudeville-like ballet between
two males, dressed black and white. With only a handkerchief for a prop, these
two enact various human emotions—joy, frivolity, sexual arousal, anger, hate,
pain, and forgiveness—by transforming the cloth into various shapes and patterns.
It is this ability to shape and reshape nature with a single motif, with one
simple focus, one realizes, that is at the heart of Mondrian's art and his sets
for the play. And it is that complexity out of simplicity, it becomes clear,
for which Seuphor is arguing.
The Dadaist humor, the echolalia, pratfalls, and buffoonery are merely
tools to point up the clarity and completeness of formal abstraction.
Ultimately, The Ephemeral Is Eternal
stands as a sort of formalist manifesto in Dadaist drag, a manifesto that uses
a rival in an attempt to destroy an absolute enemy. To blow up the old art—the
production ends with the detonation of a model of the theater itself—it uses
the shock-value, the absurdity of Dadaism; but underneath lies a plea for
order, for harmony, for an art that stands against the ephemeral in its
eternality. Mondrian, one can surmise, comprehended that in participating in
this Dada-like spectacle he was remaining true to his cause.
Washington, D.C., June 29, 1982
Reprinted from Washington Review, VIII (October-November 1982).
Reprinted from Green Integer Review (May 2009).