a linguistic fantasia
by Douglas Messerli
Mac Wellman A Murder of Crows / New York, Primary Stages, April 22, 1992
Without complaining about the very thing I’ve determined to do, I still have to
admit I feel a bit daunted about writing on Mac Wellman’s unforgettable play, Murder of Crows. Without any true plot,
you might describe this work as more of a linguistic fantasia than a drama
peopled with interrelating characters. Although family is vaguely at the center
of this play, all is more than slightly askew, as the very set suggests, where
he stands a porch without a house attached: “We lost the house,” suggests Nella
(Anne O’Sullivan) glibly tossing out one of the hundreds of American vernacular
terms with which this work engages.
I
first saw this play at Primary stages in late April 1992, and I published it,
along with the second of Wellman’s so-called “Crowtet” on my Sun & Moon
Press two years later; I reprinted that volume through my Green Integer imprint
in 2000, adding the second volume, containing the last two “Crowtet” plays, in
2003. So, I obviously have great affection for and intimate knowledge of the
play. Yet it has taken me all this time to attempt to write about it, and I still
find it more experiential than explicable.
Let me just suggest that although the characters are slightly
related—Susannah (Jan Leslie Harding) and her mother Nella, along with their
son Andy (the handsome Reed Birney, who stands all in gold throughout as a kind
of lawn ornament) having come to live with Nella’s brother Howard (William
Mesnik) and his unbelievably lucky and mean-hearted wife, Georgia (Lauren
Hamilton)—it might be best to think of their interrelationships more as a
series of monologues that each satirizes various aspects of contemporary
American culture.
Wellman’s play is set someone in Midwest (he grew up in Ohio) near a
vast “hellacious grease pit” and a nearby reactor which makes the rivers “look
like bubble baths, and the air’s all mustardy.” Her husband, Raymond (Stephen
Mellor) has evidently been drowned in the pit, and all they have is a shoe
left. With feet of different sizes and a dislocated face, Nella is clearly a
dependent, in need not only of the begrudging housing (in a chicken coop) that
her relatives have provided her and her daughter, but in need of inspirational
reading matter and spiritual help. She is, in short, a representative of all in
American life that is hated, a woman who has been bypassed by any element of
the “American dream.” Although her brother Howard is somewhat sympathetic, he
himself is impatient with his sister, and particularly her dreamy daughter,
whose major focus seems to be a “weather change”:
Susannah: The
weather is changing, the weather
is
changing for sure, I can smell it.
The
weather has got a whole wheelbarrow
full of
surprises up its sleeve for us.
Not only is she predicting, like a
local Cassandra, a serious change in the climate—significant implications in
the environmental ravaged worlds where many of Wellman’s plays take place—but a
change of philosophical, spiritual, even metaphysical significance. For her,
“The moment will come. Everything that is vertical will become horizontal,”
Time will turn inside out. In part,
The wife, Georgia, has not only broken the bank at Monte Carlo, one of
the hundreds of clichés Wellman proudly spouts, but wins big weekly at their
attendances at the local horse track, from which she brings home wheelbarrows
full of money. If she can be said characterize the dream of all Americans,
hooked on a system that promises enormous, accidental, and undeserved wealth,
she, in her xenophobic hostility of anything outside what finds to be normal,
experiences little happiness. Berating Raymond’s shoes and hats, for example,
she snarls:
……..Grotesque. Perverted
If it’s
possible for a hat to be obscene, his
hats were
obscene. I mean, They made you
think of things
no sane person ought to think
of, ever. They
were not good-looking American
hats,
law-and-order type hats, or patriotic,
military hats,
or socially eminent country
club or
corporate hats.
Later in the play Howard and Nella
reveal that their own strange attic-stored hats (fezzes) and clothes was a
result of their having as children been gypsies (or pretending to be gypsies)
who stole money from German tourists. Their real family name, so they claim,
was Babaghanouj, their great grandfather having been a rug merchant from
Istanbul named Nebuchanezzar. It all reminds one, a bit, of the patriotic,
right-wing Eleanor Shaw Iselin from The
Manchurian Candidate, who near film’s end is revealed to be a Communist set
on taking over the US.
It is almost inevitable, accordingly, that the shining gold statue,
Andy, says nothing and does nothing throughout most of the play, since, as he
briefly admits, the excitement aroused in him by bombing Iraq cities has taken
him into a higher plain of being than any of the family members can comprehend.
Like most American comedies, Wellman’s Murder of Crows, predictably ends happily as the dead father
Raymond reappears, rising from his coffin, having, he admits, been living all
these years with the Crows. As confused and mysteriously baffled as his
daughter, he would go living with them, he vows, if he weren’t allergic to
their feathers. Released from her earth-bound bondage by his sudden
resurrection and her mother’s symbolic death as she retreats into the coffin
the husband has left, Susannah discovers she is not at all allergic to their
wings, and joins up with the busy crows, who, somewhat like the cartoon figures
of Heckle and Jeckle, sit apart, at play’s end, discussing interminably deep
and unanswerable philosophical issues:
What if we
are Type A entities.
That is,
what if we contextualize
and
explain the existences of
others but
cannot, on pain of
infinite
regress, be contextualized
or
explained ourselves?
Yet, while these seemingly profound figures nicely close down Wellman’s
hilarious look at the “State of the Onion,” it is important to remember that in
other cultures, such as in Japan, crows represent ominous forces of evil for
the human species. One can only wonder, accordingly, whether the author is
suggesting that in both Andy and Susannah we have lost, as a people, our only
dreamers to realms that have no effect on our daily lives. Never mind, hints
the witty writer, that these crows “look more like mynas or parrots than real
crows: ie., they’re fake crows.” In a world built of language anything is
possible or nothing is.
Beware: the forces hovering over the second play of Wellman’s quartet
are Macaws.
Los Angeles, January 13, 2013
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2013).
