Marissa Chibas, Erik Ehn, and Travis Preston | Brewsie and Willie / 2010

listening

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gertrude Stein, adapted by Marissa Chibas, Erik Ehn, and Travis Preston Brewsie and Willie / performed at the 7th Floor Penthouse (533 S. Los Angeles Street), Los Angeles / the performance I saw was on Saturday, July 24, 2010

 

Published in 1946, just weeks prior to Stein’s death, Brewsie and Willie began as a series of essays, published in The New York Times, expressing the feelings and worries of young soldiers still in Europe. Stein’s observations were based on her own conversations with American G.I.s, with whom she had spoken on the street and at dinners in her own home to which she had invited numerous of them.

     While the work is dominated by the thinking and commentary of Brewsie, egged on by the most obstinately ordinary of the group, Willie, this dialogue fiction eventually becomes filled with the voices of numerous young soldiers—Jo, Henry, Donald Paul, Ed, Jimmie, Richard, and, through Willie’s constant evocation of him, even the dead Brock—and military nurses—Janet, Pauline, and Jane.

     In Stein’s original these men and women discuss everything, although often just in passing, from issues of race, cultural identity, immigration, history, economics, politics, and, in particular, their own uncertain future. Stein’s skillful interweaving of these various subjects is both humorous and powerfully moving, as one by one—some of the soldiers clearly having never spoken of these issues before—they reveal their minds, tell stories, and share their family lives and upbringing. It is the complex matrix of these issues which allows this seemingly transparent work—a work which Stein enthusiasts and scholars might describe as too accessible in relation to her more experimental writing—to become a poetic chorus of fearful and thoughtful voices that links this to her most challenging work.

      Although I might have liked to have the adapters tackle as many of these issues as possible, Chibas, Ehn, and director-author Preston skillfully and faithfully focus on issues economic and historical while suggesting the numerous other topics the original tackles. Indeed this performance was so excellent that any qualms I might have had in the adaptation of Stein are allayed by the powerful evocation of the young soldiers on the eve of their “redeployment,” a word most of them find meaningless, if not terrifying.

      The youthful cast of the Poor Dog Group, most of whom are just two or three years out of the theatre program at CalArts, are precisely the age of Stein’s young Americans, and their fresh faces and simple beauty—as the men, sweating in the summer heat, briefly strip off their shirts to cool off, some of them having jumped in and out the windows of the top floor playhouse, literally unable to control their energy and, as we quickly discover, their worries—almost brings one to tears.

       Having all faced two world wars back to back, and having lived through part of the Great Depression, these men of what Tom Brokaw has described as “The Greatest Generation” are  terrified that upon their return there will be no jobs or, if there are jobs, the economy will be built up once more to again collapse. An early conversation between Brewise and Willie summarizes the situation as they envision it:

 

               B:  How I hate that word job.

               W: You’re right to hate that word, hate it good and plenty, but can you afford

                     to hate it Brewsie, fellows like you dont need a job you just live,

                     eveybody’s got to see to it you live and live you do but fellows like us,

                     well we got have jobs, what you want us to do, nobody’s going to feed

                     us, you just watch them not feed us dont we know, no we got to have

                     jobs, talk all you like and talk is good I like talk I like to listen to

                     you Brewsie, but when we get home and dont wear this brown any

                     more we got to have a job, job, job. Yes job.

                B:  I know, I know, I know Willie. Yes I know, you got to have a job, and

                     it’s all right but it’s not all right, see here let me tell you about jobs.

                     Some have to have jobs, some have got to be employed and be

                     employees, but not so many Willie. Listen to me not so many, when

                     everybody is employed.

                W: God, if they only just could not be employed. I aint forgot that depression,

                      no not yet.

                B:  Yes but Willie, that’s what I want to say, industrialism which produces

                      more than anybody can buy and makes employees out of free men

                      makes ‘em stop thinking, stop feeling, makes ‘em all feel alike.

                      I tell you Willie it’s wrong. …

 

     In a world where, for the first time, they have had to look about, to compare their lives with others, and evaluate what it all means, these young men and women have gradually begun to think, and before long, they are as active as Brewsie in observing, commenting upon, and questioning the world around them. And all, in turn, begin to fear that the new workaday world which they will soon face will not allow the time to think. Will they, like those of the past generations, forget all about the lessons they have learned? Will war break out once more? Will the nation overproduce to create a new depression? One could almost hear the sighs of the audience in their silent recognition of Stein’s soldiers' prescient concerns. This play is terribly significant even today.

     The on-stage rapport of these actors, their ability, so necessary in a production such as this, to work almost as a single breathing mass of beings, is, as another reviewer commented, “a miracle, pure and simple.”  And the interaction particularly of Brad Culver as the loveable Willie and Jonney Ahmanson as the pondering, somewhat befuddled Brewsie made this play, for me, one of the most memorable in years. So intense is their sense of camaraderie and love that, at one moment, the director sends the entire male cast to the floor in a mass wrestling match that momentarily releases both their tensions and sublimated desires.

     As Stein reiterated upon her deathbed, there is, obviously, no answer to the questions the soldiers pose. Donald Paul’s Thoreau-like logic to go back to the simple ways of living and surviving by oneself, as Brewsie realizes, will not work for most of these men. One very young soldier is determined to stay in France, but the others, despite their fears, want to return home. One or two suggest that they might embrace Socialism or even Communism, but Brewsie and most of the others realize that these are not true solutions for a country in which these ideas are so foreign.

      With the help of the women, the men gradually begin to embrace another kind of possibility for their futures. Some of them, at least, come to see that it isn’t just a matter of finding a job, but of finding something meaningful to work toward. One of them suggests that their goal should be to “pioneer.” But where is the wilderness? Willie scoffs. Clearly Stein is using the word here not as a noun, “a pioneer,” but as a verb defining action as a process of pioneering, of discovering the world all over again. But this concept, as brilliant as it is, seems to emanate from the voice of author, not from the characters and, as such, brings a halt to their startlingly real interchanges.

     The last speech, spoken by one of the women characters, in the book is pure Gertrude Stein crying out to her “G.I.s and G.I.s and G.I.s,” like Susan B. Anthony or others of her women heroes, with a patriotic, rhetorical flourish. Perhaps this ending was the only way to have successfully closed the work, for the soldiers have been called home and are on the move, already missing the voice of their thoughtful friend Brewsie, who has challenged them all, again and again, to “listen”:

 

                              Janet:   And tell me, wont you miss talking when you go

                                          home, you do know dont you all of you nobody

                                          talks like you boys were always talking, not back home.

                             Jo:         Yes we know.

                             Jimmie: Yes we know.

                             Willie :  Not Brewsie, he’ll talk but, Brewsie will talk but

                                           we wont be there to listen, we kind of will remember

                                           that he’s talking somewhere but we wont be there

                                           to listen, there wont be anybody talking were we will be.

     Perhaps, as Jo suggests, “they will talk now, why you all so sure they wont talk over there, perhaps they will talk over there.” But the stubborn realist, Willie, is convincing: “Not those on the job they wont, not those on the job.”

     Thank heaven for a production such as this that helps its audience to listen, to listen attentively while loving nearly every word, if only for a couple of hours.

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2010

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2010).

 

Julia Cho | The Language Archive / 2010

dead languages

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julia Cho The Language Archive / Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre / the performance I saw was on November 14, 2010

 

Presumably anyone interested in theater is equally interested in theater's major medium, language. That does not presume, of course, an interest in "dead languages," the focus of the major character of Cho's play, George (Matt Letscher), who is a linguist-scholar devoted to archiving dying languages before they disappear—at the rate of every two weeks, if we can believe George. As any playwright might ask, do those languages include, at some level, our daily personal conversations?

     At the moment George is attending to the last living speakers of Elloway, who he has brought, at great expense, from some vaguely middle European country. The major problem he discovers with this language is that the couple, who bicker only in English—Elloway is far too lovely a language to use for anger and argumentation, they claim—refuse to help with George's work. Resten (John Horton) and Alta (the wonderful Jayne Houdyshell) see no point to sharing their vocabulary: "Our world is already gone, and no amount of talk talk talk will ever bring back" what has been lost.

    Nicely (and perhaps a little predictably) paralleling this predicament, is George's own relationship with his wife, Mary (Heidi Schreck), who is close to giving up on the idea that George, so brilliant with languages, might ever learn the language of love. She denies leaving all the cryptic messages that George finds hidden in his books, shoes, pants, etc: "Love or explaining how to use the remote control?" "Marriage or an old cardigan?" etc.  Yet her denial reveals her inability to express her own private language of frustration, suggesting that she is as incapable of saving her world as are Resten, Alta, and George.

    The playwright, Cho, has slightly seasoned her brew with the introduction of George's assistant, Emma (Betty Gilpin), who clearly has an inexpressible crush on her boss, going so far as to study Esperanto, one of his favorite languages, just to please him. She cannot seem to learn the language however, perhaps because, as her teacher explains, she is using it for the wrong purpose. The teacher (played also by Houdyshell) recalls that she too had a crush on another, a Dutch woman, which resulted in a similar problem: she could not properly express herself, and the woman left. In short, nearly all of the characters in The Language Archive can speak brilliantly when it comes to mundane or irritating situations, but have little skill, like most of us, with the language of the doves.

 

    By the middle of the play, Mary decides to leave George, Emma determines that she will tell George of her love for him, and the strangely dressed speakers of Elloway decamp for a plane home—all leaving the linguist utterly confounded. What has happened to his well-ordered world?

     Cho does not have an easy answer; nor does she offer solutions for any of her figures. Resten and Alma fall back in love, but leave their beautiful language to fall into oblivion. George becomes determined to tell Mary that he loves her, but, after she has magically met up with a former-baker who has provided her with the perfect mother dough, she has opened her own small bakery, discovering a joyful new purpose to her life. Emma attempts to escape George as well; she, in an even more miraculous encounter, meets up with the long dead creator of Esperanto, the Russian ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof, who examines her eyes, clouded by her love; she returns to George, now recognizing what Mary has previously told the audience:

 

                        Sometimes you feel so sad, it begins to feel like happiness. And

                        you can be so happy that it starts to feel like grief.

 

     Despite Mary's permanent absence, Emma never does develop a love relationship with George, who continues to work alone, lost in the syntax of other people's lives.

    Cho's play points to deeper concepts than it serves up. And the author has somewhat disappointedly spiced it up with whimsy—what some critics, mistakenly I believe, described as surreal or absurdist farce—that deflects the philosophical and psychological implications of her art. The Language Archive remains, for all that, a strong parable of what lovers—and by extension, committed believers of life—can and cannot fully express.

 

New York, November 15, 2010

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (December 2010).

Tim Crouch | An Oak Tree / 2010

the miracle of art

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tim Crouch An Oak Tree / premiered at the Edinburgh Festival, 2005; the performance I saw was at The Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Los Angeles, on February 13, 2010

 

First performed in the Edinburgh Festival in 2005, Tim Crouch's play An Oak Tree, which I saw in February of this year, is ostensibly a work about three individuals trying to come to terms with a great tragedy, in this case the accidental death of a young girl. Crouch, playing a performing hypnotist, has three months earlier hit and killed a twelve-year old pianist, Claire. One day, at a performance of his show—the one we are attending a year later, we are told, in a upstairs pub near Oxford Street—a man, among invisible others from the audience, volunteers to be hypnotized: Andy, the man whose daughter has been killed, is now near madness, with cracked lips, bloodshot eyes, and other evidence of bodily decay. Played by a guest actor who has never before met Crouch and who has not seen or read the play, this new Andy must act out the encounter with Crouch/the hypnotist by following a combination of directions and lines whispered into a headphone, reading sections of script, and following verbal instructions by the author. One scene involves improvisatory movements.

     Despite his daughter's death, Andy has continued to believe Claire is alive, inhabiting the very air of his and his wife's home and ultimately being transformed into a giant oak tree. His wife, on the other hand, is inconsolable about her loss, and frightened for her husband's sanity. Both husband and wife have considered suicide. The hypnotist's life, he tells us, has changed radically, and he is performing badly, just acting out his previously scheduled performances before he crashes into despair.

      Each has found a way to survive, but Andy's is the most creative, since he has consistently been able to see something where no one else can, is able to create a new reality out of what others see as inanimate things.

      Crouch has based the idea of his play on a noted conceptual art work, shown at the Tate Modern museum by Michael Craig-Martin in 1973. In Craig-Martin's work a three-quarter full glass of water sits on a high shelf, beside it a text which begins:

 

                      Q. To begin with, could you describe this work?

                      A. Yes, of course. What I've done is change a glass of water into

                           a full-grown oak tree without altering the accidents of the glass

                           of water.

                      Q. The accidents?

                      A. Yes. The colour, feel, weight, size...

                      Q. Do you mean the glass of water is a symbol of an oak tree?

                      A. No. It's not a symbol. I've changed the physical substance of the glass

                           of water into that of an oak tree.

                      Q. It looks like a glass of water.

                      A. Of course it does. I didn't change its appearance. But it's not a glass of

                           water, it's an oak tree.

                      Q. Can you prove what you've claimed to have done?

                      A. Well, yes and no. I claim to have maintained the physical form of the glass

                           of water and, as you see, I have. However, as one normally looks for

                           evidence of physical change in terms of altered form, no such proof exists.

                      Q. Haven't you simply called this glass of water an oak tree?

                      A. Absolutely not. It is not a glass of water anymore. I have changed its

                           actual substance. It would no longer be accurate to call it a glass of

                           water. One could call it anything one wished but that would not alter

                           the fact that it is an oak tree.

                      Q. Isn't this just a case of the emperor's new clothes?

                      A. No. With the emperor's new clothes people claimed to see something

                           that wasn't there because they felt they should. I would be very surprised

                           if anyone told me they saw an oak tree.

                      Q. Was it difficult to effect the change?

                      A. No effort at all. But it took me years of work before I realised I could do it.

 

     Obviously, Craig-Martin was demonstrating the transformative ability of art, pointing to our imaginative pact that what appears to be one thing is readily perceived as something else (a few lines on paper become the face of a woman or paint on a canvas is seen as a mountain, a man, a beast).

     Similarly, Crouch takes his dramatic situation and in the space between his character's troubled lives and desire for a salvable peace, he demonstrates how theater and art function.

     Although the play is new territory for the volunteer-actor, Crouch, in full view of the audience, directs the actor how to perform and provides him or her (the role is performed by a different male of female actor every time) with the dialogue written in the script. The performance, as in all theater, is always different (that is, Crouch argues, why we go to see plays instead of simply reading them), while the words and character's actions stay basically the same—although he admits, "Every time this play is performed it screws up. Moments are lost, lines are stumbled over, rhythms are broken, confusions abound."

    Into this contrivance, Crouch has placed these two desperate figures (and some dialogue from Andy's homebound wife) to help us to comprehend the transformative possibilities of art. At times hypnotizing his subject (convincing Andy that he can play the piano and that, later, he stands on the stage stark-naked, defecates before the audience, and accidentally hits an innocent bystander while driving) he temporarily controls his own reality. Andy, meanwhile, has done the same thing by transubstantiating his beloved Claire into a living oak.

      By alternating this "dramatic" reality with the everyday talk of actor to actor, speaking as the creator of this play with a neophyte, he further forces the audience to perceive the various levels of theatrical artistry. The writer is playing a actor playing a writer, a young woman (on the occasion I attended the role of Andy was played actress Alex Kingston, and over the years has been played by hundreds of actors including Bob Balaban, Mike Myers, Laurie Anderson, and Frances McDormand) is playing an older despairing man. Despite these purposely alienating, Brechtian contrivances (at one point Crouch even asks his actor: "You didn't think it was too contrived?"), and despite Crouch's inability, in my view, to write to the poetic level he attempts to achieve, the audience was still able to feel for the individuals for whom we had suspended, time and again, our disbeliefs, thus saving the sanity of the characters. At play's end Claire both is not and is still an oak tree. Andy can, after all, play the piano, like his gifted daughter, even if he's never played a note. That is the miracle of art.

 

Los Angeles, Valentine's Day 2010

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (February 2010).