going
nowhere
by Douglas Messerli
David Greenspan Go Back to Where You Are / Los Angeles, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble,
the performance I saw was on Sunday, August 14, 2016
Playwright and actor David
Greenspan’s 2011 play, Go Back to Where
You Are, now running at Los Angeles’ Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, is a breezy,
seaside play that might remind one of Chekov’s The Seagull—if it weren’t for the fact that this author’s works
make no attempt at all to create an illusion of reality. As director Bart
DeLorenzo notes in a program: despite being “set beside the ocean, following
the playwright’s request, you will hear no waves crashing tonight, no seagulls
overhead. When night falls, we will have no recorded crickets.” And despite the
fact that one character, Bernard (Justin Huen) speaks endlessly of the birdlife
on Long Island, we see and hear no birds.
Indeed, Bernard begins the play commenting, as the playwright, “This is
kind of a weird play”; and throughout characters, as in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, take time out to
speak asides to the audience. Some figures stand in frieze while others come
and go. And one character, improbably sent by God from ancient Greece, who
admits to the uncontemporary moniker of Passalus (John Fleck), also transforms
himself from time to time into an elderly female actress, Mrs. Simmons,
allowing for the actor to quick switch personas and demonstrate his acting
skills. Fleck was excellent in the role, but I would have loved to have seen
Greenspan himself, one of New York’s very best actors who has often done female
impersonations on stage, act the role as he did in the 2011 Playwrights
Horizons production.
The occasion for this get-together of odd characters is the birthday of
Carolyn, a figure who, inexplicably, never makes an appearance and who, we’re
told, cooks the meal which the characters share. At the center of the
get-together is Carolyn’s highly thea-ater-proclaiming
mother, Claire (Shannon Holt), who is about to star as Arkadina in The Seagull, a role, for those who
recall, of great hauteur and self-centeredness, that matches her own behavior,
as, throughout the play she negatively evaluates her friends to their faces and
behind their backs. She’s invited her younger brother, who lives in a small
beach house nearby—the “obscure” playwright and author of the piece we’re
seeing, so he claims—her unconfident and self-loathing actress friend Charlotte
(Tracy Winters in the performance I saw), her unhappy son (Andrew Walke) who’s
just returned from Los Angeles after the death of his gay lover, and her
director Tom (Bill Brochtrup) and his set-designing lover Malcolm (Jeffrey
Hutchinson), who also stands in for God. As in Chekov’s drama all of these
characters—with the exception, perhaps of Claire—feel inwardly thwarted and
unloved; but even Claire is to be pitied, since during the party she receives a
phone call telling her that she has cancer which will kill her, so Bernard
tells us at play’s end, within the year.
It is Passalus’ job at this event to
guide the invisible Carolyn on a happier path of life, and he is warned by God
not to interfere with any of the others’ lives. But Passalus, who recounts his
own unhappy love affair back in Ancient Athens, simply cannot resist,
particularly when he
hears all their inner thoughts and
falls in love with the tender nature-loving playwright. Before this witty
1-hour play comes to an end—alternating between the elderly Mrs. Simmons and
himself— he’s sent Claire’s young son, Wally, packing back to LA to find new
love and life, sets Charlotte right about her true talents, and temporarily, at
least, patches up Tom’s and Malcolm’s failing relationship, as Tom promises to
stop playing around with the chorus boys. For his busybody intrusions, God
punishes him to continued life—which like Malina Makropulos of Janáček's opera The Makropulos Affair—he’d hope to finally to free himself. But
what the heck, he’s fallen in love again and, more importantly, the sensitive
Bernard has fallen in love with him. As Bernard finally perceives, instead of
almost trying to move ahead of oneself or falling into the errors of the past,
you should “go back to where you are,” a phrase that seems almost like a
variation of Voltaire’s command to “tend your own garden,” or, put another way,
to live fully in the present.
For such a short work, Greenspan’s play
reveals a profound interconnection between dream and reality, between past and
present, despair and possibility, and repetition and creation. Writing of
the original production, The New York
Times critic Charles Isherwood argued that Greenspan’s characters were so
interesting that he’d wished that Passalus had never visited them so that we
might have more time to discover their inner realities. But, I believe, that is
just Greenspan’s point. Life is not an illusion, but a real thing to be grasped
even in the vague shadows of our comprehension about where our experiences are
taking us. Poor Chekov’s characters are simply trapped in an illusion of the
playwright’s creation, while Greenspan’s caricatures continue to intrigue us as
we are forced to imagine where life may take them. Perhaps, in the end, we can
imagine that even the permanently artificial Claire had to face the reality of
her own life.
Los Angeles, August 16, 2016
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 16, 2016).
