Thornton Wilder | Our Town / 2009

archetypal america

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thornton Wilder Our Town /  the production I saw was at the Barrow Street Theatre, New York, May 10, 2009

 

Few American plays can lay claim to being almost a dramatic "national anthem" other than Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Susan Bee recently suggested that everyone of a certain age who performed in high school theater was, at one time or another, in Our Town. I performed as a minor character in just such a production.

     Over the years, however, it has seemed to me that this archetypal drama without sets or costumes has gotten a little stale. Howard and I attended a production at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. around 1973, when they also performed that work, among others, in the Soviet Union.

     I remember that production primarily for the acting by Robert Prosky as the stage manager. Prosky performed it in a manner that was so "folksy," I could hardly bare the sentimentality of the piece. A 2003 television production starring Paul Newman and directed by James Naughton seemed even more lifeless.

     I also have the feeling that over the years that in some productions more and more props have crept onto the stage despite Wilder's insistence that the play use only three props at most. But perhaps this is just an illusion brought about by the busy verisimilitude of the productions I've seen.

     The 2009 production at the Barrow Street Theater in New York, accordingly, was a welcome change. Directed by David Cromer, this Our Town was a dusted-off rendition, where part of the audience, an important feature of the script, appeared on stage (me among them), several of whom were asked to read the questions in response to the academically inclined lecture of Professor Willard, who describes the geological history of Grovers Corners and surrounding territory.

    The stage manager of this version, Cromer himself, lost the New England accent usually lathered on in heavy doses, and spoke in a more appealing everyday quality, sometimes injecting energy through his hurried asides into a work that has a tendency in its slow spin of story-telling to fall into lethargy. With only two tables, and four chairs Cromer created a believable pair of houses in which live the Gibbs and the Webbs, whose children grow up, marry, and die in a few short hours. The abandonment of the New Hampshireisms was a particular advantage, I felt, since the play is so universally "American"—however one defines that—that this work has always seemed to be more at home in the author's home state of Wisconsin. Wherever Grovers Corners is, it exists more in the mind that in reality, and to place it in any particular locale seems to me beside the point.

     So casual were the actors, dressed in mostly contemporary clothing, that even the heart-rending wedding scene and the nearly impossible-to-perform cemetery conversation among the dead lost a great deal of its sentimentality.

     Interestingly, after paring down the characters’ lives and actions to almost abstract imitations of life, Cromer pulled out the naturalistic stops, so to speak, for the famous final scene when Emily Webb (Jeniffer Grace in this production) asks to go back "home" for one day in her life. Suddenly a curtain behind the stage was opened to reveal an entire kitchen, with a table set with plates, silverware, napkins, a working water pump and a stove where Emily's mother, costumed in turn-of-the-century dress, fries up bacon and pancakes. The startling comparison of the abstractness of the rest of the production with this highly realist scene brought home, with amazing results, one of Wilder's major themes, that we are too busy living life to really see it. Perhaps only the dead can truly smell the coffee, but on the Mother's Day Sunday I visited this play, the entire audience shared in the experience, as tears fell from nearly everyone's eyes. In a strange way, it was if Wilder had restated, within a narrow realist context, Ionesco's absurdly comic observations about living and death.    

 

Los Angeles, May 29, 2009

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2009).

 

Richard Foreman | Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance) / 2013

the unfortunate truth of my situation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Foreman Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance) / The Public Theater, New York, the performance I attended was on Saturday, May 4, 2013

 

After years and years of enigmatic and provocative plays, and after having announced that he was giving up playwriting for filmmaking, Richard Foreman has come back with a new play that at times almost appears to be a kind of film script, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance). Like most of his works, this play is set upon a stage decked out with numerous alphabetical configurations, portraits of “significant” people, numerous odd props, and the strings that outline the horizontal shell of the stage, a kind of mix between a metaphorical representation of string theory and an eruv, the defining territory of the traditional Jewish community that outlines the boundaries through which certain objects can be moved or carried on holy days. The effect, no matter what Foreman’s precise purposes, is to draw a line between what occurs on “stage” and the audience. Above all else, Foreman’s plays are definitely not narrative representations that draw their audiences into the “romance” of the story, but are purposefully puzzling brain twisters that demand the audience think about what is being said and done within the author’s domain.

        Even Foreman’s title is enigmatic: what are “old fashioned prostitutes?” And how can a romance, usually defined as a form dedicated to idealism and a preoccupation with idealized love, be “true?”  In fact, the central character of Foreman’s new work, Samuel (theater veteran Rocco Sisto), never once has sex with the prostitutes he encounters, and although the central figure, Suzie (Alenka Kraigher) invites Samuel to her room and even spikes his gin, no love occurs—unless one speaks of the love of language and philosophical speculation. The only physical contact that Samuel has with anyone is a sudden hug between Samuel and the mysterious “pimp-like” figure accompanying the two “prostitutes,” Alfredo (David Skeist).

 

                        (Alfredo, Samuel hug)

ALFREDO

Careful

 

SAMUEL

I do — beg of you, friend Alfredo                 ALFREDO

(He grabs Alfredo's lapels)                 Careful.

— Convince beautiful Suzie

That when I speak to her directly

This is always the unfortunate truth of my situation

 

Suzie and Gabriella are not women of love as much as they are women who flirt, “coquettes,” as Samuel describes them, whose major activities include “sipping afternoon alcohol under the roar of distant traffic” and attempting to catch the gaze of passing men.

     As Suzie convincingly argues, she is more a “teacher” than a lover, a woman who shows men the way. And she spends most of her time in this play grappling with Samuel’s attempt to come to terms with what “reality” is, what is the self, and what does it all mean in every day experience.

     There is never a clear set of answers or even a set of codified speculations to precisely what Foreman is arguing for or against in his provocative plays, but there are often clues to the animus behind them. In this case Samuel expresses it quite early in the work:

 

      But perhaps, ladies and gentleman,

it is best never to speak openly about

such things

 

But it did happen

That travelling these streets

In bright sunlight

An old man with white hair

Shabbily dressed, trudging slowly

In the direction opposite to the one

In which I was traveling

Carrying a large, soiled cardboard box

with what personal belongings

I could not guess

But — whispered hoarsely under his breath

"Go to Berkeley, make film".

 

I did not respond.

But I frowned

And a few seconds later

turned to watch him proceed, slowly

Down the street     (girls giggle)

 

Later in the day                                                                       SUZIE & GABRIELLA

Lying on the bed in my hotel room                            Ooo

I wondered -- I wondered should I have approached him

To ask for clarification.

Was he speaking to me

Or to himself

— yet it seemed appropriate to my concerns

And my possible

Future

 

GABRIELLA

Go to Berkeley, my friend

Make film.

Which could have meant, not the city in sun drenched

California 

 

SUZIE

But possibly the long dead Irish                                                                     GABRIELLA

philosopher of idealism, Bishop George Berkeley himself,               Oooo.

whose view of reality might be poetically re-imagined

as a vision of the world in which experience

itself was but a thin film, spread in illusionary fashion

upon human consciousness.

 

SAMUEL

So that

"Go to Berkeley, make film", could have meant, go

deeper into the notion of the world as

a transparent surface only —

depending upon the impress of a mental apparatus —

snapping the world into apparent being only —

 

Accordingly, Old-Fashioned Prostitutes does serve as a kind of “thin film” exploring the “illusionary” experience of consciousness, a bit like Proust (and the mysterious city in which Samuel exists reminds me of Paris) steeped in sensual appreciation. Even now and then a voice cries out “hold,” reminding us a bit of a film command. But of course it also suggests that the audience might “hold” that idea a bit longer in the mind.

 

       Samuel, obviously, is also Samuel Beckett, and Foreman’s seemingly personal memories are often channeled through the great author, vaguely paralleling, in particular, works such as “First Love” and, at play’s end, “Imagine Dead Imagine.” It is not that this play’s story is even similar to Beckett’s first love; there are simply associated threads between the characters of the Beckett story who meets a woman, “Lulu,” upon a park bench, a woman just as determined as Suzie to bring home her man. Unlike Suzie, the fat Lulu does eventually lure the narrator of Beckett’s tale into her home, but the two sleep in separate rooms, and as in Foreman’s play her coquetry (numerous visits to the same park bench) results in very little “love” and ends with some of the same questions about reality and experience that Foreman’s Samuel poses. Similar to many of Beckett’s characters, Foreman’s Samuel cannot even move when he is asked to follow Suzie home, his legs being suddenly frozen in space, wrapped in the production in a gunny sack. 

      Since, in Berkeley’s “film of consciousness,” however, nothing is precisely determinable even the memory of such experiences and the identity of self comes into question. If Beckett may lie under Foreman’s Samuel, so too does Foreman’s own persona, Rainer Thompson, recently appearing in his autobiographical film, I Am Rainer Thompson, and I Have Lost It Completely,  which lies behind this play’s character, as Samuel suddenly declares he is Rainer. And in this sense—although it seems preposterous to claim this in a oeuvre that has always been highly personal and autobiographical—Old-Fashioned Prostitutes seems to be one of Foreman’s most intimate works, a kind of strange memory play made up of his own and other writer’s intellectual detritus.

      In the end, however, it is nearly pure Beckett in the final words of a play which has struggled with self-knowing and reality, with illusion and consciousness:

 

 Emptiness is here

 (all to wall, then pause, then back: Music)

 

VOICE

Imagine no world but this world

Imagine no world but this world (THUD)

End of play. (THUD)

End of play.

 

Despite the play’s declaration of “emptiness,” Foreman, like Beckett, has embraced this world with his hundreds of questions and speculations over the course of his career, surely representing a “true romance” with “this world” with which we have such a difficult relationship.

 

New York-Los Angeles, May 5-May 13, 2013

Reprinted from Jacket2 (May 2013).