James Strahs | North Atlantic / 2010

shadowing the shadows

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Strahs North Atlantic, performed by The Wooster Group / first performed with the Globe Theater Company in Eindhoven, Netherlands in 1984 and at The Performing Garage, New York, 1985 / The production I saw was performed at Redcat (The Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater in the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday, February 20, 2010)

 

James Strahs North Atlantic in Wordplays 5: An Anthology of New American Drama (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986)

It is 1983 aboard a U.S. military aircraft carrier, 12 miles off the coast of Holland. The action of the first four scenes all occur at the Operations Room, "Sometime," "Sometime Later," "Sometime Even Later," and "Sometime Even Later Than That," while Scene Five is supposedly at "The Club," and Scene Six "On Deck—Early the Next Morning." It hardly matters, for throughout all action takes place on a highly racked stage with a long table seemingly threatening to propel itself into the audience. Behind the table sit mostly women, most notably Ensign Word-Processor Ann Pusey (Kate Valk) and Master Sergeant Mary Bryzynsky (Frances McDormand), who along with others are seen busily threading and rethreading audiotapes while they toss sometimes banal, sometimes witty, nearly always bawdy statements at each other and the military men, Captain N. I. Roscoe Chizzum (Ari Fliakos), General Lance "Rod" Benders (Paul Lazar), and the two Marine Privates under whom and with whom they work.

     Their job, we are told, is to intercept messages, to gather intelligence. But their actions seldom betray any mental intelligence and involve such quickly spoken and clipped sentences that it seems unimaginable that anyone, including themselves, might comprehend the language. Rather, we glean, perhaps as they do in their "interceptions," only quick stutterings from hundreds of films referencing war (From Here to Eternity, Sands of Iwo Jima, Operation Petticoat, Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, even South Pacific), punctuated by brief musical ditties ("Git Along Little Doggies," "Back in the Saddle," and "Yankee Doodle"), and silly and puny sexual references. The girls are hot for the men and Captain Roscoe and Colonel Lloyd "Ned" Lud seem always about to duke it out over the gals—except for their fascination with each other.

     As in most the works by The Wooster Group, however, none of this "means" in the traditional sense. Most of the chatter, the dialogue of the play, is cut short time and again, with the sound of screeching aircraft, explosions, and doublespeak left hanging in mid-sentence. Like the messages these "sailors" are purportedly tapping into, what the audience gets is mostly feed-back, a perpetual chatter of cultural refuse that can never be truly decoded.

     Reading the play—albeit the version I read was clearly radically changed by the 2010 production—one becomes even more intrigued by the endless sexual innuendos. Indeed, no sex actually occurs in the play; the big bash which was to have ended in the Miss wet uniform contest, is, just like everything else in this play, a shadow, an event that never happens. The constant sexual metaphors that fly between the women of this ship ("Hey, career girl, they're all beer heads. They drink beer right from the tap. All I've got to do is press the lever and they take it right down the throat. I can put in a coke bottle I'm holding between by boots...You got to make them squirt.") are just that, things of language, potentially dangerous, but not of the world of substance. Many of the women may hope for conventional lives, but it is hard to imagine that after the insanity of their military duty that any of them will ever be able to endure normality—however one defines that.   

     Rather than serving any military purpose, this vessel might be most closely compared to The Flying Dutchman, a ghost ship doomed to sail the seas, sending out messages to people living and long dead. In fact, we later discern, this ship is only a decoy for the "real" work being done 500 miles from what we are witnessing. In short, the world we encounter in North Atlantic is only a mirror of another such floating machine of decipher, which may in turn be just a shadow of another, and on and on, with no reality possible in a world where culture and imitation, parody, and camp have become inseparable. In this prisonhouse of language, gesture—at the heart of The Wooster Group's art—is the only thing that saves people from whirling off into space. With a growl, a grin, a randy scratch, a wistful smile, a grit of teeth, Captain Chizzum and his crew of ghosts seem, at times, hilariously alive, even when serenaded by Bach's "Come Sweet Death."

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2010

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

 

Alfred Kreymborg | Lima Beans / 1916 [reading of play]

food for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Alfred Kreymborg Lima Beans / Provincetown Playhouse, New York, Autumn 1916

 

In the summer of 1914, Alfred Kreymborg was invited to the Connecticut art colony named Silvermine, founded by the British art critic Charles Caffin and his wife. While there, the poet and former editor of The Glebe, worked on his manuscript titled Mushrooms, published in 1916, in which several of the pieces were written as prose poems with rhythmic dialogues, an example of which I've reproduced below:

 

                                          IDEALISTS

 

                                          Brother Tree:

                                          Why do you reach and reach?

                                          do you dream some day to touch the sky?

                                          Brother Stream:

                                          Why do you run and run?

                                          do you dream some day to fill the sea?

                                          Brother Bird:

                                          Why do you sing and sing?

                                          do you dream—

 

                                          Young Man:

                                          Why do you talk and talk and talk?

   

     These dialogue poems, in turn, influenced in part by the thinking of Gordon Craig, who argued for directorial dominance in the theater, with the use of actors as mere marionettes, encouraged Kreymborg to try his hand at playwriting. Adding his own love of and knowledge of music as well, Kreymborg wrote a short play, "Lima Beans," one of many throughout his career.

     "Lima Beans," in particular, allowed Kreymborg to combine his poetic talents with his philosophical sense of humor, without applying the stylized poetic conceits that often appear in his poetry itself.

     Kreymborg's comic gem has very little "plot." A wife, recently married, decides to change the basic ingredient of her husband's diet, just for variety's sake. Calling out to the passing Huckster, whom we see briefly only twice from the window, the wife orders up some string beans instead of the usual limas. Upon the husband's arrival home from a day at work, the two fall into what has clearly become a pattern of domestication which, at moments, seems almost as abusive as Helmar's descriptions of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House ("good mouse," "queer little dear," etc.).  But their relationship is still fresh, and they remain in love, each kissing one another "daintily six times."

     Ready for his meal, the husband declares his hunger, as she nervously brings forth the serving bowl. His immediate disgust is quickly established, as he throws out its contents, sputtering out his anger as if he were a Shakespearian King having witnessed the downfall of his kingdom:

 

         I perspire tears and blood drops

         in a town or in the fields

         on the sea or in a balloon,

         with my pickaxe or my fiddle

         just to come home

         footsore, staring, doubled with appetite

         to a meal of —string beans?

         Where are my limas?

         .....

         You would dethrone it?

         You would play renegade?

         You'd raise an usurper

         in the person of this

         elongated, cadaverous,

         throat-scratching, greenish

         caterpillar—

 

     His victim collapses in horror, as the abuser hastily leaves the house. The comic ridiculousness of this domestic spat satirizes not only the role of any housewife who is subjected to her companion's tastes, but demolishes the notion that there can be any experimentation in this couple's relationship—culinary or sexual—making anyone who has lived with another being unable to accommodate changes in his or her life uncomfortable in the way that Henri Bergson argues comedy always does.

     With what Kreymborg describes as "housewifely shrewdness," the woman calls back the Huckster, quickly buys some lima beans, and deftly cooks them, just in time for her husband's return to apologize.

     The slightness of these themes, however, is more than made up for in the musical phrases of the quick-paced dialogue (including the stage descriptions); and, although I have never seen a production of this play, one can imagine the marvelous potentialities of the actors (or, perhaps, even puppets, with whom Kreymborg suggested it was to be cast).

      Evidently, the famed human cast, poet and artist Mina Loy, poet and doctor William Carlos Williams, and artist-designer William Zorach, easily took up the task, reading the "score" with great gusto, Loy clearly sensing the issues of the marriage theme, and Williams, according to Kreymborg, "in terror lest he blow up." Williams writes that Zorach sang his role "with zest and vehemence," looking somewhat like Harpo Marx.

     Both Loy and Williams wore costumes of their own making, Loy stunningly dressed in a green gown and one of her own hand-made broaches, which according to Kreymborg, was "not in keeping with Mrs. Lima." The curtain created by the Zorachs was dressed, apparently, as Kreymborg conceived it, "painted in festoons of vegetables," and performed admirably, coming down—since, the author admits, it cannot see and has no comprehension—in the midst of the husband's final question, which may have been an invitation to sex.

                                

Los Angeles, August 15, 2010