Jack Richardson | Gallows Humor / 1961 [reading of play]

locked up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jack Richardson Gallows Humor in Douglas Messerli and Mac Wellman, eds. From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1998)

 

With the announcement of the death of American playwright Jack Richardson on July 1, 2012, I recalled how delighted Mac Wellman and I had been to rediscover his play Gallows Humor and reprint in our 1998 drama anthology. I immediately reread the play, and enjoyed it even more this time round.

 

    Richardson's play in two parts is really a study in early 1960s martial relationships more than it is about a murderer soon to be hung. There is a murderer, indeed, Walter, locked away for beating his wife to death with a golf club—"forty-one strokes from the temple to the chin." But Walter was clearly locked-away even before his tempestuous reaction. A man of complete order, he cannot abide the prostitute sent to him by the Warden to take the prisoner's mind off the gallows and lead him to his death with a smile on his face. Walter, who has also just been served up a large chicken dinner, cannot even think of eating it, and is horrified by Lucy's carnal appetites, which includes not only bedding down with him, but consuming the chicken and tossing its bones into the center of Walter's cell.

      Walter is clearly a man of order, determined to clean and organize his cell up to the very moment of his state-determined death. It is not that he is unattracted to women, simply that he has no intention of detracting from the system that has put him into the cell and now has determined the end of his life. Walter is a number, 43556, and like Zero of Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine is thoroughly a man of the system, a man whom after the murder of his wife has clearly abandoned the dizzying world outside the prison walls and now is disturbed by "perfume and overpowered flesh" of the female with which he has been provided.  We can only suspect that self-imprisonment, being locked away in an unhappy life, is what led to his frenzied act.

      Lucy, on the other hand, has a job to accomplish, and with philosophical relish attempts to convince Walter to change his ways, to, after twenty years of living a meager existence to seek out his reward in her "mouth, fingertips, and breasts." The first part ends, obviously, with Walter's being seduced by the joys of life which he was clearly seeking in wife's murder.

     On the other hand, the Warden and Hangman are even more locked away in their lives than has been Walter. At least he has gone temporarily mad, has left the confines of normalcy. Phillip, the unhappy Hangman, is so frustrated with his life that he has, as is wife describes it, begun to do hundreds of little things—tossing ashes into his slippers, skipping club meetings, purchasing a pair of red socks—that reveal his determination to change his life or, as he puts it, his desire to "open the window and slither down the drainpipe to disappear forever."

      The morning of Walter's hanging, Phillip is determined to wear a black mask over his head, like a Medieval figure—an idea met with hardy resistance from the Warden and Martha, Phillip's. As he goes off to slip on the mask, the Warden and Martha discuss Phillip's behavior. Sympathizing with what she has had to endure, the Warden reveals his long-time love for Martha, and, eventually, she admits her love for him. The Warden also lives in an unhappy relationship, his own wife having had various sexual encounters with plumbers and other working men. The two determine to have an encounter, but hilariously cannot even find a date when they might meet, so involved are they with the society in which they live. As Phillip returns with his mask, he discovers the two kissing, and, outraged, insists he that can now leave as he long wanted desired.

      Martha off-handedly invites him to first help her with the dishes, and before he can even comprehend what he has agreed to, he perceives he is trapped, locked away in his own staid identity, unable to even open the kitchen door. When it comes time for him to attend the hanging, Lucy must pop the door open, promising him "something very special for dinner."

       At least Walter has had the courage of his convictions, while these "free" figures are more locked away in their determined patterns than Walker is in his cell. As the Prologue, performed by Death, suggests, they too will ultimately die. Walter has lived a freer life in the short time his has to remain on this earth, than the Warden, Hangman, and his wife.

       If Richardson's little masterwork seems cynical, it also represents the intense dissatisfaction with everyday existence that animated other American playwrights of the time such as Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, and Jack Gelber—precursors of the later 1960s generation that would ultimately, in only temporarily, alter definitions of freedom and love.

       Unfortunately, Gallows Humor, was to be the last of Richardson's successful plays. Two further works, Lorenzo and Xmas in Las Vegas closed on Broadway after only four performances each. Although he long served as drama critic for Commentary, the author wrote no new plays. He did help his friend Elaine Kaufman establish her East Side restaurant, Elaine's, suggesting larger tables and promising to provide writers, which he did.

 

Los Angeles, July 11, 2012

Reprinted from US Theater Review (July 2012).

 

María Irene Fornés | Fefu and Her Friends / 2019

two kinds of screams

by Douglas Messerli

 

María Irene Fornés Fefu and Her Friends / Directed by Denise Blasor at Odyssey Theatre Ensemble / the production Howard Fox and I saw was on Sunday, August 18, 2019.

 

In 1935, at the prelude of World War II, 8 women gather into the living from of their friend Fefu, ostensibly to discuss an upcoming charity event, but in fact to get in touch with one another. These are seemingly strong women, particularly the host, Fefu (the endlessly vibrant Tiffany Cole), who like Ibsen’s heroine Hedda Gabler, packs a gun—in this case a rifle, a more dangerous weapon simply because of its wider reach—along with the towering and funny Emma (Syndey. A Mason), and the powerfully smoldering former lover of Paula (Cynthia Yelle), Cecilia (Jennifer Lee Laks). Others, including Julia (Sandy Duarte), and Christina (Domonique Corona), represent more fragile figures, particularly, the wheel-chair-bound Julia, who has inexplicably been shot when a deer was killed near to where she was standing.

 

    If these are amazingly strong women, speaking their own minds in a language that is quite non-normative, they are also frightened, frustrated, and nearly immobilized not only by the patriarchal structures in which they have to live in order to survive, but also because of the horrors they’re truly unable to face: Hitler’s invasion of Europe even as they meet to discuss their good intents.

      What the marvelous playwright, María Irene Fornés, who is behind their gathering, as well as the audience’s collection into Fefu’s sprawling but well-contained house, shows us, is these remarkably clever women are as strong as weak as the society about them.

       They drink, gossip, and spout their visions, beginning with Fefu’s off-hand remark, “My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are,” challenging each other with the audacity of their honesty, but also with their open wounds, their expressions of just how difficult it is to cope in a male-dominated society that treats these witty and fearful women with contempt. Early in the play Fefu goes to the garden in order to shoot at her missing companion, Philip.

       If the vivacious curly-headed Fefu seems to be in charge, serving up heavy liquor, sandwiches, and later, coffee and tea, appears to be in charge, it is actually Emma who rules this roost, or perhaps even the apparently weak and lost sufferer Julia, who has learned how to cope, and recognizes the difference between those who scream at you and those who scream deservedly in response. Although Julia seems to be completely unable to negotiate her way through life, at one surrealist-like moment she suddenly appears to walk easily in the room in which Fefu is sitting to retrieve the sugar, no wheel-chair in sight.

       If this might, at first, appear to be a kind of realist play about the pre-World War II period, the audience must abandon its pretensions. These characters are all somewhat “figures,” a bit stereotypical, who represent different poses women had to adapt in order to survive and would become even more embraced in when the soldiers of World War II returned home. They know, quite clearly, as is played out at one moment, to see hear and speak no evil—meaning to ignore their husbands and other male’s taunts, to pretend not to see their horrible actions, and never ever to speak of them. This is a very early (1977) #MeToo statement. Whatever the male does cannot be spoken of, not so very different from the early 20th century prohibition of gay love, of which could not be spoken, an issue here only because some of these women are lesbian.

       Fornés’ amazing play not only introduces these fascinating women to you, but forces you through a trot through private rooms (after the introductory first scene, the audience is broken up into rooms who are then in different sequences, taken to other mini-rooms to hear interchanges of two and three of these women at a time—while accidently overhearing some of those same dramatic events from behind and across their transverses—and which also explains why this play is so very seldomly performed. The Odyssey Theatre, itself a warren of smaller theater spaces, is just perfect for such an event!

    Yet, it is a bit concerting to be broken away from your other audience members and taken into private chambers where you certainly know you do not belong, and in which are revealed loves and passions that you would not have otherwise imagined. But that is, of course, Fornes’ point. It is not so much an “immersive theater,” as some critics have long argued, as it becomes suddenly a theater of voyeurism, maybe even embarrassment, as some characters describe their failed relationships and lost loves. My only problem with these scenes is that they make these iconic figures over as slightly psychologically realist figures. And I don’t think that accords with Fornés’ intent. As in Jane Bowles’ perfect bewildering play 1951/1953 play In the Summer House, these figures are unworldly, not tortured beings from 1935—even if they are, indeed tortured. Although I loved Denise Blasor’s savvy and somewhat sassy direction, it could simply have been a bit more deft, with a lot more blurring of the superficial realism of Fornés’ work with the far more inexplicable perceptions that show up in Bowles’ strange drama and lay just underneath Fornes’ work.

      Just to see a new production, however, was enough to engage me. You can read it, as all drama students from 1980 on have been required to, but you do need to experience it, to get yourself up and walk through those haunted avenues of these lovely women, fearing, hating, and being forced to unnecessary subjugation.

      If you shoot off a gun in the first act, so Chekhov insisted, you need to do something with it in the last act. Fornés, who argues she never much paid attention to Chekhov, nonetheless, obeys his dictum. After finally challenging “the victim” in the wheel-chair for her fraud, Fefu takes up the rifle to shoot another deer, this time killing her friend Julia, totally inexplicably, in the process.

      One might almost argue that is the “killing of the sacred deer,” the friend she has so long protected who finally needed to be put out of his misery But it is actually Fefu’s own death she is actualizing, having lost the love of her husband, a man whom she feels is utterly necessary to define her existence. Julia may die, in the terms of the drama, but it is really the stalwart Fefu who is destroyed in the process. Men are not necessary, despite her protestations, to make a woman a full human being. Fefu, it turns out, is a being of the past, while her dear friends are blindingly pushing toward a new future.

 

Los Angeles, August 20, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (August 2019).

Maria Irene Fornes | Fefu and Her Friends / 1977 [reading of play]

a rain of summons

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maria Irene Fornes Fefu and Her Friends in Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Drasgupta, eds. Wordplays: An Anthology of New American Drama (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1980)

 

By subconscious coincidence, perhaps, I reread Fornes’ remarkable play, Fefu and Her Friends, a day after reading Overmyer’s On the Verge, and I was struck at just how similar, in some respects, is Fornes’ groundbreaking 1977 comedy and Overmyer’s later work.

      While none of the several women of Fefu treks through mountains or jungle—the eight figures of this work preferring to spend their time on the lawn of a New England house, and in its several lovely rooms, the study, the bedroom, the kitchen, and the living room—Fefu is described by Christina as having “an adventurous mind,” a woman willing to take chances, which she feels is dangerous. A rifle—whether loaded or unloaded—is the subject of discussion early in the play, and becomes a major prop by work’s end.

 

     More importantly, nearly all of these eight “friends”—whom the audience encounters in different configurations in different rooms—are intrepid survivors of violence, loss, and delusions which they can perhaps only express in one another’s company. In their world—as separated from male companionship as are the three figures in On the Verge—these various strong but often frightened survivors can speak out openly and candidly. As in Overmyer’s play, moreover, the substance of the play is not so much what they say, but in how they say it. The events of their lives which they express are all rather vague: Fefu has clearly been abused by her husband (“My husband married me to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are”); Julia has suffered a terrible psychic breakdown when a man has shot a deer near to where she was standing; Emma, who is obsessed with genitals, believes she will be punished for her obsession in the afterlife; Cecilia and Paula have evidently had an affair which ended it both of them feeling isolated and lonely and reproaching.

                                                  Original cast of "Fefu and Her Friend"

      But we only get bits and pieces of these women’s vague past. Through her groundbreaking staging, moreover, the author encourages us to see these figures in bits and pieces, as if the viewers where almost voyeurs (the audience, broken up into four groups, to visit the different rooms in events are played out one by one, the words and actions of the characters performed four times each). What matters far more, as in the Overmyer work, is not our full psychological understanding of these figures, but the originality of how they express themselves to one another. Like the intrepid voyages of On the Verge, these women become strong through the community and the language that community engages in. Emma’s call to action late it the play (words taken from the prologue to “The Science of Educational Dramatics” by the early century teacher, Emma Sheridan Fry) reads almost like a feminist manifesto, urging her students—in the play’s case, the friends—to speak up and out, to express “Where are you? Where are you?”

“Society restricts us, school straight jackets us, civilization submerges us, privation wings us, luxury feather-beds us. The Divine urge is checking. The Winged Horse balks on the road, and we, discouraged, defeated, dismount and burrow into ourselves. The gates are closed and Divine Urge is imprisoned at Center. Thus we are taken by indifference that is death.”

 

     For Emma, the environment is “a rain of summons” beating upon them day and night!

 

      Yet each of these women is in some way locked into the struggles they must endure. One talks about the pattern of a love relationship, its demise, the refusal, the acceptance, the loss. Although Fefu realizes that she has long ago lost the love of her husband, she admits to Julia that she still needs him: “I need his touch. I need his kiss. I need the person he is. I can’t give him up.” Predictably, he accuses Julia of having given up, of accepting the death of the spirit that Emma has previously described.

      At play’s end—in a scene that might again remind one of stories and plays by Djuna Barnes (in particular, “The Rabbit”)—Fefu takes up her gun and runs into the yard, shooting a rabbit. Just as Julia has been seriously affected previously by the killing of a deer, so now does a spot of blood appear on her forehead. For metaphorically speaking, she is the rabbit, a woman who cannot stand up to the violence she has suffered. Fefu—and all those like her—is dangerous in her embracement of life, for her angry response to the emptiness and hate she has had to endure.

      Despite the quiet and intensely private conversations of Fefu and Her Friends, this play is braver in its call to arms than even Overmyer’s yearning ladies.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2013

Mac Wellman | The Hyacinth Macaw / 2011

music from another world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mac Wellman The Hyacinth Macaw / performed aboard The Queen Mary ship, Long Beach, California / the performance I saw was on March 12, 2011

 

As the publisher of Mac Wellman's two volume-set of plays Crowtet and other Wellman fictions, plays, and books of poetry, I have grown so used to the praise that most often accompanies his performances and publications that I was a bit shocked by the series of quite negative reviews in the local press for the second of the Crowtet plays, The Hyacinth Macaw, performed recently by the California Repertory Company aboard the Queen Mary ship in Long Beach.

     I have always thought of The Hyacinth Macaw, along with the first of the series, A Murder of Crows, as one of Mac's best works, and I included that play in the anthology we edited together, From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995, for that very reason. I had seen A Murder of Crows at Primary Stages in New York City way back in 1992; the third play of the Crowtet quartet, Second-Hand Smoke, was performed as a reading by the Bottoms Dream group in Los Angeles in a series of readings over two years which I co-sponsored. I also saw a reading of that play in New York.

 

    Bottoms Dream presented the premiere of the final Crowtet play, The Lesser Magoo in 1997, a production which I attended. Accordingly, The Hyacinth Macaw was the only play of the series I had not seen, and I thought it a lovely idea to dine on the Queen Mary and stay overnight in the ship's hotel overnight with my companion and friends Martin Nakell and Rebecca Goodman.

     Like most of Wellman's work, highly praised over the years, The Hyacinth Macaw is filled with wonderfully irrational language along with what appear to be everyday aphorisms, parables, and commercial-like babble. The combination allows almost all of Wellman's works to straddle two fences: his characters and locale are often middle-class Midwesterners, behaving—or, at least, attempting to behave—like everyone else, while suddenly finding themselves in a tangled, bizarre series of metaphysical conundrums for which they have simply not been prepared.

     In The Hyacinth Macaw the typical American family living in Gradual, Ohio (a town with "a gym, a school, a mall, all the normal things"), comes face to face with Mr. William Hard—representative clearly of all the "hard" things they will have to face—who tells the daughter Susannah what she has always wanted to hear, she's an orphan, a "useless yanked-up thing." Presenting a letter to Dora, Susannah's mother, he reveals, moreover, that the father, Ray, is a duplicate and is doomed to leave the family forever, which seems somewhat agreeable to both husband and wife. They all are, after all, bored with the complacency of their lives, Ray revealing that years before, when he was "a kid" "I went crazy, and they hauled me off to a nut house." He tells of writing a perverted drama, "dwelling on the topic of lips and thighs." Over the years, although the urges have not abated, he has "trained" those urges with "patience, and little sweet gifts, cookies, chocolates and the like."

     Dora reveals a longing to escape as well, and in the final act leaves her home with Mad Wu who whisks her away to the nearby town of Moon Hat.

     In the final scene Susannah and William Hard, her now surrogate father, bury the sick and dying moon, clearly suffering from the world's lack of romanticism.

     In short, Wellman's play seems closely related to a mix of Albee's American Dream blended up with large doses of soap opera events coated with a thick compound of linguistic play and word wizardry which thoroughly amuses and confounds us. So what's not to like? And why describe his play, as did the reviewer, Joel Beers of the OCWeekly as "an adolescent episode of theatrical dementia," or accuse it, as Greggory Moore of Greater Long Beach, of suffering from the "imitative fallacy," a work that in talking about boredom, imitates boredom? 

     The director, James Martin, has long worked with Wellman, producing one of the best productions, Cellophane, I have ever seen, and overseeing several others, including The Lesser Magoo. Yet here, I am afraid, he has lost some of Wellman's necessarily quick pacing, and by the last scenes the play begins to lag.

     Certain scenes, such as the father's long and absurdly funny farewell, were played too much for laughs. In the script the father drinks only water, but in Martin's version, he increasingly imbibes in wine, getting drunker and drunker in the process. The problem with such a literal reading as this is not only that it takes our attention away from his words, but seems to suggest his long-winded, somewhat meaningless chatter can be explained away: he's just drunk. In truth, Ray's speech is filled with a kind pathos that is crucial to our feelings for him:

 

                          I see myself a feckless youth hardened by

                          prolonged abstinence and chilblains, aghast,

                          alone, in agony. I see myself, a young shoe-

                          salesman on the windy plains of West Gradual,

                          where the Bug River hyphenates the mighty Ohio

                          with its moxie doodle, a cipher, a tragic hipster,

                          a tramp. I encounter the notorious Mu Factor

                          in the sad, shanty towns of Shenango and deem

                          myself wise with the leer of unholy knowingness.

 

     As in Allen Ginsberg's Howl, there is a sort of self-centered, self-loathing poetry in Ray's speech, a kind of poetic richness that transcends his ordinariness. Wellman's works are filled with these kinds of poetic moments, when despite their drab lives, the characters speak out momentarily in a dream of wonderment. Dora gets her turn in the next scene with her daughter:

 

                           The time comes when you hear the music

                           from another world. You know the

                           music is from another world because

                           it is so sad and strange you feel

                           as if you awakened from a dream,

                           flung your fists out in a nightfever

                           and caught a living sparrow in your

                           hand. Only, the bird sings a piercing

                           wildnote threnody that drives you

                           unwilling straight to the center of

                           things.

 

    Actress Lysa Fox in the production on the Queen Mary played this scene nearly perfectly by performing it straight as if she were saying the most ordinary thing she might say day after day. Some of the others in this production simply acted too much, which can kill a Wellman play before it can puff up to its full poetic confection. Or perhaps I should say, they tried too hard. Like Mad Wu's song in the penultimate scene—

                                      

                             I sleep in the woods

                                 all day, all night;

                             If I don't finish this song

                                  There's no one around

                             To tell me I'm wrong;

                                  or, worse, that I'm right.

 

—there must always be a sort of casual insanity about what is spoken in The Hyacinth Macaw. If the actors take the lines too seriously, they destroy both the poetry and the fun.

     I don't think that explains the hostility of the local critics, but it does account for their lack of comprehension. It's not that Wellman's plays are so difficult. They just have to be buoyantly performed in order to succeed—a hard thing to do in a country where acting is still somewhat attached to method. For there is no method to Wellman's sad and joyous madness.

 

Los Angeles, March 18, 2011

Reprinted from US Theater, Opera, and Performance (March 2011). 

Michel Seuphor (with sets by Piet Mondrian) | The Ephemeral Is Eternal / 1982

complexity out of simplicity

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michel Seuphor The Ephemeral Is Eternal, adapted by Donn B. Murphy and Judith Zilczer, sets by Piet Mondrian / performed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., June 25-27, 1982

 

With sets by Piet Mondrian and a script by Mondrian biographer Michel Seuphor, the first American production of The Ephemeral Is Eternal, billed as a "Dada play," could not help but intrigue museum-goers and devotees of drama alike. In the context of the De Stijl show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, this production inherently raised the question why Mondrian, the genius of order, harmony, and color, the artist who declared himself as dedicated to communicating "the imminent order of nature," would have agreed to participate in an event connected with the Dadaists, who by 1926, the year in which this play was written, had long since established an international reputation for their embracement of the accidental and the absurd. How one answers that question and what this production reveals concerning Mondrian's attitudes towards Dadaism depend, I suggest, on how much one is able to separate text from context, critical perspective from expectation.

     For in many respects the play shares the Dadaist love of illogic and its relish of the gestures of shouting, screaming, and babbling. A conductor, dressed in white tails, undershorts, and bowler hat, leads his chosen chorus in groans and songs of gibberish; an actress, attended by Turkish and Japanese peddlers, soliloquizes nonsense in the style of Sarah Bernhardt; three robotized Black dancers glissade across the stage; and throughout, the play is filled with self-referential commentary, statements directed to the audience, and irrelevant intrusions that one has come to associate with Dadaist theater and its influence upon and assimilation into postmodern performance art. As with much of the most interesting of contemporary performance, The Ephemeral Is Eternal seems to be less a play—a dramatic statement frozen within dialogic plot—than it is a theater of process, an event occurring in real time and space.

     Yet, for all this, there is a certain tension at work in these "theatrical demonstrations"—as the subtitle describes the piece—that pulls one away from experiencing it as such. For all of its sense of happenstance, its seemingly clever inanities, and its automatic word associations, there is a stiltedness about the free-for-all that works against spontaneity, against accident and chance. There is always a tendency to dismiss such feelings by historicizing the work, by imagining that it was more shocking, more revelatory, more... whatever in its day than it is in our self-conscious and overly-literate age. Such historiographic apologies are generally dangerous, but in this case such a notion not only reveals a cultural myopia, but obscures the focus of the play. In its opposition between what it seems and what it is, The Ephemeral Is Eternal, I argue, is not only a fascinating work, but actually is a formalist, anti-Dadaist work of art.

     The play begins, in fact, with a metaphor that suggests the play will be a dialectic between the two: a woman enters from stage left and draws in pantomine a series of rounded figures—a circle, an ellipse, a disk; a male figure follows her, erasing her figures and replacing them with angular ones—a rectangle, a triangle, a square. Momentarily, these acts may appear as mere Dadaist gestures; but one soon perceives that for Seuphor the erasure has served less as a meaningless game between the old art and the new, between the irrational and the rational, between the ideal and the concrete—all polarities which in Seuphor's days were summed up in the female/male dichotomy. Later, during the soliloquy of a melodramatic actress, an offstage voice shouts: "No women on stage"; and soon thereafter the actress, dressed in green (a color detested by the members of De Stijl), is banned from the play. Throughout this piece, in fact, the sentimental, the mystical, the circle, the feminine, all, are opposed to the tree, the horizon, the straight line, the male, the art of Mondrian.

 

     For Seuphor, I suggest, this was less a sexist statement than it was a comment on the societal linkage of art to the feminine mystique. Like the De Stijl artists, the Futurists (Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis), and dozens of other visual and literary artists of the day, Seuphor clearly felt that society had connected art for too long with prettiness, sublimity, gentility—to all those things by which it defined woman. It was not woman Seuphor hated, but society's notion of art as it related to its sexual stereotypes. What he and others desired was tougher art, a sparer, leaner notion of the creative act, an artistic sensibility expressed in his play by a vaudeville-like ballet between two males, dressed black and white. With only a handkerchief for a prop, these two enact various human emotions—joy, frivolity, sexual arousal, anger, hate, pain, and forgiveness—by transforming the cloth into various shapes and patterns. It is this ability to shape and reshape nature with a single motif, with one simple focus, one realizes, that is at the heart of Mondrian's art and his sets for the play. And it is that complexity out of simplicity, it becomes clear, for which Seuphor is arguing.

     The Dadaist humor, the echolalia, pratfalls, and buffoonery are merely tools to point up the clarity and completeness of formal abstraction. Ultimately, The Ephemeral Is Eternal stands as a sort of formalist manifesto in Dadaist drag, a manifesto that uses a rival in an attempt to destroy an absolute enemy. To blow up the old art—the production ends with the detonation of a model of the theater itself—it uses the shock-value, the absurdity of Dadaism; but underneath lies a plea for order, for harmony, for an art that stands against the ephemeral in its eternality. Mondrian, one can surmise, comprehended that in participating in this Dada-like spectacle he was remaining true to his cause.

 

Washington, D.C., June 29, 1982

Reprinted from Washington Review, VIII (October-November 1982).

Reprinted from Green Integer Review (May 2009).