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).

 

Tennessee Williams | A Streetcar Named Desire / 1947 [reading of play]

independent dependents

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: New Directions, 1947)

 

The death on September 11th, 2002 of actress Kim Hunter sent me back to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, in which Hunter played Stanley Kowalski's wife Stella in both the 1947 stage production and Elian Kazan's film of 1951.

      Although I have seen the film numerous times, and watched it again last week, I have never seen a staging of the work. I was only six months and a few days old at the time of its original production, and, although I am sure the play is popular with some college and repertory theater groups, the intense acting required from its two major figures, Stanley and Blanche, make it a very difficult play to revive, although Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange were fairly well received in the 1992 Broadway production, which I also missed.

      Accordingly, I have spent the past three nights rereading the play, which allowed me some new perceptions about this work.

      Because of the stunning acting of both Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando in the film version, it has always appeared to me that their characters are at the center of this work, and the very acting styles they embody—Leigh's highly theatrical performance and Brando's influenced strongly by the Actor's Studio method acting—created a high tension that drove the work into its near manic expressions of cultural extremes, one of Williams' major subjects.

     This time, however, after watching both the film and reading the text, I realized—much as I did for O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night in My Year 2004—that the actual fulcrum of the work was an apparently weaker figure, in this case Stella.

     Although all of the characters in this play must function in an ensemble manner, their radical differences in acting styles, language, and personalities is what the work is about. Indeed, one might almost argue that each of the three major figures living in the Kowalski hovel have an act devoted to them: Stella is the dominant figure of Act 1, Blanche of Act 2, and Stanley of Act 3. In Act 1, Stella is the first figure we see in the play, and draws both Blanche and Stanley to her throughout.

     Williams' stage directions make quite clear that Blanche is the center of Act 2:

 

            Some weeks later. The scene is a point of balance between the plays two sections,

            blanche's coming and the events leading up to her violent departure. The im-

            portant values are the ones that characterize blanche: its function is to give

            her dimension as a character and to suggest the intense inner life which makes            

           her a person of greater magnitude than she appears on the surface.

 

    The rape and its aftermath ends in Blanche's fall and departure. In Act 3 Stella is simply compelled to accept Stanley's version of reality, and he and his poker-playing friends are quite clearly in charge, as he returns to being the rightful "king" of his "domain."

    In short, Williams attempted to give equal weight to all three characters. Yet, Stanley and Blanche stand out, primarily because they are both such absurd figures. At times Blanche seems to be performing more in the manner of the mad scene in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermor than in an American-conceived stage drama, yet she is often quite capable at punching back at Stanley with realist-like quips. For example, she comments to Stanley upon meeting him:

 

              You're simple, straightforward and honest, a bit on the primitive side,

              I should think.

 

And throughout the play she devastatingly puts Stanley in his place, as when she hands over the papers detailing the loss of her and her sister's home, Belle Reve:

 

             There are thousands of papers stretching back over hundreds of years

             affecting Belle Reve, as piece by piece our improvident grandfathers

             and father and uncles and brothers exchanged the land for their epic

             fornications—to put it plainly. The four-letter word deprives us of our

             plantation, till finally all that was left, and Stella can verify that, (Moves

             to him, carrying papers) was the house itself and about twenty acres of

             ground, including a graveyard to which now all but Stella and I have

             retreated. (Pulling papers out of envelope, dumping them into his hands on

             table. Holds empty envelope.) Here they all are, all papers! I hereby endow

             you with them! Take them, peruse them—commit them to memory, even!

             I think its wonderfully fitting that Belle Reve should finally be this

             bunch of old papers in your big, capable hands.

 

      For the most part, however, Blanche is not as realistically combative or even insanely abstracted as she is simply witty. Like a campy gay man of the old school dressed in drag (is it any wonder that she demands the lights are left low?), Blanche is a ridiculously humorous figure, and I think we have to admit that ridiculousness, accepting the comic elements of the entire play, if we want to understand Williams' characters. Even simply addressing her sister, Blanche is a "hoot" who would be at home in any gay bar of an earlier generation:

 

              Stella, oh Stella, Stella! Stella for Star! ...But don't you look at me,

              Stella, no, no, no, not till later, not till I've bathed and rested! And

              turn that over-light off! I won't be looked at in this merciless glare!

 

      Along with dozens of such lines ("Never, never, never in my worst dreams could I picture—

Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe—could do justice!," "The blind are leading the blind," and her renowned last line, "Whoever you are—I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers"), Blanche's dialogue belongs more to the world of melodrama and camp epics peopled with the likes of Lana Turner and Charles Ludlam than the world of a former beauty from the South. Williams points this up even more dramatically by portraying her husband—a nervous, soft, tender boy—as having been gay (which in the film is almost erased) and revealing that, although she poses as a virginal beauty, Blanche is well known back in her home community of Laurel, Mississippi for her sexual excesses, including bedding down with one of her own 17-year-old students. If Jessica Tandy or Vivien Leigh hadn't so brilliantly defined the role of Blanche, Ludlam might later have been an appropriate choice.

     While Brando may seem, at times, to be performing a role from the realist school of Clifford Odets, Williams gives Stanley lines that catapult him into a kind of loony soap-opera or a vaudevillian production of Tobacco Road. Stanley's hilarious fascination with the idea of the Napoleonic Code, his famous deconstruction of Blanche's clothes trunk ("Look at these feathers and furs that she comes here to preen herself in! What's this here? A solid gold dress I believe! And this one. What is these here? Fox pieces! Genuine fox fur pieces half a mile long! Where are your fox-pieces Stella? Bushy snow white ones, no less! Where are your white fox-pieces?"), and his macho-laden outburst against his sister-in-law and wife ("That's how I'll clear the table [he has swept the plates and food to the floor] Don't ever talk that way to me. 'Pig—Polack—disgusting—vulgar—greasy!' Them kind of words have been on your tongue and your sister's too much around here. What do you think you two are? A pair of queens? Remember what Huey Long said—'Every man is a King!'—And I am king around here, so don't you forget it!") all point away from a realist construction. Like Blanche, no matter how Brando might believe he's portraying a kind of reality, Stanley is an absurd stereotype born in theatrical fantasy rather than New Orleans' Elysian Fields.

 

    How then does Williams "get away with it," so to speak? Why do we truly care about and become moved by these larger-than-life figures. For unlike Rhett Butler of Leigh's Gone with the Wind, we are compelled in Williams' drama "to give a damn."

      In part, of course, it is the remarkable acting. I never saw Tandy play the original Broadway role—although I've seen her in other roles, and I am certain she was splendid—but Leigh is quite simply a genius given the slightly confused mix of poetic fragility, wonderment, and sexual distractedness through which she realizes Blanche. Brando may talk, at times, like an illiterate beast, but his sexuality is evident in every smirk of his lips and swing of hips. And despite his masculinity, which can even be scented over the smell of lit-up celluloid, there is something almost feminine about everything below his waist.

    Increasingly, however, I have come to see that Stella is most important in bringing the play and its characters any credibility. If A Streetcar Named Desire has any realist potential, it lies in her character, who, although constantly abused by both husband and sister, quietly loves while attempting to disabuse them of their fantasies. She is truly the star brought to earth, a figure fecund in her ability to love and nurture. And the power of Stella, who time after time refuses to enter into the gushing anger and self-hatred of Williams' comic types, keeps silent or leaves the room or house, demonstrating a strength that helps us to recognize that there is an underlying reality, a secret humanity to both Stanley and Blanche.

    For the dueling couple, appearing as rivaling individuals of astounding independence, are one and the same thing, exaggerated portraits of the extremes of society. And in that sense they are also dependent on each other as types. Both Stanley and Blanche are naturally sexual beings who live in imaginary worlds where they drink, gamble, and incessantly bathe their bodies—he in sweat and beer, she in scalding water—requiring them to endlessly undress and dress. Both seem defined by but also estranged from their cultural and social identities. As Stanley remarks as he is about to sexually attack: "We've had this date with each other from the beginning."

    Stella is a steady force of balance between these two, and her child, we can hope, will incorporate the imagination and animal sexuality that lie in both Stella's sister and husband.

    Unlike Kazan's film, where, upon her horrific realization that Blanche is now insane, Stella turns on Stanley, rushing up the neighbor's staircase to escape her bestial lover (a second—and I have always felt a permanent—ascension of the star to its natural habitat), in the script, Stella stays in the arms of her husband below, while he, for one of the few times in the drama, attempts to comfort her:

 

                 Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love. Now, now love. Now, love....

 

     In that gentle reiteration of the present, we realize that Stanley has perhaps changed ever so slightly. The past is over, a new world possible, a world determined by love. 

 

 

Los Angeles, April 9, 2009

Revised, April 10, 2009

Joey Arias | Billie Holiday Centennial Concert / 2015

strange fruit

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joey Arias Billie Holiday Centennial Concert / Los Angeles, Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) at Disney Hall / the performance I saw was on November 19, 2015

 

After the lavish Basil Twist-influenced extravaganza, Arias with a Twist, which I saw at Redcat in 2009, almost seven years ago to the very day (see My Year 2010), I was delighted to be able to catch a performance of the famous drag artist “channeling”—as the critics have described it—the great jazz singer Billie Holiday.

      I never saw Billie Holiday perform, but listening to her songs on recordings I find Arias’ musical interpretations a bit spooky in their faithfulness. But then, as admirers of the black singer have long observed, Holiday herself appeared often as an artist who channeled other singing legends in her work; even in Arias’ renditions one can hear moments of the raw energy of Bessie Smith, the sexual shadings of Eartha Kitt, the scat jubilations of Ella Fitzgerald, and even, upon rare occasion, the carefully enunciated announcements of spiritual joy that reminds one of Ethel Waters. 

     That all of these sounds come out of the mouth of a 66 year-old gay man dressed in a slinky dark purple gown who’s pinned a large camellia to his hairdo is truly “incredible”—made credible perhaps by the fact that before our very eyes Arias constantly slips in and out of his persona, allowing us to magically watch him, moment to moment, drape himself in the character and voice of Holiday, while enjoying and even teasing us about our wonderment for his transformations. Unlike so many “drag queens” who spend their time attempting to “imitate” their beloved goddesses, Arias enjoys teasing, challenging, and even slightly mocking his heroine, while still lovingly representing her art.

      We can never be sure that in his constant intake of wine throughout his performance, it is Arias who needs the alcoholic uplift or the subject he is portraying; are his high soprano rifts a kind of mockery of the original or a true representation of Holiday’s girlish high spirits; are the performer’s several descents into pure gibberish a product of the alcohol or a tribute to Holiday’s own inexpressible comments of suffering and hurt. Certainly, we perceive in a work such as “Strange Fruit” that the guttural explosions of words such as “blood,” “crop,” and “flesh” emanate from deep horror and pain. “You’ve Changed” is filled with barks of sorrow and disappointment.

 

     Do Arias’ obviously bawdy plays to his large gay audiences leave his “character” momentarily in frieze, or might Holiday herself have gone there to entertain true admirers such as Frank O’Hara. But that is just where Arias is so gifted: in his ability to remain Joey Arias while simultaneously convincingly belting out Holiday favorites such as “God Bless the Child,” “Easy Living,” “All of Me,” “Lady Sings the Blues,” and, in encore, the amazing “Violets for Your Fur,” all so wonderfully accompanied by the quintet of Matt Ray (on piano), David Pitch (acoustic bass), Robert Perkins (on drums), Maiani da Silva (violin), and Isaiah Gage (cello).

      Only a consummate performer like Arias can get away with performing someone who is so beloved and reverently treated by performers like Audra McDonald, who in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, credibly recreated the last days of the jazz singer. While McDonald, a great singer in her own right, totally immerses herself in the icon, we readily forgive Arias’ audacious transgressions because—while nonetheless convincing us of his musical and theatrical convictions in performing Holiday—he doesn’t let us lose sight for a moment of the wonderment of his gay-male transfiguration. McDonald’s performance is simply another kind of realism, while Arias’ is what theater is truly about. Oscar Wilde would surely have applauded Arias’ performance as wildly as did the audience at Redcat on opening night. Arias shows us a reality that isn’t for a moment entirely believable, but takes us closer to the truth for all that.

 

Los Angeles, November 20, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2015).

Jane Bowles | In the Summer House / 1953 [reading of play]

the necessary remedy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jane Bowles In the Summer House (New York: Random House, 1954)

 

It was the year of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, the year that saw the first color television set, the great flood in the North Sea and “great” tornadoes in Michigan (the storms killing more than 200 people). The Platters and The Four Tops began their musical careers. The year saw the deaths of two great theater legends, Eugene O’Neill and Lee Shubert (one of the three legendary Shubert brothers).  Broadway saw productions of Tennessee Williams’ Camino Real, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town. I was six years of age. Despite all these facts and my long-standing conviction that the 1950s is today a highly misunderstood decade—more sophisticated than we imagine it today—I am still trying to comprehend what it must have been like to encounter Jane Bowles’ play that year of 1953, which ran for only 55 performances on Broadway.

 

    The play actually had a history that went back to the late 1940s. Bowles’ friend Oliver Smith evidently had been trying to convince Jane to write a play for several years, and in 1946 and 1947, in Vermont and Paris, she wrote much of the play, the first act of which was published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1947. In 1951 the play was performed at the Hedgerow Theater in Moylan, Pennsylvania, with Miriam Hopkins in the lead. Just before the Broadway production, Jane’s husband Paul came from Morocco to New York and wrote music for the work, seeing it through rehearsals and production.

     How could actors and audiences of that time be prepared for such a work? Bowles’ writing is so original that it is hard to compare it with any other writer of the day—or perhaps even now. The expressionist and fantastic aspects of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire might be described as the work closest in tone to Bowles’ play. Williams, in fact, was a close friend of Jane’s. Bowles’ work, however, is far more comically surreal than even the “campiest” of Blanche’s observations in Williams’s 1947 production.

     If Paul Bowles is to be believed, it is clear that the lead actor of the play, the great Judith Anderson, did not know what to make of the character. “Who am I? Who am I supposed to be?” she often asked in her frustrated interruptions of rehearsals. Evidently even the onstage psychoanalyst could not answer her. No one seemed to understand what the play was about.

    Bowles herself clearly wanted actors that could play their roles in the grand manner of highly theatrical performance. She hand-selected both Judith Anderson for the role of Mrs. Eastman Cuevas and the divine Mildred Dunnock for Mrs. Constable. A young actor named James Dean was rejected for the lesser role of Lionel because he was too “normal.”

     For Bowles narrative does not function in a traditional manner. There is no straightforward “plot” to this play, nor any of the tightly knit interconnecting patterns of scenes and acts that make up most so-called Broadway plays. Indeed the set changes in every scene of Act One—as it moves from a garden in Southern California to the beach and back to the garden—and Act Two, which occurs in the nearby popular restaurant. The characters shift focus throughout, as the major figure of Act I disappears—along with numerous other characters, including husband, sister-in-law, her daughter, and servants—from the very center of the play. Casual figures such as Lionel, whom we first encounter carrying an advertising placard displaying Neptune, become central characters. A young girl who appears briefly in two scenes (becoming a victim of either accident or murder) is “replaced” by her mother, who ultimately becomes perhaps the central figure in the play. A restaurant worker—Jean Stapleton in the original production—is later introduced, becoming an important voice of the second act. In short, the play moves forward through a near structureless series of “surprises,” twists, and turns in characters, plot, and meaning.

       It is the emotional states of its figures that drive this work forward—and, at times, backward. Act One establishes the central character’s role and symbolic position immediately as Gertrude Eastman Cuevas stands upon the balcony of her beach home calling to her daughter below : “Are you in the summer house?....Are you in the summer house?” wherein her daughter indeed has sequestered herself. Although she is front and center in the scene, Mrs. Eastman Cuevas is equally removed from all, even from the man whom she admits she may marry, Mr. Solares, who soon enters with sister, her daughter, and servants in tow. The comical picnic that follows—with Solares and family in the garden, Gertrude on the balcony, and Molly hidden away—sets the tone of the entire work: absurdity, imperiousness, humility, and complete acceptance of all of these are its matter.

    Solares, the courtier of the haughty Mrs. Eastman Cuevas, politely attempts to present the strange scene as one of normality, while his sister, Esperanza, crudely pokes holes in the pretense of both. When Mrs. Eastman Cuevas expresses her love of the ocean, Esperanza declares that she “hates it.” When Gertrude (believing her first husband was not sufficiently interested in his job) asks Solares if he likes his work, Esperanza interrupts: “He don’t like no business—he likes to stay home and sleep—and eat.” Later, upon Gertrude’s disapproval of such a heavy meal in the middle of the day, the overweight Esperanza quickly catalogues the heavy breakfasts and lunches she and her family consume: “For breakfast: chocolate and sugar bread: for lunch: soup, beans, eggs, rice, roast pork with potatoes and guava paste…Next day: soup, eggs, beans, rice, chicken with rice and guava paste—other day: soup, eggs, beans, rice, stewed meat, roasted baby pig and guava paste. Other day: soup, rice, beans, grilled red snapper, roasted goat meat and guava paste.” So much for normality!

     Enter Lionel and friends bearing placards of Neptune and a mermaid to advertise the local restaurant, The Lobster Bowl. Molly, called out of her hideaway to give them water, is delighted by the marvel of their costumes, and Lionel, clearly attracted to her, gives her a little plastic lobster as a gift. As if the stage were not filled enough as it was with its strange assortment of characters, Gertrude’s new lodger, Vivian, suddenly appears. She is as enthusiastic and excitable as Esperanza has been sarcastically honest. As quickly as she is whisked away into the house, her mother, Mrs. Constable, appears, worried about her overwrought daughter’s mental health.

     In short, within a single scene Bowles has spilled 14 characters onto the stage—all but one in the play—expressing their various emotional states as if midway through a grand opera. And, in this sense, no further scenes can quite compare with the play’s first. The rest of the work, scene by scene, explores the various relations between these bigger-than-life figures.

    Scene two presents Molly one month later, temporarily out of hiding, as she encounters the vivacious and avaricious Vivian skillfully attempting to take her place in the hearts of both Gertrude and Lionel. The scene ends with Gertrude, Solares and his extended family, and Mrs. Constable in search of her beloved “bird.” The audience can only suspect what—through her slightly hysterical interrogations of her daughter—Gertrude clearly also suspects, that Molly has pushed Vivian over the cliff.

     Scene three, one month later, presents the aftermath (celebration is an incorrect word) of the double weddings of Gertrude and her daughter. As the women each prepare to leave their homes and face separation, with neither one seeming to perceive any future with her new husband, the dramatic attention shifts to the drunken Mrs. Constable, who, with her daughter’s death and no other purpose in life, has stayed on in the beach community. The interchange between these strong women, where Mrs. Constable expresses her preference for the sharp-tongued truth-teller Mrs. Lopez over the imposing bitch-liar she perceives in Mrs. Eastman Cuevas, presents a stunning encounter between a being who struggles to keep in control and another who has freed herself from nearly all constraints. It is as comical as it is shocking.

    Act II, made up of two scenes, is nearly emptied of the first act’s dramatic force. The Lobster Bowl, where Lionel works, has become merely another “summer house” for Molly, as she passes the time with card games and reading and rereading her mother’s letters from Mexico. The witty interchanges between Inez, waitress in the restaurant, and Mrs. Constable are what saves these dark and dreary scenes from bringing the play to a near standstill. Yet, the play does begin to unwind, and Lionel, recognizing the need for change, suddenly becomes courageous enough to demand that he and Molly move away to St. Louis, where his brother is involved in selling barbecues. The hilarious irony of his shift from boiler to barbie is almost lost in the darkly comic, but often wise, discussions between Mrs. Constable and Molly, and the older woman’s attempts to convince her to follow Lionel, to escape the dark confines of her life.

     Molly, however, has word that her mother is returning, and she awaits her arrival with joy and consternation. Her mother’s entry and her declarations of the horrible (and to the viewer/reader, hilarious) life with the family in Mexico merely point up her selfishness. She is happy nowhere, neither on the balcony of the vine-covered beach house nor the highly peopled rooms of her husband’s abode. Now nearly powerless, she must again find someone she can control. But just as the view of the garden was altered with her mother’s departure, so does her mother now seem changed in Molly’s perception. As her mother desperately tries to rein in her daughter by telling Mrs. Constable that Molly killed Vivian (which, interestingly enough, Mrs. Constable denies), Molly suddenly recognizes that she must escape, that she must leave with Lionel. Mrs. Eastman Cuevas, like Mrs. Constable, is left without a purpose, almost a child again herself, recalling some horrible unnamed event that we suspect was probably centered around an attempt to gain love.

     Without wishing to sound as if I have undergone too many viewings of The Wizard of Oz (a movie, I admit, I saw again quite recently), I might suggest that Bowles’s characters could be compared with the three friends of Dorothy in search of a heart (Mrs. Eastman-Cuevas), a brain (Mrs. Constable), and courage (Lionel) in order to save the young heroine from the mistakes of their lives. The poignant conversation between Mrs. Constable and Molly near the end of the play point up the problems of nearly everyone involved in Bowles’ fantastical journey.

     Warned in her mother’s letters not to dream, Molly is nearly ready to give up her life and submit again to her mother’s control. “Why shouldn’t you dream?” asks Mrs. Constable (I can hear Mildred Dunnock’s voice in the very question). “I used to waste a lot of time day-dreaming,” answers Molly. “Why shouldn’t you dream? Why didn’t she want you to?” Mrs. Constable persists. “Because she wanted me to grow up to be wonderful and strong like she is,” responds the young girl. Mrs. Constable and we, the audience, know that her mother—having abandoned all dreams—is neither wonderful nor strong. Like Vivian at the cliff, the balcony is merely a height from which one can easily fall. And so too is the ephemeral surf Mrs. Constable prefers—the foam on her face that makes her believe, momentarily, that life is beginning once more—insufficient to help one go on living. The needs of the heart and mind alone are never enough. One must have the courage to act. As Lionel puts it, the longer one puts off acting the harder it is to do so. “Suppose I kept on closing that door against the ocean every night because the ocean made me sad and then one night I went to open it and I couldn’t even find the door. Suppose I couldn’t tell it apart from the wall any more. Then it would be too late and we’d be shut in here forever once and for all.” Jane Bowles describes the necessary remedy simply as a stage direction: Molly’s flight is sudden.

    

Los Angeles, July 14, 2005