Peter Quilter | End of the Rainbow / 2013

an incautious overdose of life

by Douglas Messerli

Peter Quilter (author, with music once performed by Judy Garland) End of the Rainbow / Los Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre / I performance I attended was a matinee on March 30, 2013

 

Peter Quilter’s play about the last months of Judy Garland’s life—as the beloved and decaying performer made a final singing engagement at London’s Talk of Town, accompanied by her fifth husband, former band leader and club manager, Mickey Deans (Erik Heger)—is little more than a series of documented and rumored events strung together with witty bon mots, mostly centered on Garland’s alcoholic and drug addicted condition: “It’s all about gravity. My chin and tits are in a race to my knees.” Other than Garland, perhaps the central figure might be said to be her piano player, the Scottish born Anthony (an excellent Michael Cumpsty), who as a gay man begins the play with an self-conscious contempt for the aging star (although she was only 47 at the time of her death), with whom he had previously shared a disastrous performance in Australia (“It was a blood bath”), but whom increasingly comes to feel for the terrified woman, who in Mickey Deans has again chosen the wrong man to love. Anthony ends his time with her by proposing an asexual marriage in an attempt to take her away from the circus of her life, although he seems shocked by her question of whether or not they might share a bed. Garland, this play asserts, was distinctly a sexual being.

     To give him credit, Deans begins the play with a strong attempt to make over her life, managing it the best he can (the couple have hardly any money left) while forbidding her drugs (checking in every possible cranny in which might have hidden them) and denying her alcohol. But gradually it is apparent that in order to literally get her on stage, he must return to the regimen of the studio heads of her early youth: “amphetamines to pep her up and barbiturates to make her sleep.” Behind her fiancée’s back, Garland acquires retinol and escapes, after once performance, into a drunken night on the town. There is obviously no controlling—as Garland herself makes clear—someone sick of being put on display and determined to end her life. A few months after the end of her 1968 engagement, on June 22, 1969, she was found dead in a rented London home, the victim of, as the British doctor understatedly described it, “an incautious self-overdose.”

 

    Except for a scene in a BBC studio where Garland answers questions in an outrageous manner and cannot even remember some of the questions she’s asked, most of this sometimes fascinating, but at heart rather repetitive drama takes place in a palatial room (which Garland represents it as being small as a tomb) of the Ritz Hotel.

      But then this small documentary-like retelling has something else going for it: Tracie Bennett. As an uncanny like Garland stand-in, Bennett is quite literally an engine of motion, twisting her lithe, small-body into so many positions that, at times, one might almost think that instead of being flesh-and-bones Bennett, like Gumby, is all rubber. Whether jumping upon the room’s grand piano, suffering in pain on its couch, or crawling upon the floor in supplicant pleading for everything that has been kept from her, the actor is in near constant motion. In one scene, after grabbing a bottle pills—and quickly swallowing a couple—intended for Anthony’s pet dog to cure its mange, Bennett performs as a dog, on all fours, comically barking and lifting her leg high in the air in mock-peeing upon her “captors.” With all this almost frenetic action, it is amazing that the actor can stay in character, let alone continually convince us, as she does, that she is Judy Garland. Unlike many drag queens, however, Bennett does not so much try to sound like Garland—although I’d swear at times she’s channeling the diva’s voice—but convincingly moves the way Garland might. Even at the most neurotically pitched number of the evening (“I’m Gonna Love You, Come Rain or Come Shine”) the actor seems less intent upon capturing Garland’s exaggerations, than she is in expressing the tensions of the singer’s inner demons and outer attempts to please her audience. It is, as she puts it, all in the acting rather than in the imitation. I have read that Garland, like Bennett, a small person, would stand behind the curtain before going on looking like a timid rabbit terrified at what she was about to attempt. Then suddenly she would take deep breaths, puffing herself up so that she suddenly looked taller and absolutely powerful as she entered the stage. So too does Bennett accomplish something similar, belting out a chorus just when you would have thought she had, in the previous moment, emotionally spent herself.

  

     As the play, often quite cleverly, transitions from the hotel room to her performances at the Talk of the Town nightclub, where Bennett belts out Garland favorites in a strong voice that is so dead-close to Garland—or at least similar to Garland’s own best imitator, her daughter Liza Minnelli—the audience was absolutely stunned. Through the clever machinations of these scenes, the audience’s spontaneous and often rapturous applause simulated the audience applause of the original performances. Bennett’s Garland, like the singer herself, may not quite be up to Judy Garland’s Carnegie Hall achievement, but they come damned close. While we obviously know Tracie Bennett is not Judy Garland, the actor, as if by magic, truly convinces us that she is a simulacrum—in that word’s primary meaning, “an image”—of the real thing. There is perhaps no better example of what literary critics have long described as readers and audiences “willing suspension of disbelief.”

       Yet even if Bennett’s rendition of Garland weren’t so “dead on,” her performance would still be a kind of miracle. If you think of her hotel room movements as a sort of kinetic dance, put alongside her great vocal outcries (Bennett declares that she cannot really sing), one might say that this actor is one of the best musical performers alive. After the show, my companion Howard and I tried to remember all the numerous live-theatre moments in which we had witnessed what he might describe as true greatness: I won’t list all of those, but they included the couple of times we’d seen Barbara Cook live, Faith Prince in the revival of Guys and Dolls, Elaine Stritch in her one-woman show At Liberty, Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd, John Hurt in Krapp’s Last Tape…several others, all performances you knew you’d never forget until stricken with dementia or Alzheimers. We agreed that we would have to add Tracie Bennett in End of the Rainbow to our somewhat meaningless compilation.

 

Los Angeles, Easter 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2013).

Edward Albee | The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? / 2014

getting martin’s goat

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Albee The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? / the production I saw was at the Davidson/Valentini Theater of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, on Sunday, October 12, 2014

 

Martin (Paul Witten) and his wife Stevie (Ann Noble), along with their son Billy (Spencer Morrissey) live in a well-appointed apartment in what is clearly a urban (Manhattan or Chicago) setting—in the original Broadway production, their abode was a wealthy suburban retreat, with high vaulted ceilings, an impossible requirement for the tiny stage of Los Angeles’ LGBT Davidson/Valentini Theater—a family one might describe as among the socially and culturally elite. Although they live in casual comfort, the very décor of their cozy living-room bespeaks good taste, as do their clothes and, surely, the bedrooms apparently a level above the public space. Indeed, Martin, a successful architect who has just won the prestigious Pritzker Prize—which his friend, Ross (Matt Kirkwood) describes as the “Nobel” of architectural awards)—has also just been chosen to design a multi-billion-dollar city of the future somewhere in the “wilds of the Midwest.” Their life, it is gradually revealed throughout this play has been near perfect, the couple very much still in love with one another, the couple together representing open-minded, gifted beings endowed with witty intelligence and a well-adjusted son, who declares he is gay, a sexual decision they readily accept—at least outwardly; Albee later hints at some residual reservations in Martin’s thinking.

    As Billy himself later reiterates, he has been well educated in one of the best of schools that money can buy, and is blessed by nearly ideal parents. In short, they are kind of family one encounters throughout the correct-thinking contemporary Manhattan yuppies and now millennials—as well in the wealthy suburbias of Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and Los Angeles—self-satisfied, if artfully modest members of the cultural elite, at home in their empire of the gods.

      In the domestic banter of the play’s first few moments, indeed, the audience might almost imagine that they have accidently wandered into a play, as The New York Times Ben Brantley suggested in his 2002 review, written by one of the most beloved playwrights of these ruling class member’s parents, Neil Simon. But we also immediately sense something is amiss, as if the jokes are there but the actors keep missing their lines. In fact, Martin not only seems absent-minded, but is fearful that he is developing Azheimer’s Disease. About to meet with his old friend, Ross, for an interview celebrating Martin’s 50th birthday and his two recent achievements, he cannot remember, for example, the name of Ross’s grown son. He enters the room but forgets for what he has been searching. Stevie jokingly reassures him, but soon their “banter” gradually is transformed into a kind of comic inspired sketch about sexual infidelity, ending with Martin’s unexpected and somewhat inappropriate quip that he is seeing someone named Sylvia and that she is a goat. If the audience laughs at Stevie’s comeback—“I’ll stop at the feed store on the way home”—it is an uneasy twitter, since by the very title of the play we already know that Martin is telling her the truth: that, as a modern-day Zeus, he has fallen in love with a being outside of his own kind.

     Suddenly we recognize that we have entered Albee territory, and that any laughter the play elicits hereafter will not emanate from punch-lines as much as it does from our ill-ease with the subject and the characters involved. In the very next scene, as his friend Ross attempts to interview him, we observe that Martin is almost purposely subverting any attempt at “real” communication—meaning, in the context of this play, any attempt at a preconceived and canned vision of reality that the media often whips us for its listeners. A man who has never cheated on his wife and, therefore, unlike so many of his male friends, Martin has never had an opportunity to brag about his sexual conquests, and he suddenly seems like an adolescent jock desperate to reveal his newly-discovered sexual prowess.

     Although Martin quickly knows that he about to tread on dangerous ground, he cannot resist revealing the source of his new-found sensations of what he describes as “love.” The tale he tells is similar to all such tales set in bucolic setting in which, along with nature itself, the would-be lover catches the wide-eyed gaze of his soon-to-be lover, with a sudden urge to reach out and touch her, with all the wonder and excitement of not knowing what joys might lay ahead. It might well describe the events of mid-life crisis that strike down many an everyday male where it not that Martin, as he and Albee keep hinting, is not an ordinary being, but a contemporary Zeus, and the object of his affection, accordingly, lies outside of everyday “normality,” while very much within the Greek god’s recorded assignations. Self-satisfied to the point of delusion, Martin simply cannot comprehend why it could be wrong to fall in love again, even if, this time, it is with a goat! After all, the goat does not truly contend with his love for his very human wife.

     Surely, we inwardly gasp, Martin must realize—despite Ross’ reassurances, as his best friend, he is to be trusted—that as a member of the media, whose definition of reality is always the most narrow one, will not keep quiet about Martin’s revelation. But then, the gods of our society are often so used to working hand in hand with members of the media who have helped them to achieve their god-like status, that they are brought down by those very women and men. The shocked Ross rushes out to immediately write a letter to Martin’s wife, outlining, with the expected rhetorical flourishes, his word-for-word encounter with his life-long confidant. If Martin has jokingly thought that he has heard the voice of the Eumenides earlier in that scene, Ross describing it as “a kind of…rushing sound, wings, or something,” it is nothing compared to the fury he is now about to face.

 

     If there is any question that we are now in an Albee play, the battle now re-enacted between the sexes is far more furious even than George and Martha’s pitchforked duels in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Indeed, in the small theater in which I experienced Martin and Stevie’s violent quarrel, the second row, where Howard and I sat, was perhaps too close for the howling and heaving banshee into which the small-statured actress Ann Noble was suddenly transformed. The only temporary ceasefires to the seething, spewing froth of hate she sputters out—along with images of vomit, blood, excrement, and murder—were the tortured interruptions of their properly horrified son, the couple’s narcissistic-like congratulations of one another when, in the midst deep verbal warfare, one of them achieves a moment of stunning locution—the kind of touchés that George and Martha also award one another in their “battle-play”—and Martin’s helplessly prosaic descriptions, once again, of his first encounters with Sylvia the goat and his brief introduction to a self-help group of bestial-offenders, including a man who once but no longer has intercourse with piglets, a multiply abused woman who has sex with a German Shepherd, and a man so ugly that he has found love only with a goose. Martin’s attempts to explain his guiltless emotions of joy appears to his to be the expressions of an alien from a distant planet. His acts, she makes clear, are beyond “all the rules,” representing a behavior that “shatters the glass” of their existence, and which have inextricably destroyed the near-perfect inter-dependency they have both fabricated for themselves. She has been ready for everything, she explains, except for this transgression!

      Exhausted, the audience along with her, Stevie, like Nora, slams the door for what appears to be a forever, despite Billy’s terrorized insistence on knowing where “his mother” has gone. Although a lesser fury, he too rants about having what appeared to be an ideal mother and father, before the latter began digging in the metaphorical basement of their home, hallowing out a hole from which he can never return. But in his youthful angst, we more clearly perceive that Albee is attempting to explore the larger issue of where human beings draw the limits of love. If Billy, who as a now socially-accepted gay, can only realize that in another day his own definition of love would have been damned, he must now, far more than his mother, question, at least, his father’s seemingly absurd search. And that leads them, if nothing else, to admit their own love for one another, expressed painfully in hugs of sorrow and protective embracement, which suddenly for the confused adolescent explodes into a momentary series of full-lipped kisses with his dad—at the very moment when the voice of conventionality, Ross, creeps back to their doorway to observe what he calculatingly perceives as another unforgiveable transgression.

 

    Billy pulls away in a self-hating pang of senseless shame, with Martin attempting, with fatherly love, to relieve the situation by describing a friend who admitted to being aroused temporarily while cradling his infant child, yet, soon after, realizing it was simply a natural and innocent moment that had no sexual component.

     For Ross, obviously, it is simply another explanation of degradation of the former “god-like, friend” a representation of pedophilic tendencies, yet another taboo to be tied to Martin’s tail/tale. “Where do you people stop?” he cries out. Yet Martin, challenging him, makes it clear that it is not the behavior which matters to Ross, but the possibility of public exposure, of the inability to “get away with it.” In short, for people like Ross, for the media, for example, it is not ever a really moral issue but a matter of defining a nonexistent “public” limit, of creating an invisible line that cannot be crossed. The question, of course, really concerns “when is it a sin to love?” Where the society draws those lines, the playwright suggests, defines the limitations of the society’s abilities to express what is perhaps the most important of all emotional and physiological responses to life.

     Despite any chortles of discomfort that some audience members may still utter, we all now realize that this work is a tragedy without an ending. A moment later, covered in blood, Stevie drags in Sylvia’s corpse. Vowing revenge, she has destroyed Martin’s innocent love for her own values and others’ personal definitions of where love has crossed the boundaries of decency; and, in so doing, she has doomed herself to the conventional limits of the living.  Suddenly she becomes a being as dead to love and living as the holy beast she has just sacrificed. 

    As Martin hugs his dead goat-lover to his breast, his tearful silence sings out like a “goat song”—the root word of Greek “tragedy”— a knell for any possibilities for a return to his or any other Eden.

     As my husband, Howard, expressed it: “everything is so sad—all of them, so basically innocent and yet so full of hurt.” In limiting its borders, love has been drained from their lives.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2014).

David Greenspan | Go Back to Where You Are / 2016

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).

Marissa Chibas, Erik Ehn, and Travis Preston | Brewsie and Willie / 2010

listening

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gertrude Stein, adapted by Marissa Chibas, Erik Ehn, and Travis Preston Brewsie and Willie / performed at the 7th Floor Penthouse (533 S. Los Angeles Street), Los Angeles / the performance I saw was on Saturday, July 24, 2010

 

Published in 1946, just weeks prior to Stein’s death, Brewsie and Willie began as a series of essays, published in The New York Times, expressing the feelings and worries of young soldiers still in Europe. Stein’s observations were based on her own conversations with American G.I.s, with whom she had spoken on the street and at dinners in her own home to which she had invited numerous of them.

     While the work is dominated by the thinking and commentary of Brewsie, egged on by the most obstinately ordinary of the group, Willie, this dialogue fiction eventually becomes filled with the voices of numerous young soldiers—Jo, Henry, Donald Paul, Ed, Jimmie, Richard, and, through Willie’s constant evocation of him, even the dead Brock—and military nurses—Janet, Pauline, and Jane.

     In Stein’s original these men and women discuss everything, although often just in passing, from issues of race, cultural identity, immigration, history, economics, politics, and, in particular, their own uncertain future. Stein’s skillful interweaving of these various subjects is both humorous and powerfully moving, as one by one—some of the soldiers clearly having never spoken of these issues before—they reveal their minds, tell stories, and share their family lives and upbringing. It is the complex matrix of these issues which allows this seemingly transparent work—a work which Stein enthusiasts and scholars might describe as too accessible in relation to her more experimental writing—to become a poetic chorus of fearful and thoughtful voices that links this to her most challenging work.

      Although I might have liked to have the adapters tackle as many of these issues as possible, Chibas, Ehn, and director-author Preston skillfully and faithfully focus on issues economic and historical while suggesting the numerous other topics the original tackles. Indeed this performance was so excellent that any qualms I might have had in the adaptation of Stein are allayed by the powerful evocation of the young soldiers on the eve of their “redeployment,” a word most of them find meaningless, if not terrifying.

      The youthful cast of the Poor Dog Group, most of whom are just two or three years out of the theatre program at CalArts, are precisely the age of Stein’s young Americans, and their fresh faces and simple beauty—as the men, sweating in the summer heat, briefly strip off their shirts to cool off, some of them having jumped in and out the windows of the top floor playhouse, literally unable to control their energy and, as we quickly discover, their worries—almost brings one to tears.

       Having all faced two world wars back to back, and having lived through part of the Great Depression, these men of what Tom Brokaw has described as “The Greatest Generation” are  terrified that upon their return there will be no jobs or, if there are jobs, the economy will be built up once more to again collapse. An early conversation between Brewise and Willie summarizes the situation as they envision it:

 

               B:  How I hate that word job.

               W: You’re right to hate that word, hate it good and plenty, but can you afford

                     to hate it Brewsie, fellows like you dont need a job you just live,

                     eveybody’s got to see to it you live and live you do but fellows like us,

                     well we got have jobs, what you want us to do, nobody’s going to feed

                     us, you just watch them not feed us dont we know, no we got to have

                     jobs, talk all you like and talk is good I like talk I like to listen to

                     you Brewsie, but when we get home and dont wear this brown any

                     more we got to have a job, job, job. Yes job.

                B:  I know, I know, I know Willie. Yes I know, you got to have a job, and

                     it’s all right but it’s not all right, see here let me tell you about jobs.

                     Some have to have jobs, some have got to be employed and be

                     employees, but not so many Willie. Listen to me not so many, when

                     everybody is employed.

                W: God, if they only just could not be employed. I aint forgot that depression,

                      no not yet.

                B:  Yes but Willie, that’s what I want to say, industrialism which produces

                      more than anybody can buy and makes employees out of free men

                      makes ‘em stop thinking, stop feeling, makes ‘em all feel alike.

                      I tell you Willie it’s wrong. …

 

     In a world where, for the first time, they have had to look about, to compare their lives with others, and evaluate what it all means, these young men and women have gradually begun to think, and before long, they are as active as Brewsie in observing, commenting upon, and questioning the world around them. And all, in turn, begin to fear that the new workaday world which they will soon face will not allow the time to think. Will they, like those of the past generations, forget all about the lessons they have learned? Will war break out once more? Will the nation overproduce to create a new depression? One could almost hear the sighs of the audience in their silent recognition of Stein’s soldiers' prescient concerns. This play is terribly significant even today.

     The on-stage rapport of these actors, their ability, so necessary in a production such as this, to work almost as a single breathing mass of beings, is, as another reviewer commented, “a miracle, pure and simple.”  And the interaction particularly of Brad Culver as the loveable Willie and Jonney Ahmanson as the pondering, somewhat befuddled Brewsie made this play, for me, one of the most memorable in years. So intense is their sense of camaraderie and love that, at one moment, the director sends the entire male cast to the floor in a mass wrestling match that momentarily releases both their tensions and sublimated desires.

     As Stein reiterated upon her deathbed, there is, obviously, no answer to the questions the soldiers pose. Donald Paul’s Thoreau-like logic to go back to the simple ways of living and surviving by oneself, as Brewsie realizes, will not work for most of these men. One very young soldier is determined to stay in France, but the others, despite their fears, want to return home. One or two suggest that they might embrace Socialism or even Communism, but Brewsie and most of the others realize that these are not true solutions for a country in which these ideas are so foreign.

      With the help of the women, the men gradually begin to embrace another kind of possibility for their futures. Some of them, at least, come to see that it isn’t just a matter of finding a job, but of finding something meaningful to work toward. One of them suggests that their goal should be to “pioneer.” But where is the wilderness? Willie scoffs. Clearly Stein is using the word here not as a noun, “a pioneer,” but as a verb defining action as a process of pioneering, of discovering the world all over again. But this concept, as brilliant as it is, seems to emanate from the voice of author, not from the characters and, as such, brings a halt to their startlingly real interchanges.

     The last speech, spoken by one of the women characters, in the book is pure Gertrude Stein crying out to her “G.I.s and G.I.s and G.I.s,” like Susan B. Anthony or others of her women heroes, with a patriotic, rhetorical flourish. Perhaps this ending was the only way to have successfully closed the work, for the soldiers have been called home and are on the move, already missing the voice of their thoughtful friend Brewsie, who has challenged them all, again and again, to “listen”:

 

                              Janet:   And tell me, wont you miss talking when you go

                                          home, you do know dont you all of you nobody

                                          talks like you boys were always talking, not back home.

                             Jo:         Yes we know.

                             Jimmie: Yes we know.

                             Willie :  Not Brewsie, he’ll talk but, Brewsie will talk but

                                           we wont be there to listen, we kind of will remember

                                           that he’s talking somewhere but we wont be there

                                           to listen, there wont be anybody talking were we will be.

     Perhaps, as Jo suggests, “they will talk now, why you all so sure they wont talk over there, perhaps they will talk over there.” But the stubborn realist, Willie, is convincing: “Not those on the job they wont, not those on the job.”

     Thank heaven for a production such as this that helps its audience to listen, to listen attentively while loving nearly every word, if only for a couple of hours.

 

Los Angeles, July 31, 2010

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

 

Julia Cho | The Language Archive / 2010

dead languages

by Douglas Messerli

 

Julia Cho The Language Archive / Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre / the performance I saw was on November 14, 2010

 

Presumably anyone interested in theater is equally interested in theater's major medium, language. That does not presume, of course, an interest in "dead languages," the focus of the major character of Cho's play, George (Matt Letscher), who is a linguist-scholar devoted to archiving dying languages before they disappear—at the rate of every two weeks, if we can believe George. As any playwright might ask, do those languages include, at some level, our daily personal conversations?

     At the moment George is attending to the last living speakers of Elloway, who he has brought, at great expense, from some vaguely middle European country. The major problem he discovers with this language is that the couple, who bicker only in English—Elloway is far too lovely a language to use for anger and argumentation, they claim—refuse to help with George's work. Resten (John Horton) and Alta (the wonderful Jayne Houdyshell) see no point to sharing their vocabulary: "Our world is already gone, and no amount of talk talk talk will ever bring back" what has been lost.

    Nicely (and perhaps a little predictably) paralleling this predicament, is George's own relationship with his wife, Mary (Heidi Schreck), who is close to giving up on the idea that George, so brilliant with languages, might ever learn the language of love. She denies leaving all the cryptic messages that George finds hidden in his books, shoes, pants, etc: "Love or explaining how to use the remote control?" "Marriage or an old cardigan?" etc.  Yet her denial reveals her inability to express her own private language of frustration, suggesting that she is as incapable of saving her world as are Resten, Alta, and George.

    The playwright, Cho, has slightly seasoned her brew with the introduction of George's assistant, Emma (Betty Gilpin), who clearly has an inexpressible crush on her boss, going so far as to study Esperanto, one of his favorite languages, just to please him. She cannot seem to learn the language however, perhaps because, as her teacher explains, she is using it for the wrong purpose. The teacher (played also by Houdyshell) recalls that she too had a crush on another, a Dutch woman, which resulted in a similar problem: she could not properly express herself, and the woman left. In short, nearly all of the characters in The Language Archive can speak brilliantly when it comes to mundane or irritating situations, but have little skill, like most of us, with the language of the doves.

 

    By the middle of the play, Mary decides to leave George, Emma determines that she will tell George of her love for him, and the strangely dressed speakers of Elloway decamp for a plane home—all leaving the linguist utterly confounded. What has happened to his well-ordered world?

     Cho does not have an easy answer; nor does she offer solutions for any of her figures. Resten and Alma fall back in love, but leave their beautiful language to fall into oblivion. George becomes determined to tell Mary that he loves her, but, after she has magically met up with a former-baker who has provided her with the perfect mother dough, she has opened her own small bakery, discovering a joyful new purpose to her life. Emma attempts to escape George as well; she, in an even more miraculous encounter, meets up with the long dead creator of Esperanto, the Russian ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof, who examines her eyes, clouded by her love; she returns to George, now recognizing what Mary has previously told the audience:

 

                        Sometimes you feel so sad, it begins to feel like happiness. And

                        you can be so happy that it starts to feel like grief.

 

     Despite Mary's permanent absence, Emma never does develop a love relationship with George, who continues to work alone, lost in the syntax of other people's lives.

    Cho's play points to deeper concepts than it serves up. And the author has somewhat disappointedly spiced it up with whimsy—what some critics, mistakenly I believe, described as surreal or absurdist farce—that deflects the philosophical and psychological implications of her art. The Language Archive remains, for all that, a strong parable of what lovers—and by extension, committed believers of life—can and cannot fully express.

 

New York, November 15, 2010

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