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

the unfortunate truth of my situation

by Douglas Messerli

 

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

 

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

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

 

                        (Alfredo, Samuel hug)

ALFREDO

Careful

 

SAMUEL

I do — beg of you, friend Alfredo                 ALFREDO

(He grabs Alfredo's lapels)                 Careful.

— Convince beautiful Suzie

That when I speak to her directly

This is always the unfortunate truth of my situation

 

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

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

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

 

      But perhaps, ladies and gentleman,

it is best never to speak openly about

such things

 

But it did happen

That travelling these streets

In bright sunlight

An old man with white hair

Shabbily dressed, trudging slowly

In the direction opposite to the one

In which I was traveling

Carrying a large, soiled cardboard box

with what personal belongings

I could not guess

But — whispered hoarsely under his breath

"Go to Berkeley, make film".

 

I did not respond.

But I frowned

And a few seconds later

turned to watch him proceed, slowly

Down the street     (girls giggle)

 

Later in the day                                                                       SUZIE & GABRIELLA

Lying on the bed in my hotel room                            Ooo

I wondered -- I wondered should I have approached him

To ask for clarification.

Was he speaking to me

Or to himself

— yet it seemed appropriate to my concerns

And my possible

Future

 

GABRIELLA

Go to Berkeley, my friend

Make film.

Which could have meant, not the city in sun drenched

California 

 

SUZIE

But possibly the long dead Irish                                                                     GABRIELLA

philosopher of idealism, Bishop George Berkeley himself,               Oooo.

whose view of reality might be poetically re-imagined

as a vision of the world in which experience

itself was but a thin film, spread in illusionary fashion

upon human consciousness.

 

SAMUEL

So that

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

deeper into the notion of the world as

a transparent surface only —

depending upon the impress of a mental apparatus —

snapping the world into apparent being only —

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

 Emptiness is here

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

 

VOICE

Imagine no world but this world

Imagine no world but this world (THUD)

End of play. (THUD)

End of play.

 

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

 

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

Reprinted from Jacket2 (May 2013). 

 

Samuel Beckett | Krapp's Last Tape / 2012

be again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Beckett Krapp's Last Tape / production of the Gate Theatre Dublin at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, Los Angeles on November 4, 2012

 

Actor John Hurt's portrayal of Krapp in Beckett's 1958 play is absolutely brilliant, except for, perhaps, the near interminable pause before the actor begins speaking. The stark setting of the play, with a single spots of bright white light, gives a grand theatricality to Krapp's world, a world in which, under the light, he feels safe while being surrounded by darkness wherein, as Beckett himself described it, "Old Nick" or death awaits, a fact Hurt reiterates once or twice by daring, with some humor, to enter, momentarily, the surrounding darkness.

     On his sixty-ninth birthday Krapp, yet again, forces himself to interact with a younger incarnation. It is clear that Krapp has a fixation with his former selves. For years he has recorded tapes describing his life's events, most of them quite meaningless, but some of them of great poetry and sensibility. The tape Krapp chooses on this particular, rainy night, is "Box 3, Spool 5," the day Krapp turned 39.

     Yet director Michael Colgan reveals that what leads up to his playing the tape is as important in some senses as what is actually on the tape itself. The ritualistic acts, Krapp's continual checking of the time, his strange way of eating a banana—he puts the entire banana into his mouth holding it there for a while before biting it off, clearly a bow to the fruit's sexual suggestions—and several of his other actions, including his nearly falling on the banana peel he has tossed into the dark, reveal him as a kind of eccentric fool—in short, the typical Beckett figure. As his name suggests, he is "full of shit."

     Hurt presents Krapp with a kind of valor despite his obvious distancing of himself from the human race. Clearly Krapp's mother has been a monster, living for years in a world of "vidiuity"—the condition of being or remaining a widow. The small things he describes are both comical and life-affirming: playing ball with a dog as his mother dies, awarding the ball to the dog as he hears of his mother's death; attending a vesper service as a child, falling off the pew.

     Krapp is an everyday man with romantic aspirations, or at least he was, it is apparent, at age 39, the time when we are all have arrived in the prime of life. Krapp at 39 is both a smug bore,

 

Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indulgence until that

memorable night in March at the end of the jetty, in the

howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the

whole thing. The vision, at last. This fancy is what I have chiefly

to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done

and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the

miracle that . . . (hesitates) . . . for the fire that set it alight.

What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going

on all my life, namely—(Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape

forward, switches on again)—

 

a man who will not regret any decision of his life, and is a man amazingly come alive through the love of a woman whom he describes lovingly in a scene where the two lay in a small punt as it floats into shore through the reeds.

     The older Krapp, who realizes that his younger self could not imagine the loneliness and emptiness of the life ahead, has no patience at times with his past. His new tape, which he begins after impatiently winding the older tape ahead to escape his previous self's blindness, is filled with bitterness and anger for a failed life:

 

Nothing to say, not a squeak. What's a year now? The sour cud and

the iron stool. (Pause.) Reveled in the word spool. (With relish.)

Spooool! Happiest moment of the past half million. (Pause.) Seventeen

copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries

beyond the seas. Getting known. (Pause.)

 

He has failed, obviously, even in his writing career. Unlike his younger self, so unregretful of his past, the old Krapp is filled with the detritus of his life, all those materials left over from his disintegration. If the younger Krapp declares himself as only moving forward, the elder would "Be again!"

 

Be again in the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the

red-berried. (Pause.) Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning,

in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells. (Pause.)

And so on. (Pause.) Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old

misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you. (Pause.)

Lie down across her.

 

He gives up this, his last tape (or perhaps simply his latest) to listen again to his former self describing his sexual moment with the woman in the punt.

     Hurt so painfully suffers and loves his former self—at one moment even embracing the machine through his young speeches—that one can almost hear his heart crack.

 

Los Angeles, November 6, 2012

A slightly different version of this piece about the filmed version with Hurt was published in My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).

 

 

 

Eugene O'Neill | Early Plays (Three Glencairn Plays) / 2013

the endless voyage

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugene O’Neill Early Plays (Three Glencairn Plays) performed by The Wooster Group and New York City Players / the performance I saw was a matinee at Los Angeles, Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) on February 24, 2013

 

Although I highly admire O’Neill’s later works, including the majestic tragedy, Long Day’s Journey into Night, I have always been slightly embarrassed reading his earliest works, particularly The Glencairn Plays, three of which were performed this past week at Red Cat in Disney Hall. First of all, they are obviously slight works with fairly stereotypical characters and plots, which ultimately reveal little about what being a sailor is really about. Lonely men desperate for a drink find both in the 1918 work Moon of the Caribees, two loyal lumps of clay express their devotion for one another in my favorite of the works, Bound East for Cardiff (1914), and a young man determined to return home in Sweden gets tricked by the proprietors of a local bar and is shipped out on what is near to “slave” ship in The Long Voyage Home (1917). Even worse, however, is the language O’Neill gives these lugs to speak: each of them, representing different races and countries, are revealed in a painfully dialogue-based argot that makes one wonder, at times, whether O’Neill had really heard men like his characters speak. Any casual reader, I believe, would declare them “fake.”

     Accordingly, these early O’Neill plays are rarely performed, and, I, like most others, had never seen them upon the stage. How wonderful, I reasoned, be able to see a production under the direction of The New York Players founder, Richard Maxwell, known for his productions in which he reveals the very “theatricality” and “unnaturalness” of theater works instead of attempting to pawn them off as “realistic” or “veristic” events. Maxwell’s actors are about as far away from Method acting as you can get.

    Yet, at the same time, Maxwell is emphatically loyal to the original texts. And, in this case, his actors speak every Swedish, Bronx, Caribbean, and British accent that O’Neill has thrown their way. By speaking those lines without dramatic intensity, almost in a monotone, they somehow relieve us from necessity of placing them into a realist world, and, while often calling up laughter, they also highlight the poetic value behind their somewhat incoherent words.

     Particularly in Bound East for Cardiff, in the long dialogue between the dying Yank (Brian Mendes) and Driscoll (Ari Fliakos, who I last saw in the Wooster’s Williams play Vieux Carré), this strange pairing of theatricality and emotionality creates its own intensity, as the two long time sailor friends reveal their love and devotion to one another, while reminding themselves of their various past adventures. Played out in a corner of the stage, supposedly the ship’s fo’c’s’le, the scene requires the audience to listen attentively and peer into the set from a great distance as if they were secret voyeurs. Indeed, they are, as it gradually becomes clear, particularly with Yank’s admission that he had always dreamed of settling down with Driscoll on a farm. Far more believable than anything expressed in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, we sense the intense eroticism of these two “roughs” and the painful denials and acceptances of their own mortality. If they speak often almost incoherently, it is even more painful that the two now so clearly confess to each other their own love.

     The last of the three plays, The Long Voyage Home, is also painful in its chicanery, betrayal, and inevitable imprisonment of the young Olson (Bobby McElver) who, fed up with the hard work, low wages, and inedible food of the several ocean voyages he has suffered is determined to return to his homestead in Sweden, with the hopes of helping his brother and mother on their farm. He has apparently had that dream for a long while, but each time he reaches port, his thirst for alcohol seizes him, and spends his wages, unable to travel back to his homeland. This time, he brags, he will not drink. The sleazy bar owner, Fat Joe (Jim Fletcher), his assistant Mag (the wonderful Kate Valk), and a fellow sailor, Cocky (Keith Connolly), helped by the prostitute Freda (Victoria Vazquez) work to break down the young innocent’s defenses, slipping a potion into his drink that knocks him out. In sad inevitability, he is once again shipped out on one of the worst vessels in port!  Olson’s quiet revelation of his story through O’Neill’s torturous Swedish rendition helps to make the audience feel sad and solicitous for this doomed young traveler, who, like Odysseus takes a nearly endless voyages to reach his destination.

     Outwardly O’Neill’s most poetical short, filled with tropical moons, exotic native music, two Carribean beauties (Kate Valk and Victoria Vazquez), and loads of rum, seemed the least successful of the three plays. It may, in fact, have been that this work was the first of a trio, and we had not yet adapted ourselves to Maxwell’s techniques. But then the relationships between the characters seem innately vague and mysterious. Why is Cocky so distanced from all the others and apparently the only one able to resist the charms of Pearl? Most of the indeterminate sailors, moreover, spend their time in the fo’c’s’le drinking, and when they do gather atop ship to dance, they interrupt their pleasures with what they know best, a chantey—in part simply to drown out the strange and frightening music of the island natives. While there is a forceful dis-ease in their momentary pleasures, there is, more importantly, a disease within them that breaks out in a violent fight, to be quelled by the always squelching officers. Even their momentary pleasures, accordingly, are forbidden and interrupted. 

    In the end, I am not sure that any of these plays represent great theater. But in the hands of the Wooster Group and Maxwell’s New York Players we see them, at least, for their fascinating potentialities, and recognize why O’Neill himself saw them as break-through works.

 

February 27, 2013

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

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte | Le nozze di Figaro / 2014

 

terrifying twists

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (composer) Lorenzo da Ponte (libretto, after the comedy by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais), Le nozze di Figaro / the performance I saw was the Metropolitan Opera live HD broadcast, October 18, 2014

 

Like many an opera buffa, Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro is filled with would-be lovers jumping in and out of beds; late night romantic assignations; flirtations and sexual encounters between maid(s) and master, mistress, and godson (or male servant(s), or any visiting admirer); intriguing switches of amative attentions; startling revelations of heritage and birthright; as well as, quite often, temporary alterations of sex—all undertaken beneath the nose of a highly suspicious husband or another such authoritative figure who is usually the greatest transgressor of the lot.

 

    As anyone who has seen this “follow up” to Rossini’s just as character-leaden and plot-stuffed precursor Il barbiere di Siviglia knows, Mozart’s work offers all of the above in great proliferation. Between Count Almaviva’s (Peter Mattei) attempts to bed nearly all of his housekeepers, and his maid Susanna’s (wonderfully elucidated by Marlis Petersen) and her soon-to-be husband Figaro’s (Ildar Abdrazakov) attempts to get even (or in Figaro’s case, to get revenge) for the master’s unwelcome attentions of the lively “flower of the household,” there is hardly a moment in this heady elixir of amour and feudal abuse that isn’t jam-packed with new plot twists.

     “Twist,” indeed, is the perfect word for the constant story fluctuations, which the Saturday HD broadcast host, Renée Fleming (who has performed in her share of Figaro productions) characterized as “a perpetual turning of the tables.” So many epistles have been written and posted through the pockets of Figaro that, at one point, when cornered by the Count, he admits that even he cannot keep track of the would-be comings and goings of figures, as three notes of assignation simultaneously fall from his pockets. Fortuitously, Rob Howell’s well-oiled swing of the settings and Sir Richard Eyre’s precisely-timed fluidity of direction keep the production moving, even if, at moments, the audience and characters lag behind in comprehension.

     But the “twists” of this busy-bee work lay not only in the turning down of bedsheets by the Count, but in the twisted relationships of various characters, most notably Marcellina (the housekeeper to the pompous Dr. Bartolo) who hankering after Figaro, has long-ago loaned him money attached to a contract stating that if he does not pay her back, he must marry her. Bartolo, who like the much younger Count, at one time has clearly employed house staff in roles beyond their job descriptions, is more than delighted to now have the opportunity to get rid of his “old cow,” while simultaneously revenging himself for Figaro’s involvement in preventing him (incidents represented in Rossini’s operatic version) from obtaining Rosina, now the Count’s lovely wife.

      Suddenly in act III we discover that the man Marcellina truly desires to marry is, without her knowledge, her long-lost son, Rafello, fathered by her employer, Bartolo. In short, she, who the Count was determined just minutes before to declare to be Figaro’s wife, would lure Rafello into a horrific coupling, like Oedipus and Jocasta, of mother and son. In the context of Mozart’s pre-Freudian world, such a marriage does not represent a psychological condition but rather serves as a hovering omen about the machinations of the Count, threatening to transform at any moment the comic “pranks” of Lorenzo da Ponte’s and Mozart’s work into a tragedy of epic proportions like Oedipus Rex. The potential parallel between the Count’s and Bartolo’s actions cannot be missed by the man who has just sung a song (Vedrò, mentr'io sospiro) expressing his jealousy of his own servant.

   Similarly, throughout their opera da Ponte and Mozart feature a newly created figure not in the original Beaumarchais play, Cherubino—who the great Kierkegaard described as a figure “drunk with love”—who twists and turns his way throughout this play in a sexual stupor that would dizzy even the most sure-footed angel. Yes, Cherubino, obviously, is a kind of angel, a man so beautiful that—as the writers insist in their script—he must be played always by a beautiful young woman (in this case, the lovely and musically gifted Isabel Leonard). But Cherubino is also a sort of shadow to the Count, a being who aspires to the same status as his master, which also explains why, discovering the young sex-fiend wherever he goes, the Count can only seek his destruction. For Cherubino also has significant qualities that the Count is missing: beauty and youth. Accordingly, like a twisted, fun-house looking glass, the stare of Cherubino, which the Count seems to encounter everywhere, can only remind him that he will soon be an old and ugly fornicator, like Bartolo, who also once challenged him for his wife! 

      Unlike the often clumsy and blundering Almaviva (a long-living soul who actually learns through the long-time experiences of life), who serves always behind his nemesis, the cherub can literally “fly,” as he proves through his escape from the balcony window of his godmother’s bedroom. In short, he can move about in near absolute freedom, not only in space but within his own body, as he constantly shifts gender. Using the former castrati role as a tranvesti character to perfect effect, Mozart and his librettist require that not only every woman in the play be sexually charmed by the young man but must attempt to make every man equally so enchanted.  

    Except for perhaps Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, opera has never before used transvestitism to such wonderful effects. Not only do the Countess and Susanna spend long moments in joyfully dressing up their youthful lothario as a lovely woman whom they hope will satisfy the sexual longings of the Count, but another of the Count’s conquests, Barbarina hides him, when Cherubino has deserted from his military service, by dressing him up as a provincial beauty. Time and again, the woman turn-the-tables, so to speak, on this would-be molester by rendering him neuter, by turning him into one of their own kind.

     Still, the rapscallion Cherubino nearly destroys the day for the penultimate “twist” of the story, wherein the Countess, having transformed herself into Susanna through her costume—while at the same time Susanna hides her eager desire to be embraced by Figaro by wearing the Countesses’ gown—prepares to receive her unrepentant husband. Cherubino’s unwanted attentions reiterate not only the pains the Countess has had to suffer for his husband’s philandering, but those that Barbarina may have to suffer through her Cherubino.

     For the moment, however, the day is saved, and, the final “twist” is played out in all its grand ironic display, the Count unconsciously playing lover to his own wife.

 

    Suddenly realizing that he has become the fool in front of everyone, the Count, at least momentarily, is forced to realize the errors of his way, asking for forgiveness not just from his wife (“Contessa perdono!), but from everyone in hearing range, including the audience whom he has so entertained. The Countess’ proclamation that she is kinder than her husband in forgiving him, results in a beautiful choral work that expresses joy while reminding everyone of the “terrible twists” of reality that they all have almost accidentally escaped. As I whispered to Howard a few moments later: “That is the saddest aria to a happily-ending opera that I have ever witnessed.”

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2014

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