Harold Pinter | A Slight Ache / 1962 [reading of play]

the wasps

by Douglas Messerli

Harold Pinter A Slight Ache in 3 Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1962)

 

Pinter's brilliantly absurd parable of people born to the estate—particularly of their paranoia, boredom, and lost dreams—is played out in a simple and quite humorous narrative: Edward (Emlyn Williams in the first stage production) wakes up with "a slight ache" in his eyes as if he hasn't slept; as he attempts to tell his wife, Flora, (Alison Leggat), of his condition, a wasp becomes trapped in the jam pot, and she becomes terrified of its possible bite. Edward insists that wasps do not bite. They sting.

 

    Yet, a "wasp" does indeed nip away at Edward much as the jury haunts Philocleon in Aristophanes' ancient comedy. Like Philocleon, Edward has been a Justice of the Peace. And much like that monster, we quickly perceive, despite Edward's insistence that he, as always, slept "uninterruptedly," he clearly suffers from irregular sleep, obsessional thinking, and is utterly paranoid.

    A nearby matchseller has been watching him, Edward in convinced, keeping an eye on his estate, both his home and himself.

 

                           Edward: He's back again.

                           Flora: But he's always there.

                           Edward: Why? What is he doing there?

                           Flora: But he's never disturbed you, has he? The man's been standing

                               there for weeks. You've never mentioned it.

                           Edward: What is he doing there?

                           Flora: He's selling matches, of course.

 

     But Edward cannot be convinced. The road on which they live is not at all likely to be traveled by people interested in matches. And why does this matchseller arrive at seven o'clock each morning? Determined to watch him devotedly, it does not take much before Edward is obsessed with the poor man, and, finally, becomes determined to invite him inside to get to "the bottom of things."

      The ridiculous one-sided conversations between Edward and the matchseller (who speaks not one word) results in a tale about an acquittal that again points up his relationship to the Greek lawyer; his story is about a man whom Edward describes as a poacher who he comes upon laying, possibly injured, in the road. When Edward dismounts to check the man out, he falls, the pony taking off down the valley, he "up to [his] ears in mud." He continues:

 

                         Years later, when I was a Justice of the Peace for the county, I had

                         him front of the bench. He was there for poaching. That's how I

                         know he was a poacher. The evidence though was sparse, inadmissible,

                         I acquitted him, letting him off with a caution. He'd grown a red beard,

                         I remember. Yes. A bit of a stinker.

 

     Before long, of course, he is cursing the dirty, smelly, old man before him, accusing him of sins he himself is guilty. What he reveals about himself is a life of accumulation and dispassion, speaking like a true paranoid, of "lists of people anxious to do me down." But most of all, he reveals the pointlessness of his own life. And even as he speaks, the old man begins to transform, finally growing young again. Is he the young Edward before his has become the monster he is now?

 

                        You look younger. You look extraordinarily...youthful.

                        ....I would like to join you...explain...show you...the garden...explain

                        The plants...where I run...my track in training...I was number one

                        sprinter at Howells...when a stripling...no more a stripling...licked...

                        men twice my strength...when a stripling...like yourself.

 

    Before Edward's aching eyes, the matchseller, whom he has attempted to convict (this time in a "home court), has turned the tables, so to speak, and—symbolically at least—has been acquitted of his supposed crimes.

      Flora, who has named the matchseller Barnabas—evoking the disciple who, along with Paul, oversaw the church at Antioch and later, at the Council of Jerusalem, helped to permit Gentiles into the Christian Church—comes to take him into her garden, her polished house. As she takes him by the hand, she passes over his tray of matches to a speechless Edward, who might well, like Philoclean proclaim:

 

                    And so I have charged my conscience with the acquittal of an accused

                   being! What will become of me? Sacred gods! forgive me. I did it despite

                   myself; it is not in my character.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2008

Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (September 12, 2024).   

Joey Arias | Arias with a Twist / 2009

all by myself

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joey Arias (performer), Basil Twist (director) Arias with a Twist / Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) at The Walt Disney Concert Hall, November 21, 2009

 

     A few days after seeing Michael Jackson’s This Is It, I attended a performance of the drag queen Joey Arias directed by Basil Twist. Like Jackson, Arias is an excellent performer, but here it is the voice that dominates, not the feet. For his great dance finale, Twist provides him with dozens of dancing legs and scene right out of Busby Berkeley, yet those high kicking gams are puppets, not Arias' own slim limbs.

     While Jackson worked big, on a gargantuan scale, Arias does more with small, working with the stunning sets and costumes of Twist, Thierry Manfred Mugler, and Chris March.

    Without any apparent logic, Arias begins his vocal narrative as a captive in a alien spaceship, attentively watched over by alien men, until, evidently thrust out of this spatial Eden she falls through space into a kind of campy corduroy-covered jungle, an earthly Eden with a large python slithering through its confines.

     Without any apparent logic, Arias begins his vocal narrative as a captive in an alien spaceship, attentively watched over by alien men, until, evidently thrust out of this spatial Eden she falls through space into a kind of campy corduroy-covered jungle, an earthly Eden with a large python slithering through its confines.

     Evidently Arias is thrown out of that heaven as well, ending up, inevitably, in Hell, sexually entrapped by Satan's slaves and soon after wrapped in the arms of a giant squid.

     Appearing like a slightly pouting, perhaps betrayed dominatrix with a long ponytail, Arias sings out in raspy voice through an equally hair-extended mic in a manner that is often more interpretive than Madonna or even Bette Midler, beginning with Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" and moving quickly into Lennon and McCartney's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Her moving version of Eric Carmen's "All By Myself" and the Billie Holliday-like rendition of "You Changed" is vocally more powerful than anything Michael Jackson might have spit out.

     Suddenly it's time for her to get herself down to The Great White Way, but her talent is so enormous that when she arrives in Manhattan she is the size of King Kong, swallowing up male passengers on trains and in taxis as she moves through New York's neighborhoods, ending up in a scene right out of a motion picture musical.

     Like Jackson's missing person, Arias' twisted being—that is, his persona—is just that, a figure of true talent, funny and entertaining enough for anyone to enjoy, but also a kind of monster who can never quite fit into everyday life.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (November 2009), USTheater, Opera and Performance (September 2010).

Tennessee Williams | Vieux Carré / 2010

bow down and be dim

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tennessee Williams Vieux Carré, conceived and performed by The Wooster Group / the performance I saw was on Sunday, December 5, 2010 at Redcat (The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater in The Walt Disney Concert Hall Complex) Los Angeles

 

Although Tennessee Williams began writing his play Vieux Carré in 1938, the play did not appear on Broadway until 1977, and then lasted only 5 performances. The New York Times critic Clive Barnes summarized: " It is a play of blatant melodrama and crepuscular atmosphere," but admitted that that might be said of any Williams play. "You leave the theater with the impression of having been told a secret," he concluded.

 

    The Wooster Group's reconstructed performance of this unknown work leaves one, strangely enough, with the same feeling, that Williams is revealing something here that no matter how you reimagine its structure remains potent. If his autobiographically-tinted The Glass Menagerie only hints at personal realities, the next step of his life—Williams’ emergence into the dark world of New Orleans' French Quarter—is revealed with an almost horrific honesty that can only make one, at times, want to look away.

     If "Rise and Shine" was the daily aspiration in that earlier play (at least for Amanda Wingfield), The Writer of Vieux Carré seems to live a life in the shadow of his mother's proclamation, in a world ruled by a declaration to "Bow Dow and Be Dim." From the beginning of the play, all the characters except The Writer (Ari Fliakos) have learned how to crawl. The metal-like cages of the Wooster production which signify the rooms of Mrs. Wire's (Kate Valk) boarding house for the destitute are strewn with clothing and personal belongings as if the inhabitants spent most of their lives on the floor or in bed. In fact, they do precisely that.

     Mrs. Wire has recently taken to sleeping in the hall in order to keep a better eye on her immoral and deceitful tenants, shouting out for the occasional help of the mad travesty of a nurse, "Nursie" (Kanez Schaal), who seems simultaneously permanently servile and yet about to revolt. The Writer's next-door neighbor, the artist Nightingale (the excellent Scott Shepherd), goes about, in this version, with a large rubber dildo sprouting through the zipper of his pants. This gay Priapus is forever on the make, and knows just how to relieve the sufferings of the lonely new boy just landed in this dump. Yet, of all the characters, the consumptive artist is the most loving and caring, at times almost replacing the resilient southern mother The Writer has left. Certainly, like Amanda Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie, he has the most comic lines.

     In what I now perceive as a brilliant directorial decision, Elizabeth LeCompte cast two of the characters as their polar opposites. Kate Valk, the dreadful Mrs. Wire, also plays another of The Writer's acquaintances in this zoo of lost lives, Jane Sparks, a seemingly normal young woman who has somehow lost her way, becoming trapped in a life given over to sex. The object of her desire is a seedy hick who works at the local strip bar, Tye McCool (also Scott Shepherd), who is anything but "cool," but like Nightingale goes about with a hard-on most of time and sees himself as a kind of heterosexual Priapus who won't "let a fag blow him for less than a $100." Both Nightingale and The Writer desire him, despite their recognition that he is a burned-out heroin addict. In the lonely world in which they exist, nearly anyone will do in a pinch.

     Although both Nightingale and McCool are sexually consumed, however, neither can be said to be, like the Roman God they bow to, generative. And their lovemaking ends, generally, in disgust.

     It is a disgusting world in which they live. McCool excuses his most recent heroin episode on his knowledge that his boss has turned his dogs upon the bar's "Champagne girl," the lead stripper, when she threatened to leave him. The dogs literally "ate" her, he reports—reminding us somewhat of the dreadful fate of Sebastian Venerable in Suddenly Last Summer. All of the figures of this play are, in one way or another, being eaten up, consumed. Jane, it turns out, has a serious blood disease and will soon die. By play's end Nightingale is so sick, symbolized by the loss of his erect penis, that is he taken away to a public institution to die. McCool, we recognize, is so caught up in a world of crime and drugs that it can't be long before he too "will go to Spain," as the underworld figures describe their colleague's sudden disappearance.

     Beginning his tenure as a true innocent, The Writer has quickly gotten involved with Mrs. Wire's attempts to open a restaurant in her room, and is forced to testify that she is innocent (even though he has seen her do it) in trying to burn the photographer living below her with hot water. After an operation for an eye cataract, he can, symbolically speaking, no longer see the truth. By the second act of this work The Writer has become one with the destroyed beings who surround him, raping Nightingale and attempting to sexually attack the drunken McCool.

     For a few moments it seems like The Writer may escape this nightmarish society, as he meets a young man, Sky, who, about to head West for a new life, asks him to join in the voyage. But we soon discover that it is impossible. Just as Nightingale and McCool have been symbolized by their erect members, so is The Writer tied to his headphones, keyboard, and video screen as he attempts to tell his story as quickly as it is being told to him, or, as he tells the story to its characters as quickly as they might enact it. There is little difference; either way, we see that he is clearly frozen in space; Sky does not show up to save him from himself. At play's end, The Writer is strangely at peace with the silence surrounding the disappearance of the others with whom he has shared his life or created.

    In short, The Writer, it appears, is now as corrupt and uncaring as the people he met when he first arrived in Vieux Carré, and in the process has been swept up into the evil world of his own imagination. If nothing else, the man we see now welcoming the quietude is the polar opposite of the boy at the beginning of the play crying out of loneliness in his room.

       

Los Angeles, December 10, 2010

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

Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, and Joshua Logan | South Pacific / 2008

confused by paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Rodgers (music), Oscar Hammerstein II (lyrics), Oscar Hammerstein II and Joshua Logan (book, based on Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener) South Pacific / New York, Lincoln Center Theater at the Vivian Beaumont / the performance I attended was on May 9, 2008

 

Whenever I think of the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals other than the early and more energized Oklahoma! (see My Year 2003) I feel slightly claustrophobic, as if their often sugary, sweet songs and sensibilities had stuck to my skin. Certainly, I recognize Carousel, South Pacific and The King and I as great musicals, and I’ve watched the movie versions of these works countless times; but by the time of the megahit The Sound of Music (a musical I endured for several weeks of rehearsal and performances in the role of Max in high school) I could scarcely tolerate their work (I have seen the Julie Andrews movie only twice!); their Chinese-American travesty, Flower Drum Song, seems to me an embarrassment!

      How could I resist, however, a revival of South Pacific—50 years after the motion picture and nearly 60 years after its original Broadway production—at Lincoln Center Theatre at the Vivien Beaumont Theater, described by the New York Times: “I know we’re not supposed to expect perfection in the imperfect world, but I’m darned if I can find one serious flaw in this production.”? Even at the scalper’s price of $240—twice the listed ticket price—I was willing to put up and shut up, despite the fact that some of my friends, including Charles Bernstein, who reported he shared my reservations about the noted music-writing duo, may have felt I had fallen into some childhood reverie.

     From the moment the curtain rises on two beautiful, supposedly Polynesian-French children singing “Dites-Moi,” the audience perceives that they have entered another world, a world—intimated, in this production, by the written passage by original author James Michener upon the scrim—of enormous beauty and utter strangeness, where an old woman, whom we later discover as Bloody Mary, attempts to sell the sailors human heads on a ocean beach that looks out upon a stunningly beautiful volcanic island in the distance. This is, indeed, an enchanted world, but also a world of strangers, a “crowded room”—a theater of war—wherein different cultures encounter one another.

     Nelly Forbush is all in a flutter about finding the perfect man (a cultured Western European), and is even able to accept Emile de Becque’s explanation of why he is a “murderer”—after all, he killed a “bully.” Yet, it soon becomes intolerable to her that he has embraced a culture truly foreign to her, along with a Tonkanese wife, with whom he has produced the two beautiful children with whom the musical begins!

      The whole of American history, I would argue, might be summarized by various issues relating to our ability to assimilate almost any form of violence while being absolutely unable to accept any, but the most conventional, forms of love!

     By the second scene, where the all-male chorus, who, unlike the officers, are trapped in sexual isolation (they are not permitted to fraternize with the ensigns and the French planters have placed their daughters on isolated islands) sing their paean to the special and irreplaceable qualities of the opposite sex, I came to recognize that at the heart of this work is not sexual longing—albeit something that is clearly in evidence throughout the musical—as much as the sexual innocence, along with the spiritual and intellectual innocence the Americans represent.

     For the Seabees and Sailors, Bloody Mary—an earth mother perhaps, but a sad imitation of female beauty (her skin is as tender, we are told, as "Dimaggio's glove")—is their only available associate (“Bloody Mary is the girl I love…, now ain’t that too damn bad!). And when they sing of their sexual longing, the opposite sex is not represented by a full-bodied woman, but through the American slang word, representing a diminished notion of the sex, a “dame” (or, contrarily, if one defines the word as do the British, some one of higher position, and therefore out of their reach).

     Nelly, moreover, immediately describes herself as a “hick,” and later reiterates that she is “corny as Kansas in August,” “normal as blueberry pie,” that she is a knucklehead, a “cockeyed optimist”—in short out of sorts with the world in which she has discovered herself. As if we needed further evidence of separation, actor Kelli O’Hara speaks in a convincing southern twang (the actress was born in the South) which forces us to realize just how out of place she and the Americans are in this tropical paradise, how confused they are in being confined to such a heavenly spot.  These Americans, obviously, are the terrifying innocents of Blake and, centuries later, of Graham Greene, a folk who, while pretending to embrace the world, shun everything outside themselves or often destroy or displace what they cannot comprehend—while sanctimoniously boasting of their malady.

      Throughout South Pacific, however, we get evidence of cracks in that wall of sexual “normality.” In their isolation, the all-male chorus comes to define the homoerotic nature of much of Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s musical, a situation underlined in the Lincoln Center production by Christopher Gattelli’s choreography, wherein several of his male dancers cavort with each other, posing in positions of the opposite sex.

     Seabee Luther Billis—who beautifully washes and irons Nelly’s clothes (he’s especially good with the pleats), cleverly weaves native skirts, prefers the all-male boar’s-tooth ceremony to the other sites of Bali Ha’i (even when he does embrace a woman, it is during a religious ceremony), and later performs as Nelly Forbush’s “girlfriend” Honey Bun—is much ridiculed as a representative of a love that not only cannot speak its name, but in the World War II atmosphere of the writing, suffers no language with which one could even ask.

     The “saxy lieutenant,” Joe Cable, who Bloody Mary picks out for her beautiful daughter Liat, is also an innocent—so innocent that he cannot even imagine that Mary might have a daughter, as if Liat were of virgin birth—and, enveloped in innocence, is only too ready to copulate with the young girl, who, the story hints, is not even of (American) legal age. He is unable to embrace the idea, moreover, that in the morality of Tonakese culture such an act might be understood as a prelude to marriage! He is indeed, as Bloody Mary describes him "a stingy bastard."

     While Nelly tries to convince herself that the irrationality of racism is somehow natural and innate, Joe recognizes it is something learned, a thing “carefully taught,” which he expresses in one of Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s most politically aware songs of their career, which for me washes away some of that sticky residue of their sentimental songs better than Nelly is able to wash her would-be lover “out of her hair.”

     For James Michener and, consequently, Hammerstein and Logan, the only solution to such a crisis is to follow Papa Hemmingway’s lead and send the male characters on a hunting expedition, in this case a search for Japanese naval movements in the neighboring islands. Despite their moral outrage against racism, the writers sacrifice Joe Cable—if he survives, he, after all, is now ready to marry Liat—allowing the Frenchman de Becque to return to the wiser Nelly, ready to forgive him his earlier racial “transgression,” and to embrace both his children and life.

      For all my seeming sarcasm, however, by musical’s end all characters have the potential for change. Despite the violence around them, love has altered their lives, and those who return home will hopefully arrive as figures—like the leading characters of this work—transformed by the culture(s) they have been forced to face, a fact that could not have been made clearer than in the Lincoln Center’s production of the penultimate scene, where the soldiers, gathered in military formation, march off—not to the strains of some patriotic anthem, as one might expect, but to the quietly chanted lyrics of the absurd love-song “Honey Bun”:

 

                                      A hundred and one pounds of fun,

                                      That’s my little Honey Bun.

                                      Get a load of Honey Bun tonight.

 

New York, May 10, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (June 2008).