Tennessee Williams | A Streetcar Named Desire

a streetcar a little too much on track

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire / Dance on Productions at the Odyssey Theatre / the performance I saw was with Thérèse Bachand On May 25, 2019

 

     Any company who might bravely present a new production of the great Williams’ masterpiece has my approval. And the Dance On group—with Susan Priver playing Blanche DuBois, the handsome Max E. Williams as Stanley Kowalski, Melissa Sullivan as Stella, and Christopher Parker as Mitch—has nothing but my admiration.

 

    Surely they know that with legendary figures such as Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy, Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, and others having literally defined their roles, that any revival can only compared in the minds of a mature audience. And the actors and director here actually gave homage, in part, to these figures, as well as the great original director of both the stage play and film Elia Kazan.

     If the actor Williams can never quite hope to match the sort of humorous lowlife of Brando’s Stanley, he certainly looks better with his buff body than the more feminine-looking Brando. In this case, you can truly comprehend why Stella has stayed with him; he’s like a stupid-minded body that you can’t keep your eyes off. Stella, in this production is obviously addicted, just as her sister, to sex—without any of the good-girl Mississippi pretensions.

     If Blanche, at heart, is all about desire, Stella with Stanley make such desires obviously apparent. And while I’ve always thought Kim Hunter’s Stella’s was a little slow-minded, Sullivan’s portrayal represents a lusty, level-headedness that demonstrates how she might be a good lover and mother for the rest of her life.

      Director Jack Heller perceived from his other Williams’ plays such as Kingdom of Earth, just how much actress Priver was a figure perfect for the playwright, and here she gives a rather credible rendition of the Vivien Leigh figure, a woman on the way out who would like to pretend—and is deluded enough to try to pretend—that she is still a woman whom men might want.

      In the movie, the sparks flew simply because of the completely different acting styles of Brando and Leigh, the New School and traditional British character-acting traditions. And Heller attempts to repeat that, despite the fact that the former ice-hockey Canadian Williams has probably never been in the halls of such an acting school.

      Indeed, this production has all the hallmarks of Kazan’s style. But in the process of paying homage, it misses much of the point of the playwright himself. Rumor has it that in the original Broadway production, the playwright sat in the back rows sniggering through the whole production. I believe it, but even if it weren’t true, it should be. For A Streetcar Named Desire is really a very funny play, with the “dumb Pollack” Stanley, with his ridiculous pretensions of the paternalistic Napoleonic Law squaring off with a totally delusional “whore” (she has, after all, lured even a 17 year old male student into her bedroom and perhaps has slept with every passing soldier and salesman that every passed through Laurel, Mississippi, all of this after, in her youth, having mistakenly married a handsome homosexual boy whose death she triggered) who now demands that the hard-working momma’s boy, Mitch, attend to her with chivalrous demeanor of a knight-in-waiting. She wants magic, while Stanley wants realism. It’s a truly hilarious dance, with poor Stella, the star come down to earth, caught in between.

      And that is the problem with this production. This Streetcar plays out as a kind of dirge for a woman terrified—after an entire life of desire—of death in almost a Wagnerian fashion. But that isn’t Williams really. Anyone who could write lines such “The blind leading the blind,” or, even better, “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers,” is also suggesting a kind of pre-Sontag notion of camp. Blanche is one of the campiest figures who has ever been put upon the stage, I’d argue. And this company makes it all so very, very serious, the way Kazan perceived it.

      At least Heller doesn’t make poor Stella run with her baby up the stairs to her neighbor’s apartment. Instead, as Blanche meets the people from the insane asylum, this director sort of shuffles Stella and her neighbor off to the side, apparently on the street. But why cut the truly beautiful last encounter between her rapist husband and his wife which appears in Williams’ original version, which almost redeems both of them as human beings?: “Now, honey. Now, love. Now, now, love. Now, now love. Now, love....” This is perhaps the most tender moment that Stanley has in the entire play.

      The standing-room audience loved the production, applauding the company’s opening night with a standing ovation—perhaps as they should have. I may just be, in the end, a grumpy critic who has seen too many productions of this work and can’t get the comparisons out of my head.

      Yet, I won’t stop attending to this work and many other such iconic plays, hoping to find a production that makes me completely forget what came before it. Memory can be a dangerous thing, as well as a blessing; how I would love to see these works afresh; but that, of course, is impossible.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2019

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

 

Samuel Beckett | Happy Days / 2019

winnie on speed

by Douglas Messerli

 

Samuel Beckett Happy Days / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum / the performance I saw with Deborah Meadows on May 22, 2019

 

This past week I saw two famed plays each at opposite ends of Los Angeles, downtown and on the west side, that reminded me just how difficult it is to do iconic plays—works so memorable through previous productions or movie versions of them that it forces a knowledgeable theater-goer to compare them with what has come before them. Both Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (performed at the distinguished Mark Taper Forum, the play directed by James Bundy) and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire (at one of the most prestigious LA independent multiplex theaters, Odyssey Theatre Company) recalled similar problems I had recently had with a local production of Long Day’s Journey into the Night, wherein, unfortunately, I kept comparing the actors to the impressive movie production, starring Kathleen Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, Jr., and Dean Stockwell, directed by Sidney Lumet.

      Fortunately, the case of Happy Days, the central actor was the remarkable Dianne Wiest, one of my favorite actresses on both stage and screen. Moreover, I was too young to have seen the famed Ruth White performance of 1961. But I did, in 2014, see a quite marvelous production of this play in Pasadena’s Boston Court with Brooke Adams as Winnie, and her husband Tony Shalhoub playing a the one-line roll of Willie.

      Whereas Wiest sped through her role, making the partially buried Winne a bit like a train wreck that has left her in the chasm from which she cannot escape, bringing into focus all of Beckett’s hilariously absurd lines—the Taper audience was clearly alert to even the subtlest of the author’s humorous jabs—Adams had performed the play in a kind of slow-mode, revealing the endless repetitions, a bit like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, of a daily life performed while waiting to die, or to be buried alive.

      It’s not that Wiest isn’t almost perfect for this role, surely one of the best of her now long career; it’s just that I couldn’t help but compare the two performers and the bits and pieces I have seen on archival sites of Ruth White’s version. If Wiest brings out Winnie’s comic embracement of “the best of all possible worlds”—she is, indeed, a kind of student of Voltaire’s Pangloss if there ever was one—Adams was able to demonstrate the poignancy of living while yet representing the absurdity of the Beckettian trope of “I can’t go on; I will go on.”

     Similarly, Michael Rudko as the Taper’s Willie, is a wonderfully comic figure, popping up from his hole just often enough to make Winne believe she is not truly speaking only to herself.     

    And in the second scene with Winnie buried up to her neck, Weist and he came into their own, as the couple finally gently confronted one another and their fears. Weist’s attempt to encourage Willie to come near her so that she can better see him is a touching moment of love and utter frustration, which adds a dimension to her character that almost redeems what I had felt previously as her lack of voiced modulation. And that, in the end, have been the major problem for me: Weist is a genius when it comes to certain roles that demand a kind of one-level type of character: the Woody Allen wide-eyed and somewhat innocent woman or in the role of Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or even the wide-eyed Emily of Our Town; but although Winnie may be a Candide-like figure, she is also a salty pragmatist who has perhaps driven her husband and herself into their tapped lives. I never felt I heard in her voice the full dimensions of these two extremes.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2019

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

 

Lucas Hnath | A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney / 2022

cut

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Hnath A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney / directed by Peter Richards as produced by Racquel Lehrman, Theatre Planners at the Odyssey Theatre / the production I saw with Deborah Meadows was on March 27, 2022

 

Who might imagine that the seemingly gentle, fatherly-like man who weekly introduced throughout my 1950s childhood the long-running The Magical World of Disney was also a chain-smoking, gin swigging movie mogul who rarely saw his wife, used his brother Roy as both a stooge and a force in order to get want he wanted, was hated by his daughter who refused to name her third son after him, and was threatened in turn that her father would remove her name from his will?

     By now surely we should no longer be surprised that celebrities are often not what we perceive them to be. Walt himself, who projected an outward image of a shy man, uncomfortable in the public spotlight, confessed of the façade to a personal friend: “I’m not Walt Disney. I do a lot of things Walt Disney would not do. Walt Disney does not smoke. I smoke. Walt Disney does not drink. I drink.” He might have added, Walt Disney lives a perfect family life of loving kindness, while I’ll throw by brother to the wolves if it protects my image, I don’t much care about my wife, and I hate my son-in-law and think he’s an idiot.

     And indeed, if these were the worst of his faults, given all the joys Disney gave families throughout his life (he died of lung cancer in 1966) and far beyond, lending his name not only to the two most successful family amusement parks in the world, the hundreds of cartoons and motion pictures, and perhaps the most glorious architectural and musical center in Los Angeles, he might surely be forgiven for being a flawed individual.

     Fortunately, the real issue of  playwright Lucas Hnath’s 2013 play A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay about the Death of Walt Disney does not concern simply Walt Disney’s personal faults, using them only as tools to open up the crevices of the stone tomb in which the real man is embedded, just as the play is really not a “reading” nor a true “screenplay,” nor even a work “about Disney’s death,” although death is very much on the mind of the imaginary Disney who supposedly penned this screenwork.

     Hnath has a knack for asking his audiences to question and challenge who and things really are. Because someone tells you this is the way things happen, that this is really a reading or a screenplay, a dirge or a “biographical revelation, mightn’t we still actually question the reality of what we’re told by the individual, the work itself, or the media? As he explored in his early masterwork A Doll’s House, Part 2, just because Nora stormed out of her house in Ibsen’s play, was that really the end of the story? Or in his Hillary and Clinton, were Hillary and Bill Clinton really as terrible or as good as we might imagine them to be? Or as he asked in his play The Christians, performed at the Mark Taper Forum in 2016 (a play I saw and reviewed), can fundamentalist believers ever come to ask themselves whether their beliefs are the only viable ones on earth, that perhaps even those of other beliefs and atheists might also be saved by God’s love? What is a feminist, a president and his wife, a true believer, or, in this case, a remarkable family fantasist behind his assigned titular designation. Is that individual’s ability or inability to remain true to that role a thing for the better or the worse?

  

    At the heart of Hnath’s works is the question of the frailty of human desire, both from the inside of that desire’s representation and from the outside of our judgment of that being’s ability to live up to our vision of what his or her desire represents.

      First of all, obviously, we need to question the very words we have chosen to describe these notable beings. I was interested that Wikipedia chose to characterize Disney as an entrepreneur (a self-made tycoon or business magnate) which is probably closer to the truth than my definition of him as a fantasist. If it seems odd that Disney might wish to write a screenplay about himself, we need only recall that Walt knew screenplays well, and as an ex-cartoonist he knew how to create figures that attracted the human eye. We all want to be remembered for the best of what we were and are. I write. Others push their bodies to the limit on a football field, while some represent themselves best by portraying others, and still others work their entire lives just to brilliantly represent their employers. Disney knew movies.

      And should we be surprised that the screenplay, employing every second of the camera in motion, cuts continually in on its hero—unless he wants to deflect attention away from himself as he does when the hardworking animators “brilliantly representing their employer” demanded higher wages during the 1941 Animators’ Strike that lasted five weeks?

      Disney not only turned the matter over entirely to his brother Roy, leaving him to finally to make a settlement, but immediately accepted an offer to make a goodwill trip to South America as part of the Office of the coordinator of Inter-American Affairs effort to represent the most popular of American industries’ interest in their neighbors. Roy was forced to make the unpopular industry decisions to raise the animators’ salaries, some of his best animators, resenting Disney’s “cut,” leaving the company for good—one of the reasons that 1941’s Dumbo is a far less visually interesting film than 1937’s Snow White.

     Cut to Disney’s desire to take his films beyond the realm of mere fantasy into the real world of nature itself. Convinced by a Scrooge McDuck comic book artist that the small Rodentia of lemmings regularly control their burgeoning population by throwing themselves off cliffs, Walt demanded his nature filmmakers, who he’d placed under the aegis of Roy’s son Roy Edward, that despite their Canadian lemmings’ refusals to readily leap off cliffs, they had to encourage them to do what “came naturally.”

     In Hnath’s metaphor they somehow manipulate the tiny rodents with turntables, flipping them off like a gramophone needle dropped upon vinyl. In reality, Disney directors dropped lemmings over the cliff from garbage trunks for his 1958 film White Wilderness, despite the fact that there was never evidence of lemming suicides and that the suddenly overly populated lemming communities had been observed only in the Scandinavian species, never among the Canadian variety. The myth is still retained by some today, and again Roy and his son took the wrath of critics and animal protectionists, not Walt, the man behind the false science. This would be funny—and is in Hnath’s telling—if it weren’t for the fact that it meaninglessly led to the killing of so many small animals and that the Disney of the company myth remained, as always, blameless, while the movie furthered the falsehood for generations.

      Cut to the increasing bloody handkerchiefs stored up in Walt’s pockets as his cancerous illness worsens along with growing vision of how he might survive forever through being cryogenically frozen: just his head, which might be implanted on another healthier body in some far distant future...perhaps without any of his personal flaws.

      Gradually we begin to discern how a true believer in what he defines as good—in Walt’s case comprised mostly of iconic images of home and hearth, happiness for all, a good life for those who worked hard, pleasant surroundings, etc.—becomes increasingly upset when he discovers others do not totally agree with that vision. Like so many of his time, Disney turns from FDR supporter to conservative Republican. He testifies before the House Un-American Activities Committee, branding his former animators and labor union organizers Herbert Sorrell, David Hilberman, and William Pomerance as communist agitators. He tours filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl through his studio only a month after Kristallnacht. None of this appears, however, in Hnath’s play.

      The playwright focuses instead on Disney’s increasing determination to build a new city where everyone would live in peace and pleasantness, living out lives of total joy far too similar, to my way of thinking, to the world envisioned in Andrew Niccol’s and Peter Weir’s terrifying town of perfect facades of The Truman Show. Disney, it appears, was far less interested in building a new amusement center in Orlando than he was in realizing his control over the lives of the people of a visionary city, EPCOT ("Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow"). Like most fascists- in-budding, Disney begins with a grand vision of humanity; but when people get in his way or—in his imagination should citizens of that community might later disagree with the life assigned to them by the god-like creator—he goes into rages. At one point, angry with a situation, Disney even through one of his Oscars at his brother’s head. Late in his life he manipulated his “idiot” son-on-law, Ron Miller to cause chaos in the board meetings and perhaps assure that his grand empire might not survive after his death.

      When hurt by the criticism of others, Walt lists his admirers and lovers, including Mussolini, chastising Hitler as being foolish for not liking Mickey Mouse, as if somehow that was worse of the evil tyrant’s crimes. Roy tries to explain to him that he simply cannot make such public statements, to no avail.

      But in recognizing those roots of fascism in Disney we must also look into the mirror, as the play’s set designer David Offner does, to see how our own fantasies, our visions of the “American Dream” are reflected through similar lenses. You cannot demand order and similarity of vision in a world filled with millions of differing voices from thousands of dissimilar cultures, religions, sexual desires, and plain stubborn obstructionism without destroying the country we know as the USA. Without even intending it become that, the utopian EPCOT was inevitably a fascist, racist, homophobe world organized by the US majority viewpoint, a world that would never have permitted the real USA to enter its gates.

      Walt Disney was cremated upon his death at 65 and buried in 1966 Forest Lawn Memorial Park, not sped off to a secret cryogenic center in Irvine, California as the play might lead us to believe. Roy was left to squelch his brother’s plans for a utopian city, itself becoming simply another “ride” through the tour of his talented brother’s imaginary worlds.

      Disney was not, fortunately, a god, and was never permitted to become the fascist he might have unwittingly wished to become. But in his so very appealing dreams most Americans should take a deep look at their own unstated desires and beware.

      Cut. End of play. Game over.

 

Los Angeles, March 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2022).

 

Sam Shepard | Buried Child / 1984 [reading of play]

unburying the dead

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Shepard Buried Child in Sam Shepard: Seven Plays (New York: Dial Press, 1984)

 

In Rome I read Sam Shepard’s Buried Child for the first time, surprised by how similar it was to my own play The Confirmation. In both plays the action centers on a dysfunctional family to which the return of a family member accompanied by an outsider results in the revelation of a terrible family secret that may or may not be true. In both plays the vernacular of American everyday phrases and clichés combines with the bizarre behavior of family members to create a highly comical tone. I love the comic scenes of Shepard’s play, the absurd upstairs/downstairs conversation between husband and wife, Dodge and Halie; the hilarious gardening of Tilden, who discovers whole armfuls of corn and carrots in a backyard without a garden; and the mad family interchange between Dodge, Tilden, Vince and Shelley, in which grandfather and son seem unable to recognize or even recall the existence of Vince, who Halie later describes as having been “the sweetest little boy.” But then, this family hardly recognizes family members with whom they live, each describing one another as utter failures, and yet each nearly unable to care for himself.

 

     The play is flawed, however, by the heavy metaphor (and possible reality of) the “buried child,” purportedly a child that came late in Halie’s life and was killed by her husband because it was the offspring of another man. Were Shepard simply to use this as metaphor, allowing the audience to heavily doubt Dodge’s admission—as they learn to doubt all of his other statements—it would still float heavily upon the play, but it might remain aloft. For, quite obviously, all Dodge’s and Halie’s children are “buried,” remnants of the couple’s desperate embracement of the American Dream. Tilden, the eldest, has a criminal record and, having lost his freedom, has also lost much of his mind. Bradley is half a man, an amputee and, in the manner of a Beckett character, is unable to even move throughout much of the play; Ansel—the basketball and soldier hero—is, in fact, dead, another buried child for whom Halie seeks a memorial statue, basketball in one hand, rifle in the other. This family’s refusal to recognize Tilden’s son, Vince, renders him, like the others, incapable of action, independence, escape. He may have come home to re-experience—as Shelley sees it—a Norman Rockwell vision of home life, but has found instead a household right out of The Addams Family. As a man of inaction, Vince is the rightful inheritor of the estate, and when Shelley’s departs, he is doomed to a life, like all the others, without vitality and love.

     Shepard, however, cannot leave his metaphor alone, forcing Tilden to dig up the symbol and, in mud-covered clothes, visually “serve it up,” so to speak, to the audience. Like Jonathan Barofsky’s Hammering Man, Shepard drives his message home, deadening any true wonderment that previously existed in the work.                              

 

Café Mancini, Rome, October 15, 2003

Reprinted from Green Integer blog (October 2003).

Kier Peters | The Confirmation / 1994

confirming reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kier Peters The Confirmation (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993)

Kier Peters The Confirmation Vineyard Theatre (as part of the T.W.E.E.D. New Works Festival) / April 6 and 7, 1994

 

Almost from the moment in September 1991 when we returned to Jerry Fox’s condominium after the memorial ceremony for Howard’s mother Rose, I took out pen and paper and began to write the play The Confirmation.

      Obviously, Rose’s death—I was close to both of Howard’s parents—triggered something in me about mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and sons—although the Midwestern women of the play could not be more different, in their language and mannerisms, than the Baltimore-raised Rose Fox. The character’s language, in its aphoristic repetitions, bore traces, however, of another Baltimorean, Gertrude Stein.

     From the moment Mother commanded Grandma to “sit down there nicely and be out of the way!” (something, given the current situation, I might have commanded of myself), the women of my play took control of my head and hand, leading me through a series of incidents over which I seemed to have little control. Whenever I even attempted to think out some element of plot, the voices forced me in other directions, so that page after page of the original manuscript was torn up, lines crossed out.

      “What are you doing?” asked Jerry, observing me writing in a seemingly uncomfortable position at the dining room windowsill.

     “Writing,” was all I could mutter, as words tumbled through my fingers to the little notebook before me. It seemed I could not write fast enough, and by the time we had returned to Los Angeles a couple of days later, I had completed a rough draft. Never had I produced a work so painlessly. The only things that needed alteration, so it appeared, were instances where I had gotten ahead of my characters’ words and acts.

     As I do with all my plays—or, at least, as Kier does—I sent a typed copy to playwright friend Mac Wellman, who read it with great enthusiasm, ultimately suggesting its inclusion in the 1994 T.W.E.E.D New York Festival.

     Mac also arranged, at an earlier date, a reading at Richard Caliban’s Cucaracha Theater in New York, a production overseen by Richard’s wife, Mollie O’Mara, who later directed the Festival production. The wonderful actress/teacher Nora Dunfee performed in that original reading (there may have been others of the later cast in the first reading, but I have no memory of who else performed). I do know that playwrights Wellman, Len Jenkin, and Matthew Maguire, along with my editor, actress Diana Daves (upon whom I had based, in part, the character of Mother) were in attendance. The reading went splendidly, creating a much more absurdly comic effect than the later Festival production.

     I had titled the play The Confirmation because the work concerned a group of figures who were all attempting to confirm their various visions of reality—visions each at odds with one another. The outsider to this dysfunctional family, Carmelita, was also attempting to confirm her position as a member of the family (yes, Carson McCullers had come to mind in the writing) and to confirm a reality different from what family members were willing to admit. During the final revision, moreover, I was watching on television the horrific circus of the confirmation hearings in October 1991 of Judge Clarence Thomas, accused by his former co-worker Anita Hill of inappropriate sexual conversations covering everything from gang rape, the size of porn star Long Dong Silver’s penis, to sexual intercourse with animals! Who could have made up such a bizarre scenario? To me, Hill’s painful testimony could be nothing but the truth, and to this day I am convinced of the incompetence of the conservative Justice of the Supreme Court, and I must admit, I was taken aback by Joesph Biden’s hurry to push that nomination through.

     Accordingly, I began my play with a quote, representing the two opposing visions of truth represented by those hearings: Anita Hill’s statement “I felt that I had to tell the truth,” as against Thomas’s summary of events, “I have never, in all my life, felt such hurt, such pain, such agony.” To me it seemed to sum up the idea of truth and consequence. My Sun & Moon Press published the play in 1993.

 

Los Angeles, September 17, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2012).

 

Bill Talen, Savitri D., and the Life After Shopping Choir | Reverend Billy and the Life After Shopping Gospel Choir: The Earth-a-Llujah Earth-a-Llujah Revival! / 2010

tigers got to hunt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bill Talen, Savitri D., and the Life After Shopping Choir Reverend Billy and the Life After Shopping Gospel Choir: The Earth-a-Llujah Earth-a-Llujah Revival! / October 21, 2010 at Redcat (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall Complex, Los Angeles

 

There I was, dressed down and all hyped up, credit cards in pocket in preparation for the invocation that we rid ourselves of some, impatiently awaiting the start of the revival—in two performances back to back—of the Rev. Billy and his rabble-rousing "life after shopping" gospel choir. "Changealujah!" was surely in the air.

     I'd read of this performance artist's transformation from Bill Talen over the last years into a monologue-ing, prayer-invoking, anti-capitalist-preaching, left-leaning version of Billy Graham-Jimmy Swaggart-and Ted Haggard all rolled into one Brechtian being. May the theater-walls of ritual realism come tumbling down upon our ears, I secretly prayed.

     The chorus of eighteen marched forward robbed all in—what other color could it be?—green, singing up a storm about American consumption: "forgivealujah." How terrible, they proclaimed, "the supermarket is now our neighborhood!" "Monopoly is not democracy," etc. etc. "This town ain't no supermarket!" they announced.

     Rev. Billy strutted behind, gradually getting into the feel of things before he could come before us with the testimonial that, despite his previous messages, he had accepted the money from his recent award of the Herb Alpert Foundation connected to CalArts, as well as their invitation to perform in the Disney Hall. The Reverend had come down very hard in past sermons on Mickey and Minnie Mouse. Hypocrisy some might call it, but hardly something new when it comes to spiritual zealots of either the left or right.

     The chorus rolled out another sprightly tune: "Push back—stop that Starbucks," or something to that effect—and another and another yet. The chorus gave each song a lot of energy, despite the fact that I could not always hear the lyrics, although I sat in the fourth row.

     It was time for Rev. Billy's sermon. But tonight he seemed, well, I must admit, quite muted, quietly ruminating on his recent experiences with the people of the Appalachian Mountains where he and they had been working with environmental activists to stop coal mining. You know, he confided, as if this might be the very first time we had heard it, this "rip up and extract mentality," along with the destruction and sludge it reaps, brings "cancer to the promised land."

     The earth is inarticulate, he explained. People must speak. And he spoke quite beautifully about the power of these poor Appalachian people, bound together by mountain after mountain for several generations. It was a very sweet sermon, if not so very original. Although different in tenor, he was similar in tone to all the ministers I had heard in my youth. Which is why I stopped going to church.

     There was a lot of "good feeling" in the room, as if we had found a congregation of one mind, and joined together just for this night only to celebrate the changes he and we together sought. Like most such ministers, he encouraged us to reach out and touch our neighbors: the couple who sat nearest me were from Torrence, having joined the congregation because her brother was in the chorus. I don't know, accordingly, whether they shared the same sensibility as most of the audience clearly did. For a few minutes even I forgot about the Tea Partyers, having left them behind in this temporary Left-leaning heaven. Thankalujah!

     "Tigers got to hunt," sang the chorus. "Tigers got to eat. Birds got to fly. Humans try to understand."

 

    I was confused. Were the tigers good in their necessities or simply dangerous? Or both? Perhaps that's what we humans couldn't understand. As Reverend Billy argued: "Nobody knows what to do."

     That's certainly true. But when you go to theater you expect the performers at least to suggest a temporary answer or to more profoundly question you about things than he and his chorus had. This was, clearly, less a revival, a renewal of faith or belief, than it was a repetition of what I think we all had known for some time, a kind of celebration of our good aspirations. Entertaining enough, surely, but something that left me, like the tigers, hungry for more. 

      Ex-porn star Annie Sprinkle and her "wife" Dr. Beth Stephens, sitting in the audience (Rev. Billy would officiate their "marrying the moon" a day later), were brought onto stage, where the chorus sang out in support of gay marriage as "A way to say I do."

      As Mae West might have queried, "And what did you do?"

 

Los Angeles, October 23, 2010

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

Enda Walsh | Penelope / 2010

pool of survivors

By Douglas Messerli

 

Enda Walsh Penelope / performed by Druid theatre company at St. Ann's Warehouse, Brooklyn, New York (the performance I saw was on November 13, 2010)

 

At the bottom of Penelope's swimming pool four men gather each morning to await the appearance of Penelope, whereupon they take turns trying to woo her into marriage. Odysseus has been away for years and these four, now middle-aged and elderly, are the leftovers of what was once hundreds of suitors, all seeking the wealth and protection marriage with her might bring.

     None of them, we quickly realize, is suitable for the beautiful Penelope, who watches from her window without saying a word. The most elderly and learnéd man of the group, Fritz (brilliantly performed by Niall Buggy) is a bald and wizened oracle, spending most of his day reading Homer's tales of the missing king. His bid for Penelope's hand is based mostly on his recognized inability to believe in or do anything. Like a Beckett character, he pleads, at the edge of nothingness, for the transformation into a possibility of life, for a new start. Like Beckett's characters his plea is nearly meaningless, but his words, carefully chosen and lovingly performed, seem to move the implacable queen's heart.

     The portly Dunne (Denis Conway) is perhaps a more gifted speaker, a wittier entertainer, but his speech to Penelope turns quickly into a series of scatological metaphors, his and her body becoming the center of his perceived universe. It is clear that he has eaten himself into excess, and that excess has spilled over into his thinking, infuriating the others—and, at times, even himself. Dunne, the son of a even more overweight woman, he tells us, was loved only when he put jam behind his ears. He is, in short, more desperate to be loved than he himself is a loving being.

     The worst of these survivors, the Alpha male Quinn (Karl Shiels), dresses only in speedos as he poses in muscle builder's stance before attempting to light the barbecue, dropped one day into the pool from above. Yet the machine won't light, and he is forced to cook his dinner with a propane blowlamp. His own body is flabby rather than firm. In this empty world people and things have broken down, disintegrated.

     On the day we witness, one out of hundreds for these stolid men, Quinn has had a dream that Odysseus will return, killing each of them, beginning with Fritz. When the other three admit that they have had the same dream, it is apparent that the event will occur. And he suggests, to possibly save themselves, that they each support one another in their performances before the queen. Quinn, the most abusive of the speakers, is the last to perform, and we await that speech with great anticipation. Yet when it becomes his turn, we witness only a series of outrageous tableaux, performed with the help of the abused Burns (Tadig Murphy)—who Quinn treats throughout, much like Lucky in Waiting for Godot, as a tortured manservant—dressing, alternately, as Gone with the Wind's Rhett Butler and Scarlet O'Hara, as Napoleon and Josephine, Romeo and Juliet, and Jack and Jackie, transforming himself in magic-whisks-of hand as if he were acting in Charles Ludlam's The Mystery of Irma Vep. The result is everything but sexually enticing or romantic.

      The much put-upon Burns helps with these quick changes, but you can see his hate building up against the three men, particularly Quinn, in the previous scenes. For despite his stupid obedience of these dunces, Burns has secretly begun to think, gradually recognizing their brutality,  most importantly the psychological terrorism of Quinn, who has caused the death of Murray, Burns' best friend. From his growing resentment of that event, it is clear that despite all the hateful competition these men have enacted and endured, love has nonetheless survived. And it is that recognition of "love," however puny it may be, that convinces Fritz, Dunne, and Burns that Quinn must be destroyed, that were he to win Penelope's hand, love might be wiped away from their society.

     In a sense, all of these men are already dead, not simply because they will be killed by the returning hero, but because they have destroyed themselves, have turned the world to stone through their language of wit, lies, mockery—hate. Basically repeating his role of Sean in Walsh's The Walworth Farce, Murphy's character stabs Quinn to death, freeing their world from the cut-throat menace of eternal battle.

    For Burns there is suddenly the possibility to return to "the real world" of men and women rising each morning listening to the simple sounds of nature, who tell stories they have heard instead of cunningly creating a wall of meaningless words. Yet his long ending speech, also made up of words, is so powerfully human that it moves Penelope to momentarily descend into this symbolic hell. But at that same moment, we know Odysseus has returned to port, the barbecue furiously flaming up in the symbolic renewal of love and desire.  

     Walsh's play is perhaps too preachy and strained to be great, but it is certainly a work worth witnessing, if only for the intelligent cast I saw perform it.

 

New York, November 14, 2010

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