what america
abandons abandons america
by Douglas Messerli
Mac Wellman Two September, New York, The Flea Theater / November 29-December
16, 2006 (The performance I saw was on December 7, 2006)
Over the years I have probably seen
more plays by the noted American playwright Mac Wellman than any other writer.
Beginning as early as 1986, I saw Mac’s play Cleveland performed as a BACA downtown production at, of all
places, Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. In 1992, I attended the first of his
famed Crowtet series, The Murder of Crows, at Primary Stages
in New York. At the first production of the reconstructed Victory Theater on 42nd Street, I witnessed the 1994 En Garde Arts production of his Crowbar, which won two Obie Awards. The
same year I saw both Swoop and Dracula at the Soho Repertory Theatre.
The Los Angeles theater company, Bottom's Dream—with whom I co-produced a
series of readings that included Mac’s Second-Hand
Smoke, the third play in his Crowtet
series—premiered the final play of that series, The Lesser Magoo, in Los Angeles in 1997. A year later I sat in on
a reading of his Cats-Paw while
visiting New York. I saw Terminal Hip performed
in Los Angeles by Bottom's Dream in 2000, and witnessed his dance-drama Antigone in New York at the Big Dance
Company/Classic Stage Company in 2001.
Beyond these numerous play productions, I published his plays The Professional Frenchman (1990) and Bad
Penny (1990) on my Blue Corner
Drama series (the precursor to my later publishing house, Green Integer),
printed his influential anthology Theatre
of Wonders: Six Contemporary Plays on my Sun & Moon Press in 1985,
published the first two Crowtet plays
as Two Plays in 1994 on Sun &
Moon and reprinted those plays as Crowtet
1 on the Green Integer imprint in 2000, following up with Crowtet 2 in 2003. Wellman’s two Dracula
plays, The Land Beyond the Forest:
Dracula and Swoop (1994) appeared
on my Sun & Moon Press, as did his novels The Fortuneteller (1991) and Annie
Salem (1996) and his collection of poetry, A Shelf in Woop’s Clothing (1990). More recently, I published his
novel Q’s Q: An Arboreal Narrative on
my Green Integer press. Together we co-edited the significant anthology of
American drama, From the Other Side of
the Century: A New American Drama 1960-1995, which included 38 American
plays since 1960, including Wellman’s own The
Hyacinth Macaw.
Accordingly, I presume that it will be understood as no disparagement of
Wellman’s great talent to suggest that the newest play I witnessed, Two September, at The Flea Theater on
December 7, 2006, was not my
favorite of his works. Basically a political statement, the play seemed without
much of the linguistic energy of his other works, despite the interweaving of
texts by American writer Josephine Herbst, from whom he quotes a long passage
that might be read as a thematic entry into this work:
Today the point of gravity for
responsibility has shifted from the small
community to the relationship
between things. Experiences have even
made themselves independent of
men… Over the air ways, in movies,
experiences come to be dogmatized
to certain kinds of experiences at
the cost of all others… The world
comes second hand—or fifth hand—
to us and the illusion that it is
fresh because it is shown as a picture of
an actual place by some reporter
divides man into incalculable parts of
any true center. (from New Green World, 1954)
Although I have difficulty with what
I perceive as a romanticized notion of “the center”—a harkening back to an
order of small town America and the social priorities of another age—I think
there may be no better direct statement of what I began to explore in the 2006
volume of My Year: the simulacrum we
now seem to desire in place of the “real” because it remains, in its imitation
of dangerous reality, at a safer distance than the actual events. But, of
course, in that preference we often have no way of knowing whether what we are
witnessing is something that has been manipulated to look like the real thing
or an accurate image of it. Truth thus becomes so separated from reality, from
what might have really happened, that we have no way of unweaving it from
someone’s fabricated warp and weft. As Herbst has argued, coming as it has from
one or perhaps six degrees of separation, the real becomes disconnected from
us, and, accordingly, is indeterminable and often indecipherable.
Herbst’s statements seem even more prescient in the context of later
wars in Vietnam, the first Iraq invasion (when even news reporters were kept at
a distance from significant events) and our current occupation of Iraq. Only
yesterday—through the simulacrum of my choice, a CNN television report—the
young soldier, Staff Sgt. Roy Starbeck, interviewed from Baghdad, expressed precisely
these issues: "It's just...really just aggravating," he said,
shrugging his shoulders. "People saying that they don't support the war
because they don't like the president or saying they don't support the war
because they are Democrats or saying they support the war because they are
Republicans. None of them are taking the time or energy to find out what is
actually going on over here."
Obviously, with the rise of virtual
realities in our computerized age, it becomes even more difficult to separate
any notion of “real” from what is imagined or simulated.
Iowa writer Herbst, former friend to Ernest Hemingway and Robert
MacAlmon, experienced these problems first hand when she was summarily
dismissed from her position at the Office of Strategic Services—precursor to the
Central Intelligence Agency—an organization that helped to arm, train, and
supply anti-German and anti-Japanese groups, including Mao Tse Tung’s Communist
Forces in China and Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh, the Vietnamese National Liberation
Movement. Herbst was released from her position, evidently, on the basis of
classified reports, thus allowing her no opportunity to even know the charges
or defend herself from them.
Sound familiar? It is precisely what President Bush is advocating for
individuals who today are arrested on terrorist charges, that such
people—defined by the government as terrorists—should have no access to normal
legal procedures, that because of the need for governmental secrecy they have
no right to know all the charges against them, and, accordingly, no possibility
of a knowledgeable defense. Herbst was later to discover that the source of
information that named her as a political radical (in fact, her second marriage
was to John Herrmann, the writer who introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger
Hiss, and Herbst did embrace various
Marxist ideas of the time)—information that was filled with lies and exaggeration—had come from her supposed
friend, Texas fiction writer Katherine Anne Porter. Although Herbst was later
cleared of all charges, her reputation and career basically ended with her
dismissal in the early 1940s.
Against this backdrop Wellman portrays larger world-wide political
events, particularly those relating to the young Ho Chi Minh, who had lived in
and traveled throughout the United States in the first decade of the 20th century, and was highly influenced in his own attempts to free Indochina from
the French colonialist regimes by the American Declaration of Independence and
other such documents. His September 2, 1945 declaration of
Vietnamese Independence in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi began:
All men are created equal.
They are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights;
among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit
of Happiness….”
Wellman presents the man as having
sympathetic allies on the American front in China and Vietnam in 1945,
individuals who attempted to explain to American higher-ups that it was in our
better interest to support the Vietnamese National Liberation. OSS chief,
William J. Donovan—the same man who fired Herbst—finally notified the local
American forces to have no more connections with Ho Chi Minh, and in 1946 the
first Indochina War (the Franco-Vietnamese war) began, resulting in the
division of South and North Vietnam, and, ultimately, in the American military
involvement in that country.
The only actual link between Herbst and Ho Chi Minh is the figure of
Donovan, and that fact, perhaps, is what weakens this play’s claim to our moral
outrage. Donovan, moreover, later became assistant to the chief prosecutor,
Telford Taylor, at the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal and received the
Distinguished Service Medal.*
What continues to haunt me, long after Wellman’s play, however, has less
specifically to do with Donovan or his role in these two seemingly unconnected
events, but relates to what might be perceived as the American inability to
separate our fears from listening to the voices of people who, caring about our
values and ideals, represent opposing viewpoints. And it is in this matrix of
events—even more than our misunderstandings of Indochinese politics, it seems
to me—that we reveal our ready acceptance of the simulacrum over truth. The
same blindness that Wellman speaks of in the post-World War II politics were
continued in the Nixon-era slogans such as “Love it or leave it,” declarations
of hatred to anybody who even questioned American military decisions in the
Vietnam War, perpetuating the absurd confusion that disagreeing with
governmental policies and decisions necessarily means opposition to or hatred
of our country or—to bring it into today’s context—represents terrorist
attitudes. It is strange that in a country founded on individual freedoms—a
country that was created by individuals speaking out against what was perceived
as unfair governmental authority—is so fearful of embracing those who question
and challenge political monotheism. In fact, by dismissing figures as radically
different as Ho Chi Minh and Josephine Herbst we threaten our existence. Had we
heard and followed the enthusiasms and admonitions of that Vietnamese leader,
we might have saved ourselves from years of painful political turmoil and
rescued the lives of thousands of American and Vietnamese men and women. Had we
listened to a voice like Josephine Herbst, we might have recognized that the
truths we believed we held were imitations of—indeed were false presentations
of—the real thing. By abandoning figures such as Herbst and the hundreds of
falsely accused liberals and even communist sympathizers within our own
country, we forced them to abandon America; their insights and percipient
warnings were no longer heard. That some of them remained to advocate
alternative views speaks not to the greatness of our country but to their own
unswerving beliefs in the truth.
*Of more
interest, however, is the fact that Donovan was later the chairman of the
American Committee on United Europe which, with funding from the Rockefeller
and Ford Foundations—secretly supported by CIA monies channeled through the
Fairchild Foundation—fought against what was perceived as the omnipresent
Communist force by attempting to unify Europe, which, in turn, led not only to
the establishment of America’s cold war policies, but helped to fuel the
cauldron of Communist fears brewed by the Senate Committee for Un-American
Activities investigations and those meetings by house member Joseph McCarthy
(part of the larger series of events related to the experiences of Josephine
Herbst)—and indirectly led to today’s European Union.
Los Angeles, January 11, 2007
Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 9 (June-October 2007), on-line
