Kier Peters / The Confirmation / 1994 [production]

confirming reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

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.

     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.

    When I came to New York in early April 1994 to observe rehearsals for the Festival production, I discovered that O’Mara had read the work somewhat differently from what I had, particularly in connection with anti-war statements. It wasn’t that she was incorrect in her interpretations—indeed much was said in this family about military service, whose men, in war after war, had died—but the fact that she and costume designer Carol Brys had decided to literalize those issues, dressing Carmelita, the lesbian nun living in a relationship with Sister, in a military-like costume, came as a surprise. The other major change in the play was Mollie’s decision to cast the estranged sister, Blanche, whom the family believes speaks only Norwegian, but, in fact, speaks only Yiddish, with the wonderful actor Kirk Jackson, dressing in drag and speaking English in a heavy Yiddish accent. When she was at her best, Nora Dunfee, a beloved acting teacher (and the elderly Southern woman on the park bench in the film, Forrest Gump), was a perfect Grandma, but throughout rehearsals she was having difficulty memorizing her lines, and the day before the premiere we were forced to embed the script in a magazine, laying open upon the table in front of the backyard “couch.”

     None of these “changes” really upset me, since I have always felt that one of the wonders of theater is the possibility of various interpretations of a work which directors and actors can provide. With that in mind, I write only minimal stage directions, and prefer to leave the set—in this case highly stylized, with large cardboard tubes suggesting the trees of the backyard—an abstraction. What I wasn’t prepared for was the utter stubbornness of some actors. The woman playing Carmelita, in particular, was constantly asking me about her motivations. Since I have never written from of a psychologically-based perspective, I simply could not answer her. “Clearly she just wants to be part of the family, wants to be part of something!” I declared. But again and again, Cate Woodruff was pulling the work into a kind of bog of conditions, reasons, explanations, and the more O’Mara and I tried to float the play as the slightly nostalgic comedic work I had imagined it, she flatly pulled it down into a thwarted drama of small-town lives.

     Fortunately, lighting director Richard Schaefer and the composer Tom Burnett had captured the spirit of the work, and, along with Jackson’s slightly campy portrayal of Blanche, which completely pulled the play away from any sense of realism, often succeeded in restoring the work’s sense of bemused acceptance of the darker horrors of family life.

     Howard attended the two performances on April 6 and 7 at the famed Vineyard Theatre, along with, once again, many of my playwright friends, Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, Hannah Weiner, and other poets and artists. Howard, however, did not feel the play succeeded, suggesting that I was straddling absurdity and realism, maintaining that what I had really attempted to do was to write a fully developed realist play—something that couldn’t be further from my mind. Besides, I had no control over the situation, I tried to explain; the characters wrote the play, not I.

     A few weeks after this production, Nora Dunfee fell to a New York street, dead from brain cancer. Clearly her lack of memory throughout the production had been a product of her illness!

    Some years later, a Los Angeles theater company decided to produce The Confirmation for one night. I suggested I might attend the rehearsals, but they seemed to question the need for that. Nonetheless, I did drop by, where I was obviously seen as an intruder even more dangerous than Carmelita. After the rehearsal, the director introduced me to the cast as the publisher of the play, and suddenly I realized why I had gotten such a cold shoulder. “And I might add, I am also the playwright himself; I write under the pseudonym of Kier Peters.” Suddenly several cast members came forward filled with questions.

     That production was what I can only describe as a disaster. The company had been famous for, at one time, producing plays by Ionesco—which explained, perhaps, the continual manipulation throughout the play of various pieces of furniture, particularly the movement of chairs! Of close friends, I think only Martin Nakell attended—thank heaven! And today, so he tells me, he has forgotten the event.                      

 

Los Angeles, May 3, 2008

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2008).

Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal | Ten Chi / 2007

you know what i mean

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal Ten Chi, Royce Hall, UCLA / the performance I saw as on Sunday, November 11, 2007

 

Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater’s “Ten Chi,” begins promisingly enough, the stage featuring a sculptural conception of what appears to be a frozen whale or, at least, a whale frozen in space half in and half out of white ocean. For the first half of the work, Bausch’s dancers alternate with graceful lifts—in which the women performers such as Azusa Seyama, held parallel to the stage, appear to swim along with the whale—and dreamlike movements and verbal skits, including Metchild Grossman’s comic query of the front-row audience members whether or not they snore. The alternating currents of water-and-wave-like movements and the dream-like occurrences—including a shower of seemingly never-ending snow—create what appears to be a significant context for Chi, the metaphysical life forces which are promised as “exercises” in the second act.

       Yet gradually, what might have been interwoven into a moving testament to contrary cultural experiences increasingly comes to be represented in cabaret-like sketches: the usurpation of a corner of woman’s dress as a male’s napkin, a man cavorting in a long evening gown. And differing cultural experiences grow into more like “Saturday Night Live” satires of Japanese stereotypes: a woman teaches others how to properly bow, another gives a rendering of standardized Western images of Japan through a comic extension of the consonants of words such as Mount Fuji, samurai, sushi, etc. Another skit satirizes the Japanese love of the camera.

    As on-line reviewer Paul Ben-Itzak commented on The Dance Insider: “Do we really need another comic riff on the snapshot-crazy Japanese…?” A dancer of Asian heritage attempts to tell the audience they are now free to leave since the performance is over; as the audience remains frozen in place, she repeatedly returns, with Geisha-like graciousness, to convey the seriousness of her statements: “Oh, I so sorry, very sorry. I understand,” she reports, “you think I joking with you, you think when I say you may go now, I am really saying you should stay…”—and in other words to that effect.

     Instead of gradually attempting to unveil the mysteries of the life-forces of things, Bausch’s dancers turn what began as a cultural exchange on its head, ultimately reverting to all things European rather than Asian. Finally, as these skits gasp into increasingly unfunny comic routines and movements (a dancer punching a miked pillow, three men with Eraserhead hair dancing steps similar to those of street-dancing and hip-hop) the entire performance seems to collapse. Almost as if to redeem the utterly disconnected movements of “Chi,” Bausch pulls out the stops, forcing her talented company, one by one, to repeatedly run from every corner of the stage and nearby doors as they dance a maddened frenzy of athletic (and one must admit, often quite joyfully engaging) movements. Perhaps that is enough: certainly the audience at UCLA’s Royce Hall thought it sufficient to give a long and rousing ovation, not one of the usually hurried California audience members dashing from the theater to claim his car!

      What most irritated me about Bausch’s (and her dancer’s work, since her theater is a collaborative affair) was that while the work suggested it might attend to one of the most substantial differences between the East and West, focusing on the Asian idea that each thing in the world has its own energy and life-force, “Ten Chi” seemed to indicate that any “superficial differences” the cultures experience are merely something at which to laugh: what we know, they know, and any seeming incomprehension is unimportant.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2007

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2007).

 

Pyrotr Tchaikovsky and Modest Tchaikovsky | Iolanta || Béla Bartók and Béla Balázs | Bluebeard's Castle / 2015 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

what’s love got to do with it?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pyrotr Tchaikovsky (composer), Modest Tchaikovsky (libretto, based on a play by Henrik Hertz), Iolanta and Béla Bartók (music), Béla Balázs (libretto, based on a story by Charles Perreault), Bluebeard’s Castle, Mariusz Treliński (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) / 2015 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

I originally intended, before actually viewing the two operas presented in the MET’s HD Valentine’s Day broadcast, to discuss these works separately, adding my remarks about the Bartok opera to those I had already made above on the Los Angeles Opera production, and writing about the Tchaikovsky work, never before performed on the Metropolitan Opera stage, within another context. After seeing the pair of short operas, directed by Mariusz Treliński, it became apparent that to do so would be to ignore the carefully constructed and, at times, revelatory links between the two works.

     Of course, there is absolutely no reason to imagine that these two very different pieces, written only 20 years apart, need have anything to do with one another, Iolanta representing clearly a work of 19th century that romanticizes love and seeks for its characters’ purification through their orientation to the light, “the pearl” of God’s gift to mankind. Light is not just God’s first creation, but representative of moral value and comprehension in the Tchaikovsky work.

     This work struggles with a pre-modernist dilemma: how is someone without the knowledge of light and all that it represents—good, beauty, love, wisdom—able to comprehend what is missing from their life? Importantly, the opera asks questions that Blake had previously posed: can innocence be good, does lack of knowledge allow for salvation, or, as Pope Francis recently pondered, can an animal be forgiven and granted eternal life? For in this opera, which the director has linked up intimately with animal life, represents the blind Iolanta (Anna Netrebko) locked up, not in a beautifully enchanted cottage—as the original libretto would have it—but in a hunting cabin, replete with the trophies of deer antlers posted across its walls. Deers are seen roaming about the place, are shot, and their blood is drained all during the course of short performance.

     In Treliński’s version, the young girl’s father, King René (Ilya Bannik) is not just a misguided parent, attempting to protect his beloved daughter from a truth which may, he fears, transform her joyful demeanor into a world of fear and terror, but is a dictatorial figure who pretends wisdom while denying even the concept of it—no one with access to girl is allowed to mention light and vision. Yet at opera’s start, Iolanta has come of age enough to perceive that something is missing from her life, and begins to suffer even though she cannot yet comprehend why she might have any right to do so, particularly since she is lovingly cared for by servants day and night. Eyes, accordingly, have no purpose but for tears, and tears, alas, have become to appear in her eyes without cause. What we begin to perceive is that, even in the closed world in which she has been sheltered, the young blind girl is beginning to comprehend that something is amiss. How can her nurse, for example, know that she is crying without touching her eyes, to spot her fever without putting her hands to her forehead?

     The opera’s libretto, however, does hint, moreover, that René’s intentions may not all be a as loving as they are manipulative. Why will he not even reveal that he is the king or that Iolanta has been promised in marriage to Duke Robert (Aleksei Markov)? This beautiful young maiden locked away in her enchanted garden, after all, is not so very different from the forested animals the King keeps on his property to hunt them down and destroy them. And not only is René mistaken in his notions of filial protection, but he has not bothered to discover whether or not the young man to whom she is promised is a suitable husband for her. In fact, Robert, even knowing of the vow to which he has been committed, has been, so to speak, actively playing the field, and has fallen in love with another woman, Mathilda.

      Fortunately, his close companion, Vaudémont (Piotr Beczala) has not yet found the perfect woman he is seeking, and which, almost as soon as he has sung of his desires, he discovers in the visage of Iolanta. But even suddenly witnessing everything for which he has been seeking, also reveals his own failures: for him everything is based on sight. Accordingly, just as he begins to reveal to the unknowing girl the importance of light and all that it represents, she, in incomprehension of words, begins to reveal to him that love, wisdom, and knowledge can (and must) be known even in the darkness.

     Had Tchaikovsky been a 20th-century composer, he surely would have sought out that second truth more thoroughly, faced as Bartók would soon be, with the bleakness of the already discordant future. But Tchaikovsky and his story, being of another time, pursues instead how to bring the light to his heroine’s life so that she, too, can be blessed just as has her loving knight.

     Today, the ridiculousness of the magical cure by the Arab doctor Ibn-Hakia (Elchin Arizov) is apparent, with its mysterious “backstage” melodramatics which, we are told, the young girl bravely endures as she is forced to wear a blindfold to cover eyes that cannot see the light. Chalk it all up to a dramatic revelation of the fact that she is cured, and is now suddenly able, because she has willed it, to share in God’s great and glorious gift, all somewhat campily represented in this opera’s conclusion through the project of white rays emanating in an art- deco-like pattern behind the carefully arranged gathering, for the work’s conclusion, of the chorus and leads.

     Hinting that the happy girl of the first opera, in entering the new century, is drawn to return to the world of her father’s dark domination—or, one might almost argue, as if young Countess of Rossini’s Barber of Seville were to sudden awake in the bed of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figuro—Judith (Nadja Michael) of Bluebeard’s Castle inexplicably leaves her happy home of light to follow the Bluebeard (Mikhail Petrenko) into his nightmare castle. Like Vaudémont of the Tchaikovsky opera, Judith hopes to help Bluebeard—by opening the doors to all his rooms and revealing their secrets—to see the light and, in that process, discover just what they meant for Iolanta: good, beauty, love and wisdom. Treliński, in attempting to link these works, brings in, quite naturally, elements of the first work, the antlered deer heads, the roots of trees, flowers, etc into the second opera as Judith tries to entice Bluebeard to perceive (perhaps with a bit tweaking of the translation) just what Modest Tchaikovsky described as “the pearl” of God’s gift to mankind. And, in this sense, by performing these works together, they function to slightly shimmer off of one another, giving each work an intensity of meaning that alone they might not reveal. What also became clear by bringing these works together, was how informed they both were by eastern European thought, along with its inherent appositions of evil and good, meaninglessness and revelation.

    Yet, as my companion Howard pointed out, too often this can lead to “connect the lines” sort of sketch that easily collapses with any careful thought. For Judith is not and never could have been as innocent as Iolanta, even as a child. She is attracted to Bluebeard and his dark world, not because she herself once shared it, but because she cannot truly believe in his rumored evil. A bit like the Biblical Judith, Bartók’s figure might even imagine herself as being able, in the end, to take charge of the situation by beheading her Holofernes when he attempts to rape her in her bath. But she cannot act in time, needing still to prove her would-be lover innocent, refusing to believe the truth she already knows but cannot will herself to believe.

     In fact, even more so than when I saw the great Bartók opera late last year, I could not help but comprehend the work, this time around, as a horrifying, nightmare prediction of World War I and the fascist interventions of the rest of the 20th century. Everything that Bluebeard reveals to Judith will be realized in the century ahead, as the idealist’s life—the dreamer in the moonlight—will be the required sacrificed of mankind.

     What these operas do ultimately reveal by their pairing is that while the first may represent a dream of love, the second has actually very little to do with love, but is a tale of the twisted human attraction to the perverse, concerning the awful hypnotic draw of the human species to the heart of darkness.

 

Los Angeles, February 16, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2015).

Lee Breuer | Pataphysics Penyeach: Summa Dramatica and Porco Morto

barnyard philosophers

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lee Breuer (text and direction) Pataphysics Penyeach: Summa Dramatica and Porco Morto / performed as part of the Under the Radar festival, New York, Mabou Mines / the performances I saw were on a matinee on Sunday, January 18, 2009

After the weak performances I had witnessed one night earlier in a Broadway theater, I was delighted to witness actor Ruth Maleczech's marvelous acting as Sri Moo Parahamsa, the first bovine to lecture at the Gifford lectures of William James in Scotland. As if she herself had four stomachs, each with a different voice attached, Maleczech divertingly argues, in pure pataphysical nonsense, that the post-performance animal should take acting lessons, and proceeds in a heady mix of scientific jargon and an oddly logical argument based on the existence of the "triune brain," that all animals should "Know Thyself":

 

          As an academic, a mammal, and a cow, I know I have a soul

          And since I do not have a neocortex, it must not reside                              

               therein

          It's my thesis—and I'll go to the mat with a lizard on this

               point—that psyche lives in the limbus

          Reality is not real, it is virtual

          Each mind has its game and virtualities are subject each to their own laws

         The neocortex to the laws of reason, the reptilian spinal stem adheres

              to chaos theory

         and as for the hedonic—limbic laws are, in the vulgate vernacular, showbiz

             "Know Thyself" says the Delphic oracle

         Well, to "know itself" the post-performance animal should take an acting lesson

 

The school, of course, is her own: The Institute for the Science of the Soul, a fully accredited acting conservatory ranked in the top ten by US News and World Report!

    A zany satire on various acting methods ("A Strasburg, a Meisner and an Adler may differ in approach, But Methodists generally agree that the spiritual script breaks into actions and objectives") "Summa Dramatica" ends with a recovering animation, Marge Simpson, testifying on screen to the value of Sri Moo Parahamsa's Institute, loosing a hilarious send up of phrases such as "truth is beauty." This delicious monologue (or, if we count Marge as a "true" character, we must describe it as a dialogue) ends with the new barnyard post-performance conclusion that "The Greeks have been in denial for 3,000 years / The Truth is not beautiful." 

      Poor Porco, the wonderful puppet of Breuer's loony imagination, has just committed suicide, and in a valedictory ode from the grave admits that he could no longer stand living, obsessed as he had become with the great Grey Lady, The New York Times. Although he attended the famed bovine-run "Institute" for a while, he left it doomed by the "Sick Fiction Syndrome," destined to end its days as a replay of a subplot to The Lion King.

    Breuer's satire here at times seems so broad-reaching that it does not always hit its mark, but when Breuer's language does hit home, it takes us all aback, as we are shamed by our easy acceptance of mediocre journalism as a "true" presentation of life. Recalling his feelings upon first meeting The Grey Lady, Porco proclaims:

 

                What did I feel, Grey lady   I felt vivid!

                O the torture, the spins, the needles, the pins. The creative dilemmas...

                What music of my heart should underscore what angle of your face?

               What did I feel Grey Lady?   I felt "life-like"

               The Times was a beautiful vagina that in my hubris I engorged

                       with every cunilingual wag of my tongue

               Your vibrations were histronic!

               There was drama in the air—tragedy—and it was generational

               The New York Times was going through menopause

               ....

 

Later:

 

               I am a New York Times creation, American un-emancipated

               I am a tabloid's love slave.

 

    How hilarious, accordingly, to have read a few days lady, in the Grey Lady herself, a review expressing the following:

       So there's this pig, see, and he lives The New York Times. After a romantic affair with the Gray Lady, they commit suicide together with a "Diamond Sutra dagger," but not before the pig, played by a puppet, offers a few sweet nothings to a stack of newspapers.

     ...If you're trying to figure out what is going on here in "Porco Morto," ...you're not the only one. ...It stars animal puppets and features a lot of bad puns, pretentious jargon ("normative soulfulness"?), some jokey video and barely coherent mockery of commercialism and this news organization.

 

Lucky Porco's no longer around to engage in conversation with his former love. Breuer couldn't have written a sillier response. As Mac Wellman once admitted, the surreal events of his plays are generally based on news articles; "you couldn't make them up!"

     I was happy to verbally admit, upon Sri Moo Parahamsa's urging: "I pledge allegiance to the hype."

 

Los Angeles, February 15, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2009).

 

 

Marcel Marceau | in performance at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts / 1980

the resounding dance of silence

by Douglas Messerli

 

The performance I saw of Marcel Marceau took place in the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, Washington, D.C. in 1980.

 

Anyone who knows me well recognizes that I am not greatly sympathetic with the art of mime, particularly with the street-based mimicry that one witnesses in large cities throughout the world. As I wrote this year in my essay on Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-up, “I once quipped that all mimes should be shot at birth.” But when it comes to the art of Marcel Marceau, who died on September 22, 2007, I make an important exception.

     Marceau spent most of his long life in theater as a white-face, soft-shoed personage with his head covered with a well-worn hat topped by a red flower, a persona he called Bip, a reference to the Charles Dickens character of Great Expectations, Pip.

      Bip’s antics were closer to Harlequin than to those of a circus clown (although the great Ringling Brother's Barnum and Bailey sad-faced clown, Emmett Kelly—who I saw as a child in one of that circus's last tent performances—might be said to have been influenced by Marceau), his movements more similar to those of dance (it is no accident that Michael Jackson based his “Moonwalk” steps on Marceau’s “Walking Against the Wind”) than to the wooden and mechanical gestures of street mimes. Indeed, Marceau himself disparaged most of his imitators. For Marceau’s movements owed less to vaudeville than to the nearly flawless movements of the great silent film comedians Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the Marx Brothers. One need only revisit the little tramp’s now notorious waddle through town and country, his choreographic struggles with machinery in Modern Times, and his pas de deux with a globe in The Great Dictator, observe Keaton’s daring leaps across train cars in The General or his fruitless yet miraculously successful struggles against the cyclone of Steamboat Bill, Jr., and recall Groucho’s perfectly executed leaps, slides, and daffy spins of his dance in Animal Crackers, or any of Harpo’s sleights of hand—all of them admittedly influences upon his art—to recognize their importance in Marceau’s artistry of moving his body through space.

     As for John Cage, moreover, silence for Marceau is something far more complex than a lack of sound. In his 1980 performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Howard and I witnessed a famous incident in which during his sketch, “Angel,” the music suddenly broke down into an uncertain buzz, upon which Marceau bowed politely and apologetically to the audience as stage lights dimmed and the curtain fell. After what seemed like an eternity (actually only 15 minutes later), the curtain rose once more and the sketch was repeated. Later, in an interview, the great mime insisted, “There is no such thing as silence.”

     By that statement, I don’t think he was simply speaking of the Mozart music which accompanied the piece, but was referring to the many sounds silence entices into its seeming emptiness. In Marceau’s silent dances of “Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death”—the title of one of Bip’s sketches—all the tumult and clamor of those various states of life echo through the audience, reflected in the gestures of the face, hands, chest, hips, legs, and feet of the performer. The symphony of our own settlement, the coughs, creaks, giggles, whisperings, and taps of the audience, are part of any performance, but in this great mime’s art, seem subtly incorporated in movement itself.

      Off stage, Marceau was an inveterate talker. He once admitted to an interviewer: “Never get a mime talking. He won’t stop.” It was his involvement with his audience that so separated Marceau from other mimes, whose performances often seem dissociated from the everyday, representing extraordinary ex-aggregations of daily activities.

     Born Jewish in the French-German-speaking Strasbourg, Marceau was the son of a baritone-singing butcher who was later imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he died. Escaping to the Southwest of France, the son changed his name from Mangel to Marceau and, with his brother Alain, became active in the French Resistance, altering children’s identity cards to save them from Vichy-German deportation. Through his ability to speak English, Marceau became a liaison officer to General Patton.

     Enrolling after the war in the Charles Dullin School of Dramatic Art, Marceau studied with the mime Etienne Decroux. So was Bip born. Accordingly, one might say that his persona was born out of Marceau’s political activities, which explains, in part, what helped to make his performances so human, what helped to bridge a connection between him and his audiences.

     There is no doubt that several of his sketches were sentimental, one of the most well known, “Public Garden,” reminding me of the kitschy works of numerous comediennes from Lily Tomlin to Bette Middler. But then, Marceau well understood that as a great artist in his field he was also a popularizer (his death coming after the deaths of a series of such popularizers—Gian Carlo Menotti, Beverly Sills, and Luciano Pavarotti): “I have a feeling that I did for mime what (Andres) Segovia did for the guitar, what (Pablo) Casals did for the cello.”

 

Los Angeles, September 27, 2007

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 10 (November-December 2007).