Mac Wellman | A Murder of Crows / 1992

a linguistic fantasia

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mac Wellman A Murder of Crows / New York, Primary Stages, April 22, 1992

Without complaining about the very thing I’ve determined to do, I still have to admit I feel a bit daunted about writing on Mac Wellman’s unforgettable play, Murder of Crows. Without any true plot, you might describe this work as more of a linguistic fantasia than a drama peopled with interrelating characters. Although family is vaguely at the center of this play, all is more than slightly askew, as the very set suggests, where he stands a porch without a house attached: “We lost the house,” suggests Nella (Anne O’Sullivan) glibly tossing out one of the hundreds of American vernacular terms with which this work engages.

      I first saw this play at Primary stages in late April 1992, and I published it, along with the second of Wellman’s so-called “Crowtet” on my Sun & Moon Press two years later; I reprinted that volume through my Green Integer imprint in 2000, adding the second volume, containing the last two “Crowtet” plays, in 2003. So, I obviously have great affection for and intimate knowledge of the play. Yet it has taken me all this time to attempt to write about it, and I still find it more experiential than explicable.

      Let me just suggest that although the characters are slightly related—Susannah (Jan Leslie Harding) and her mother Nella, along with their son Andy (the handsome Reed Birney, who stands all in gold throughout as a kind of lawn ornament) having come to live with Nella’s brother Howard (William Mesnik) and his unbelievably lucky and mean-hearted wife, Georgia (Lauren Hamilton)—it might be best to think of their interrelationships more as a series of monologues that each satirizes various aspects of contemporary American culture.

      Wellman’s play is set someone in Midwest (he grew up in Ohio) near a vast “hellacious grease pit” and a nearby reactor which makes the rivers “look like bubble baths, and the air’s all mustardy.” Her husband, Raymond (Stephen Mellor) has evidently been drowned in the pit, and all they have is a shoe left. With feet of different sizes and a dislocated face, Nella is clearly a dependent, in need not only of the begrudging housing (in a chicken coop) that her relatives have provided her and her daughter, but in need of inspirational reading matter and spiritual help. She is, in short, a representative of all in American life that is hated, a woman who has been bypassed by any element of the “American dream.” Although her brother Howard is somewhat sympathetic, he himself is impatient with his sister, and particularly her dreamy daughter, whose major focus seems to be a “weather change”:

 

                      Susannah: The weather is changing, the weather

                                        is changing for sure, I can smell it.

                                        The weather has got a whole wheelbarrow

                                        full of surprises up its sleeve for us.

      Not only is she predicting, like a local Cassandra, a serious change in the climate—significant implications in the environmental ravaged worlds where many of Wellman’s plays take place—but a change of philosophical, spiritual, even metaphysical significance. For her, “The moment will come. Everything that is vertical will become horizontal,” Time will turn inside out. In part, of course, Susannah’s “strangeness,” as Howard describes it, is simply the desire of any young being for change. But the change she prophesies is also terrifying, particularly for the hidebound gold diggers whom Howard and his wife represent.

    The wife, Georgia, has not only broken the bank at Monte Carlo, one of the hundreds of clichés Wellman proudly spouts, but wins big weekly at their attendances at the local horse track, from which she brings home wheelbarrows full of money. If she can be said characterize the dream of all Americans, hooked on a system that promises enormous, accidental, and undeserved wealth, she, in her xenophobic hostility of anything outside what finds to be normal, experiences little happiness. Berating Raymond’s shoes and hats, for example, she snarls:

 
                                ……..Grotesque. Perverted

                                If it’s possible for a hat to be obscene, his

                                hats were obscene. I mean, They made you

                                think of things no sane person ought to think

                                of, ever. They were not good-looking American

                                hats, law-and-order type hats, or patriotic,

                                military hats, or socially eminent country

                                club or corporate hats.

 

Later in the play Howard and Nella reveal that their own strange attic-stored hats (fezzes) and clothes was a result of their having as children been gypsies (or pretending to be gypsies) who stole money from German tourists. Their real family name, so they claim, was Babaghanouj, their great grandfather having been a rug merchant from Istanbul named Nebuchanezzar. It all reminds one, a bit, of the patriotic, right-wing Eleanor Shaw Iselin from The Manchurian Candidate, who near film’s end is revealed to be a Communist set on taking over the US.

 

     It is almost inevitable, accordingly, that the shining gold statue, Andy, says nothing and does nothing throughout most of the play, since, as he briefly admits, the excitement aroused in him by bombing Iraq cities has taken him into a higher plain of being than any of the family members can comprehend.

     Like most American comedies, Wellman’s Murder of Crows, predictably ends happily as the dead father Raymond reappears, rising from his coffin, having, he admits, been living all these years with the Crows. As confused and mysteriously baffled as his daughter, he would go living with them, he vows, if he weren’t allergic to their feathers. Released from her earth-bound bondage by his sudden resurrection and her mother’s symbolic death as she retreats into the coffin the husband has left, Susannah discovers she is not at all allergic to their wings, and joins up with the busy crows, who, somewhat like the cartoon figures of Heckle and Jeckle, sit apart, at play’s end, discussing interminably deep and unanswerable philosophical issues:

 

                                     What if we are Type A entities.

                                     That is, what if we contextualize

                                     and explain the existences of

                                     others but cannot, on pain of

                                     infinite regress, be contextualized

                                     or explained ourselves?

 

    Yet, while these seemingly profound figures nicely close down Wellman’s hilarious look at the “State of the Onion,” it is important to remember that in other cultures, such as in Japan, crows represent ominous forces of evil for the human species. One can only wonder, accordingly, whether the author is suggesting that in both Andy and Susannah we have lost, as a people, our only dreamers to realms that have no effect on our daily lives. Never mind, hints the witty writer, that these crows “look more like mynas or parrots than real crows: ie., they’re fake crows.” In a world built of language anything is possible or nothing is.

      Beware: the forces hovering over the second play of Wellman’s quartet are Macaws.

 

Los Angeles, January 13, 2013

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

 

Martha Clarke | Garden of Earthly Delights / 2009

from a crawl into flight

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martha Clarke (director and choreographer) Garden of Earthly Delights, music by Richard Peaslee / Minetta Lane Theatre, New York City / the performance I saw was a matinee on January 17, 2009

Hieronymus Bosch's sixteenth century triptych of paradise, earthly delights, and hell is the source of Martha Clarke's dance performance first presented in New York in 1984 and revived in 1987 at the same theater in which I saw it this year, at the high-ceilinged Minetta Lane Theatre.

      Clarke's work however is only tangentially related to the Bosch painting, since its rich reds, greens, and blues are replaced in the performance with various shades of white and brown; only the sheer body stockings worn by the dancers, lending it a pinkish-like glow.

    And while Bosch presents us with three versions of what delight might signify: the paradisiacal serenity before the fall, the lusty play and abuse of the earthly world, and the dark and sadistic tortures of Hell, Clarke's work is more clearly inspired by a Puritan-like vision of reality, as she explores, through body and motion, mankind's transformation from animal being to gluttony, greed, lust, torture, war, and murder.

      One of the loveliest moments in a hour of many wondrous scenes occurs at the very beginning of the work, as the eleven dancers gracefully move forward on fingers and toes, a species not yet fully able or willing to stand erect. Yet soon, bearing branches in ritualistic gestures they come together as humans, in pairs and in small groupings, that predicts the inevitable fall from grace, Eve biting the apple and Adam both as the snake sensuously writhes between them.

     From the beginning of this revelation of flesh, I wished that Clarke had allowed her dancers to perform naked instead of being ensconced in the sickly flesh-colored body stockings that wipe out all but the general shapes of their handsome bodies. I say this out of no prurient interests—dozens of Broadway musicals and plays these days feature nudity—but am simply suggesting that the appearance of dancers such as Sophie Bortolussi, Daniel Clifton, General McArthur Hambrick, and Whitney A. Hunter seems an occasion to truly witness the delights of human flesh.

     In the second "triptych," the revelers have truly found "society," and are now dressed in Medieval peasant garb, one festooned in a codpiece. Accordingly, it is the earthly garden itself where Clarke most clearly explores both the pleasures and abuses of human sexuality. Here too she represents the "potato eaters," as a man seemingly swallows dozens of potatoes before vomiting up his dinner.

     Some figures gracefully dance while others imitate copulation. Priests (played by the musicians of Richard Peaslee's haunting score) attempt to control the various disruptions, including a few individuals who have suddenly gone aerial, flying in and out of the stage frame through pulleys and ropes. However, their attempt at order ultimately results in even greater torture—represented as the Spanish Inquisition—of these free-spirited souls, eventually chaos breaking out.

     In the final hellish spectacle almost all dancers—again sporting bodytights—take to the ropes, spinning almost out of control over the audience, tumbling head over heels high above us, who have become almost voyeurs of the human hell to which we are witness. It is terrifying—and liberating.

     By the work's end, we realize what miserable beasts our species has turned out to be, how spirituality and ritual have been converted into warfare and other acts of hate. As the audience turned to go, a woman in front of me commented: "Not a very encouraging portrait of our kind, is it?"

      Perhaps not. But what other earthly creature could take their bodies from a virtual crawl into flight?

 

Los Angeles, February 5, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2009).

Tennessee Williams | Camino Real / 2011

end of the road

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tennessee Williams Camino Real / The Theater at Boston Court, Pasadena, California / the production I saw was on Sunday March 6, 2011

 

I have always greatly admired the works of Tennessee Williams, having even chosen to publish one of his lesser—and undeservedly ignored—plays in Mac Wellman's and my large drama anthology, From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995 of 1998. That play, The Gnädiges Fraülein of 1966, is perhaps one of his most absurd works, but worth a rereading. More recently, moreover, approaching this centennial year of his birth, I have been fortunate to see some of his earliest, for more romantically-inspired pieces, that have helped to me once again reassess this great dramatist.

     After my own literary reinvestigation of A Streetcar Named Desire in 2009, I was able to see a credible, if not entirely satisfying, revival of The Glass Menagerie, performed in New York in 2009 and in Los Angeles in 2010; Vieux Carré, reconceived by the Wooster Group, a play begun early in Williams' career and finished late; and, now, the seldom produced Camino Real of 1953, in a delightful, if not perfect, production by The Theater at Boston Court, co-produced by the CALARTS School of Theater, with most of the roles by CALARTS students.

      The fact that this is primarily a "student" production should not make anyone wince; for years CALARTS has produced some of the most interesting of productions presented in Los Angeles, and the school has spun off numerous younger groups, including the wonderfully inventive Poor Dog Group, whose 2010 production of Brewsie and Willie gets my nomination for the best LA-area play of that year!

     Having said that, I can well understand why the 16 blocks (a one act version contains only 10 blocks) of the full-length Camino Real—pronounced deliberately, with Williams' instructions, in the American way, Cámino Rēal, suggesting the real world as opposed to a fantastical one—is seldom revived. Williams' play is a series of fantastic and terrifying scenes that resemble nothing else in theatrical history. Without knowing that I was a critic (we did not speak at all before the first act of 90 minutes), the woman next to me said, in the intermission, "I hope you're going to tell me what this is all about." I assured her I would try.

     But, of course, Williams' poetic expressionism cannot be that simply transformed into narrative explanation. A great part of this phantasmagoric world into which he has enwrapped his audience is better just being experienced instead of analyzed. There is no true comprehension for the conglomerate of lost souls trapped at the Royal Road, including a wild collection of individuals from time and space, most notably, Don Quixote (Lenny von Dohlen) (whose Sancho has abandoned him upon his entry into the plaza); Marguerite "Camille" Gautier (excellently realized by Marissa Chibas) (the famed courtesan who in Verdi's La Traviata and numerous other versions dies a horrible death of tuberculosis); Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt (the noted nobleman lover, more commonly known simply as Casanova); George Gordon Noel Byron (the romantic poet, lover of both Percy Shelly and his wife); Palamède de Guermantes (the Baron de Charlus of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past); and, most notably perhaps, Kilroy (the World War II legend who had been everyone before all the others). Add to these the permanent denizens of this flophouse of a town, the near to stage-manager Gutman (named after Sydney Greenstreet's character in Casablanca); a gypsy fortune-teller and her perpetually virgin daughter, Esmeralda; a pawnshop owner; Rosita the Whore; a blind mother; an effeminate waiter; the proprietor of the Ritz Men Only hotel; Abdullah; Tranny Streetperson (who is literally shot down in the street for fraternizing with others); and the horrifying, ever-present street cleaners, and you have an idea of the zoo-like atmosphere of the 16 scenes that reveal, little by little, the hell that is Camino Real. It is, obviously, a place of horror which will remind of Tahirir square, Tiananmen Square, or the streets of Tripoli—a place where authorities do not want one to gather.

 

     Except perhaps for Kilroy, all of these individuals share outrageous exploits in love and larger-than-human lives. One might suggest they have all ended up here, from where there is no easy escape, simply because of their gargantuan lusts, their refusals to live life an any level of what might be described as normality. But even in Camino Real, in an endless now with no possibility of redemption, they refuse to give up. A large part of the relationship between Casanova and Camille concerns his insistence that they admit their deep love, and her refusal to give up her many drugs: including cocaine and kif, but also sex and outright infatuation. Time and again, she is robbed, raped, and left for dead, but each time she rises to fall again, unable to stop the cycle of her dramatic spiral into death.

     By the time Casanova (wonderfully played by Tim Cummings) has reached this dead end, he is too old to live up to his reputation, and too poor to even maintain—despite his attempt to keep up his appearance in a gold embroidered coat—his lifestyle. By curtain's end he has been thrown out of the best hotel (the Siete Mares run by Gutman) and is forced to take refuge in the cold, narrow bed of the Ritz Men Only, ready to share even that with the equally rejected Kilroy.

     One by one we come to see that each character in this god-forsaken place has been eaten up by life and circumstance. They are the grotesques of the world, hardly its heroes, people who, as in nearly every Williams play, have lived too much of their lives in dreams, now, like Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire, forced to pay the piper.

     Only three of the play's characters have any potentiality to escape or redeem themselves. The gypsy woman's daughter has at the least the symbolic possibility of regaining her humanity by undergoing a dance with each full moon that restores her virginity, after which everyone attempts to take it away from her again. But this time round she has chosen the American oaf Kilroy (capably played, in the production I saw by a stand-in, Chris Chiquet) as her lover, the man, who, because of his big heart—"the size of the head of a baby"—has been advised to give up sex, cannot complete the act. And, in that sense, she is freed. She remains a virgin, at least temporarily, falling in love with the memory of his possible sincerity. Swept up into death by the street cleaners, Kilroy returns to her, but she can hear him only as a mewling cat.

      The play begins with the arrival of the biggest dreamer of them all, Don Quixote, who like all the others is tired and lonely. Yet Quixote, as we all know, cannot be quelled, and after a good sleep lasting the length of the play, he arises to find a new replacement for Sancho. That he should find the now "nonexistent" (as he may have been always) Kilroy, is perfect. For Kilroy has been throughout a bigger fool than even Quixote battling windmills as his enemy. Made to dress like a clown, Kilroy, a disturbingly innocent "patsy" who has lost his championship status, his lover, and, later, the mementos of that life, at least knows the difference between past, present, and future, changing the graffiti of "Kilroy Was Here," to "Kilroy Is Here," and back to past tense as he joins Quixote in his exit.

     The only way to leave Camino Real in this production is to climb a small ladder into what appears to be a booth for camera snapshots, as if each has to face the reality of his image before he can escape. For these vain and lost individuals it is a frightening possibility, fraught with all the perils of losing, on top of everything else, one's soul and sanity, that keeps them from attempting the unknown. But with Quixote's faith to support him, Kilroy takes the leap and, as Quixote declares "the violets push through the rock."

     Camino Real is not an easy play, either for its cast nor the audience, but it is a beautifully poetic screed, like so many of Williams' work, for those who have lost their ways through their endless attempts to live a full life, as well as a prayer that the sinful may not be forgotten by those who consider themselves as among the saintly.

 

Los Angeles, March 7, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater (March 2011).

 

 

Reidemeister Move (Robin Hayward and Christopher Williams) | Performance / 2018

what is sound?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Reidemeister Move (Robin Hayward and Christopher Williams) / Los Angeles, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), the performance I attended was on Wednesday, October 10, 2018

 

Named after the mathematical theory of knots, the performers of Reidemeister Move combine theories of music developed by Berlin’s echdtzeitmusik scene and Fluxus leader La Monte Young’s ideas of “Eternal Music,” often described as “dream music” or “drone music”: undertones, noise, spatial resonance and overtones are fused together to create a kind of ethereal mix of sounds.

      The two players of the group, British-born Robin Hayward and University of California, San Diego educated Christopher Williams, combine an oddly shaped microtonal tuba (Hayward) and a contrabass (Williams), this one that looks a bit like it has been stored in a painter’s studio, to structure overlying sounds with alternating long tones which challenge and define each musician’s following passages.             The last piece of the evening, Borromean Rings (by Hayward, created in 2011) does just that, as the tuba and contrabass take turns in musical refrains which either resolve or stimulate each other to new refrains. If there is often a sense in this piece that the phrases may soon resolve and lead to a hushed standstill, the second player often follows with a different tonal register which the challenges the first to take it in yet new directions, and so on, Williams occasionally tapping the strings to create new rhythmic possibilities which keep the piece moving forward in a series of tuba chugs and long bow antiphonal responses that help put us on the edge of the seat as we wait for what seems like a resolve and/or closure of the piece. We feel, time and again, this must be the final bowing only to have the closure challenged by a different harmonic register, almost as if the two players were challenging one another to go in new directions or to “give it up” to harmonic resolution.

      One feels time and again excited and a bit uneasy with the intense playful shifting of the opposing instrumental variances. But it is just the oddity of tuba and contrabass that create a tonal dissonance that makes everything endlessly entertaining.

      The first piece of the evening, by Williams and Charlie Morrow, from 2012, emanates from André Breton’s “occultist” work, itself modeled on his relationship to women and to tarot cards. The book was written on the eastern coast of Quebec at Rocher Percé, and thus the composers incorporate the sounds of the sea, gannets, flapping flags, and somewhat surrealistic-sounding emanations of the stars within the piece. In this work the tuba, at moments, often has the feeling of a fog horn lost in the dark met by the lower and higher responses of the clearly more feminine aspect of the work through the long tones of the contrabass. 

    This piece had a particular significance to me, since my Sun & Moon Press published the first English language translation, by Zack Rogow, of Breton’s work with a colorized picture of that great coastal rock. I reprinted it several times in my Green Integer series.

      Certainly, this group’s music is not for everyone—although I wish it might be—but in indirect ways La Monte Young’s music and the later works of this group might be said to be related to the compositions of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, music that in its very repetitions and shifting tonalities demand careful listening and learning of what sound is all about.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2018).

 

Jacques Offenbach, Jules Barbier ( based on the tales of E.T. A. Hoffman) | Le contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) / 2015

love and tears

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jacques Offenbach (music), Jules Barbier (libretto, based on his and Michel Carré’s play, based on tales by E. T. A. Hoffman), Le contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann) / 1881; the production I saw was the Metropolitan Opera’s HD Broadcast of January 31, 2015

 

Jacques Offenbach’s operatic repertory favorite, Le contes d’Hoffmann is a true mish-mash of musical and theatrical offerings: comic opera numbers such as "Il était une fois à la cour d'Eisenach” (a number that might have been at home in the Broadway musical Cabaret, replacing that musical’s number “Messkite”); drinking songs in the manner of Verdi and Wagner; comic novelty numbers such as Olympia’s “Les oiseaux dans la charmille” and the servant Frantz’s insistence on his singing, dancing talent, “Jour et nuit je me mets en quatre”; all mixed up with stunning operatic arias of love and longing such as "C’est un chanson d’amour."

     Divided into three distinct "tales," Offenbach’s work functions as a baggy monster, with the vague and often fragile interconnective link insisting that the stories all represent the poet’s failed loves; yet productions have, at times, lopped off an act or, at other times, added another. The opera, moreover, sometimes effortlessly, at other times rather clumsily, shifts between realism, fantasy, and literary autobiography while delving into the grotesque. Particularly, under Bartlett Sher’s Metropolitan Opera direction, the work seems nearly always teetering on the edge of a Kafka-like nightmare tinged with a Berlin-cabaret sexuality that borders also on camp (Sher insists his sources were Austrian, but they seem much closer, to my way of thinking, to the Berlin of the 1920s.).

      For all this, nonetheless, the Le contes d’Hoffmann survives, perhaps simply because it does encompass so much that other operas of the day might have thrown overboard. Whether conceiving as woman as an innocent, an artiste, or as a courtesan, what Offenbach’s Hoffmann reveals, in the end, is that no fulfilling liaison can be consummated as long as the writer-artist is wed to his art. Time and again Hoffmann loses his mind, at no time more evident than when he puts on Coppélius’ rose-colored glasses to become enchanted with the wind-up doll Olympia (not so very different, indeed, from Lubitsch’s “doll” described in the essay above—except that in Hoffmann’s fiction, she has no human equivalent, despite the fact that the real human Erin Morley brilliantly imitates her robotic actions. 

      Hoffmann (the charming and energetic Vittorio Grigolo) falls in love with a fellow artist, the singer Antonia (Hibla Gerzmava), only to discover that her very profession may result in her death. Like a would-be controlling fiancée (today we would describe him as unliberated sexist), Hoffmann is forced to demand, as has her father, Crespel (David Pittsinger), that she give up her career, a choice that can only leave her in such frustration that she is almost immediately tempted to challenge the men in her life by channeling the voice of her mother, a former primma dona inflicted with the same illness. Antonia can no more give up her role as an artist than can Hoffmann.

     And finally, after nearly giving up on love, the writer seeks love in the arms of a wicked courtesan, Giulietta (Christine Rice) only to lose his reflection and, almost, his soul. Hoffmann’s absurd love does end in the death of Giulietta’s equally lied-to boyfriend, Schlémil (David Crawford). And even though, in killing her lover, he obtains the key to her boudoir, he is saved by the fact that she literally leaves him in the lurch, gondolaing off without him. As the police arrive, he is, once more, saved by the only one who truly loves him—and whom he, unknowingly, truly loves, his male friend Niklausse, secretly his "female" muse. If the device of the male friend/female muse offers a slightly homoerotic tinge to the opera, in the end it truly doesn’t matter since the muse, obviously, is an aspect of his own being, just as the three women with whom he falls in love are all elements of the one woman imagines as his divine partner, the Mozart diva, Stella, who literally ignores him, and whom he, in his drunken state, no longer even recognizes. Ultimately, the opera suggests that true artists can only find satisfaction in themselves—along with copious amounts of beer and wine! But, of course, it very does matter, since these figures represent various gender opportunities to the suffering artist.

      Interestingly, Sher has skewered his production away from the simplistic Hoffmann, who, despite his fascinating tales, remains a vague actor in the stories of his own life. For Sher, the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann is merely a stand-in for Offenbach himself. And, from this perspective, the opera does indeed reveal a great deal about the situation of the actual artist, a German Jew, well loved by French society, but obviously made to also feel always as an outsider. The several Jewish references (at times almost anti-Semitic, particularly in the legend of Kleinzach) signify the kind of dual reality which the composer faced, wherein at one moment he laughs with his audience as he tells the story, but by work’s end tragically becomes the mocked figure himself, taking on the tallit almost as a protective garment against the taunts of his failures in love and life.

     It also helps to clarify the inexplicable evil of the four-headed villain of the piece, who appears as Lindorf, Coppélius, Dr. Miracle, and Daspertutto (all played by the noted baritone Thomas Hampson). Why, we ask are these villains, so similar in some respects, all out to steal, murder, and abuse Hoffmann’s would-be loved ones. There is no explanation of course for such evil, such seemingly in-bred hate—except perhaps for the successful insider’s detestation of all who represent something different and new to his culture. Such hate clearly leads what Nicklausse / the Muse observes as a "loss of love and tears," but it will never be able to entirely destroy true art.

 

Los Angeles, February 1, 2015

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