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).

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

the wasps

by Douglas Messerli

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

                           Edward: He's back again.

                           Flora: But he's always there.

                           Edward: Why? What is he doing there?

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

                               there for weeks. You've never mentioned it.

                           Edward: What is he doing there?

                           Flora: He's selling matches, of course.

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

                         I remember. Yes. A bit of a stinker.

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

                   myself; it is not in my character.

 

Los Angeles, December 26, 2008

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