Harold Pinter | The Dumb Waiter / 1960 [reading of play]

in service

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter The Dumb Waiter in The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1961)

 

The "dumb waiter" of Pinter's play of the same name is, of course, Gus, who with his partner Ben murders unknown individuals they are assigned. Each time they meet in a room and wait for the arrival of the victim, accomplish the dark deed, and leave. This time around they are holed up in a small room that appears it may once have been a kitchen for a restaurant or bar above, a presumption they must accept since there is a dumb waiter and a speaking-tube between the floors.

    Gus is dumb not only in his inability to fully express himself but in his choice of career—although unlike his partner, Ben, he seems to have some sort of sense of guilt, at least for their last job, the murder of a girl:

 

                     GUS: I was just thinking about that girl, that's all.

 

                     GUS sits on the bed.

 

                     She wasn't much to look at, but still. It was a mess though, wasn't

                     it? What a mess. Honest, I can't remember a mess like that one.

                     They don't seem to hold together like men, women. A looser

                     texture, like. Didn't she spread, eh? She didn't half spread. Kaw! But

                     I've been meaning to ask you.

 

                     BEN sits up and clenches his eyes.

 

                     Who clears up after we've gone?

 

    It is perhaps these second thoughts, emanating from the horrible memory of the body obviously torn asunder by their gunshots, that threatens the end of his service. For what character and audience simultaneously discover in the final moments is that he is the victim this time around; as he goes out for a drink of water, he returns to find himself facing Ben with gun in hand.

     Yet the dumb waiter is also an object with which the two men become hilariously involved when they began receiving orders for various dishes, including Macaroni Pastitsio and Ormitha Macarounada. The stove has no gas, and the men have little in the way of sustenance, except for Gus' biscuits, a bar of chocolate, a half pint of milk, and one Eccles cake, stale. Yet, despite his own hunger he gives up these precious objects as replacements for the foods they cannot provide. In short, he remains in service not only to his dreadful job of murdering unknown beings, but his attempts to obey any demand they make of him. He is a born lackey, a man who was determined from birth to act out the demands of those in control, whether they be of some nefarious upper class or of the criminal underground. It hardly matters for Gus. And given the absurdity of the demands for the various dishes ordered up, he might as well have been murdered for his inability to live up to the demands.

     At least he questions, wonders if those in charge are not toying with them, giving them matches, for example, when they know there is nothing to light. Ben, although more literate—he reads the newspaper over and over, commenting on the ordinary events it describes as if they were more horrendous than the murders he commits—but he does not ever challenge the authority of what he describes as the "organisation." For him it is a large system with "departments for everything."

      Ben, in fact, although smarter than Gus, may be a sort of dumber waiter, about which the men's final staredown at the end of the play hints. This time he must kill Gus; but next time might it not be himself who is called upon to unknowingly pass through the doorway?

      This play premiered at the Hampstead Theatre Company in England in 1960.

 

Los Angeles, January 5, 2009

Reprinted from USTheater (October 2010).

Betty Garrett | Betty Garrett: Closet Songwriter / 2007

 

remembering

by Douglas Messerli

 

Betty Garrett: Closet Songwriter, with Betty Garrett, Debra Armani, Daniel Keough, Jack Kutcher, Robert W. Laur, Barbara Mallory, Lee Meriwether, and Andy Taylor, Los Angeles/Theatre West [the performance I attended was on Sunday, November 18, 2007]        

.

     My companion Howard and I saw Garrett on November 18 at what was to have been Los Angeles’s Theatre West’s last performance of Betty Garrett: Closet Songwriter, although the show was later extended for another week.

      Garrett—whom we both loved for her acting in several film musicals we own on DVD—had chosen in this show to sing, along with seven other actors, music for which she had written the lyrics, and accordingly she didn’t have as rich material to work with as the slightly sassier and brassier Stritch. But along with her long-time friend Lee Meriwether (actress, journalist, and former Miss America winner) and other Theatre West regulars she entertainingly presented a medley of 28 songs interspersed with memories of her career.

      Garrett’s is a story of amazing fortune and darkly sinister events. Beginning on Broadway as an understudy to Ethel Merman, Garrett’s career quickly rocketed as she performed in several plays and the musical revue Call Me Mister, where she famously sang “South America, Take It Away,” winning her the Donaldson Award. In 1944 she married actor Larry Parks (star of The Jolson Story and Jolson Sings Again) and moved to California, where she acted in a string of successful films, including Words and Music (1948), Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Neptune’s Daughter, On the Town (all three 1949), and My Sister Eileen (1955).

     In 1951, however, Parks was subpoenaed to appear as one of a group of individuals connected with Hollywood before the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Of that group, only Bertolt Brecht and Larry Parks testified; ten others (Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert Maltz, Adrian Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Dalton Trumbo, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Larder, Jr., John Howard Lawson, and Alvah Bessie—a group which came to be called the Hollywood Ten) refused to answer questions and were all blacklisted.

      A few years ago, at a memorial dedicated to the Hollywood Ten and an unstated apologia for the Writers and Directors Guilds’ complicities with the HUAC and McCarthy hearings, Howard and I saw Billy Crystal enacting Parks’ tormented testimony as he attempted to allay the questions of committee members. “I would prefer, if you would allow me, not to mention other people’s names. Don’t present me with the choice of either being in contempt of the Committee and going to jail or forcing me to really crawl through the mud to be an informer.” Later: “I don't think this is American justice...So I beg of you not to force me to do this." Reminding the committee that he had two small children, Parks confronted his questioners: "Is this the kind of heritage that I must hand down to them? Is this the kind of heritage that you would like to hand down to your children?" The committee insisted, however, that he name names. Although Parks was, accordingly, not added to the blacklist, his contract with Columbia Pictures nonetheless was soon cancelled and he made only three more films.

      So too had Garrett’s film career ended, and the two of them had no choice but to form a musical team appearing in nightclubs and theatres across the United States, later, like Stritch, performing in England.

     Betty is anything but bitter, and her lyrics, if at times satirically biting, are never cynical. While a large number of her song lyrics are mere rhymed ditties and “patter” songs, a few of these pieces, in particular “Remember Me” (a song written for her granddaughter), “Lack-a-Daisy Day” (a number she performed with her husband on tour), and a song written for her close friend Lloyd Bridges and his family, “Bridges of Love” are charming songs, the first and last moving, if somewhat sentimental ballads. I believe the entire audience left Garrett’s show with even more admiration for her musical and acting contributions and her lifetime of sustained energy.

     Garrett died almost three years from the day I wrote this in 2011.

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).

 

 

 

 

 

Elaine Stritch | Elaine Stritch: At Liberty at the Carlyle / 2008

the marvelous party

by Douglas Messerli

 

Elaine Stritch: At Liberty at the Carlyle, with Elaine Stritch, New York/Carlyle Café [the performance I attended with Felix Bernstein was on Friday, January 18, 2008]         

 

    I had seen Stritch’s At Liberty on DVD several times, so I was prepared for the sometimes raw and down-to-earth humor of her artful autobiographical tribute to her survival and past. The treat for me was to see her so close-up in the Carlyle’s small dining room accompanied by the youngest person in the room, 15-year-old Felix Bernstein, son of my dear friends Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein.

 

    Felix, who is quite knowledgeable about musical theater and is an aficionado particularly of Stephen Sondheim, enjoyed this show which included three numbers by Sondheim: “I’m Still Here,” and two songs from her legendary performance in Company, “The Little Things You Do Together” and “The Ladies Who Lunch.” But we also both took joy in her two Noël Coward numbers, “I’ve Been to a Marvelous Party” and Sail Away’s hilarious “Why Do the Wrong People Travel?” And who could not find pleasure in the simple “Something Good,” a song, Felix pointed out, with both music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers. Stritch’s perfectly timed telling of her travels each night from her role as an understudy for Ethel Merman in New York to the New Haven production of Rodgers’ and Hart’s Pal Joey, where late in the show she performed the fabulous “Zip,” is one of the best skits of the show. Later, she would star in the national company role of Merman’s Call Me Madam.

    Stritch’s humorous tales of her strict religious background (her uncle was Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago Samuel Cardinal Stritch) and her descriptions of her relationship (or perhaps one should say, lack of relationship) with Marlon Brando and intended marriage to Gig Young are alternatively funny and sad. Stitch was clearly unlucky in love (throwing over Ben Gazzara for Rock Hudson, she described her choice of Hudson over Gazzara: “And we all know what a bum decision that turned out to be!”) until she met and married, later in her life, the British actor John Bay, living in London with him until his death. At the heart of Stritch’s stand-up comedic presentation of her raucous life is a painful story of alcoholism and near death from diabetes. She wrote this show, in part, she proclaims, to get back her life, to recall all those events from which alcohol had kept her from completely experiencing.

     Both Felix and I loved the evening, and although I had come into Stritch’s performance believing that this may be her last act, I am now sure that, given the gusto with which she performed her closing show on January the 18th, she will be back, still here for years.

     As we took the taxi back to the West Side, Felix asked me two questions that deserved more discussion than we had time for. He queried how Noël Coward had become such a legendary figure in a time when there was no television, no cell phones, no easy computer downloads for songs as there is today. I reminded him that most large cities had several newspapers, many of them filled every day with news on actors, writers, and other celebrities of the moment. And, I might have also added, there was radio, with a very large audience and a wide variety of shows. Instead of the tabloids there were a number of quite popular fan magazines which reported on both theater and film.

     Knowing of my great love and knowledge of New York theater and its history, Felix later asked: “I can understand why I love theater; I live here and witness it; I can see it almost any day. But how did you fall in love with musicals and plays growing up in such a distant place as Iowa?”

     “Imagination,” I answered. “I never got to New York until college, but I lived in New York in my imagination for years before that.”

 

Los Angeles, February 14, 2008

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (February 2008).

 

Jez Butterworth | Jerusalem / 2011

sunday, bloody sunday

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jez Butterworth Jerusalem / New York, The Music Box, 2011 / the performance I saw as a matinee on May 8, 2011

 

 Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem begins with a blindingly, blaring party in a small wooded clearing inhabited primarily by a Waterloo trailer. In the quick glimpse of the strobe-lit bacchanalia it appears that the celebrating group is made up mostly of young teenagers. But the next morning we gradually perceive, as court processors arrive to post the demand the clearance of the property, that the main celebrant and owner of the trailer is a burned-out, alcoholic, drug consuming former bicycling stunt artist, Johnny "Rooster" Byron (Mark Rylance), whose woodland trailer plot serves as a kind of open house for any and all discontent beings near the small town of Flintock not far from Stonehenge in Wiltshire County, England.

     Among Rooster's several regulars are his wanabe "mate," Ginger (Mackenzie Crook), a young man who has never outgrown this world of Peter Panism; a former Professor (Alan David) who drops by mainly for the alcoholic beverages freely proffered by the host; an overweight and under educated butcher, Davey (John Gallagher, Jr.); a soon-to-be traveler to Australia, Lee (Danny Kirrane); and two silly and rather unattractive teenage girls, Pea and Tanya, the later quite desperate to give up her virginity; and, upon occasion, the former Queen of the Fairies, Phaedra (Aimeé-Ffion Edwards), gone missing from the home of her violent step-father, Troy Whitworth. These and others help keep alive the myths surrounding Rooster, and, in turn, boost his morale as he carouses daily, in battle after battle, straight into the jaws of death.

     In the context of Butterworth's play, Rooster is represented as something akin to a figure of Druid or Nordic history, or, at least, a kind of Falstaff-like celebrator, a larger than life "hero," who stands against the staid and boring behavior of the small town bourgeoisie surrounding him, so desperately desirous of ousting this outsider from the environs so that they can quickly build up a few more suburban-like houses or apartments.

     Given the goings-on in this little "Jerusalem," the loud, late-night parties, underage drinking, drug consumption, and sex, I think it safe to say that nearly every member of the elderly Sunday audience who tumbled into The Music Box mostly from New Jersey, Connecticut, and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, like the good citizens of Flintock, would have just as readily signed the petition to remove Johnny "Rooster" Bryon from his little plot—although given what we later discover about the hypocritical, alcoholic, and drug-hungry adults we encounter from the community, it is doubtful my audience would venture to live in Flintock either.

     So, why do audiences like the one I joined sit through the assaults on their sensibilities and, at the end of it, after a series of ridiculous plot developments I will soon reveal, applaud, not just politely, but enthusiastically cheering on these obvious misfits?

     There are, perhaps, a number of reasons, but the most obvious one bears the name Mark Rylance. For Rylance is not just a good actor, he creates, embodies completely, and inhabits the character of Rooster so fully that we are in awe as we watch a thing of words, a literary character, grow, bit by bit, into a monstrous yet humanly pitiable being with whom we have no choice but to contend. I sat in the front row of the theater, where I and the others there not only suffered some of the slings and arrows of spit, beer, sod, and blood, but watched his towering performance as he stood, often just in front of my seat, since the characters claimed it was the spot where they smelled the wonderful wafts of wild garlic and where Rooster drew his ex-wife and other figures to look into eyes, whereupon a deep rumbling sound shook the theater at its roots. Rylance is so convincing, so commanding in his role that I believed in his dark powers even without that stage device.

     For much of each act Rooster creeps round his "Jerusalem"—nearly crippled by all those "slings and arrows," the Evel Knievel-like jumping stunts, the numerous bar fights and beating, and his advancing age—covered in layers of sweat, beer, liquor, wine, and other liquid ablutions, spinning off remarkable myths to his spellbound, if skeptical, merry band. The eldest and least imaginative of Rooster's protégées, Ginger, particularly struggles to restore some rational logic to Roosters' larger-than-life proclamations; but in that very act we foresee that, having stayed on beyond his time, he is soon to join the failed and flailing folk of Flintock adults.

    Rooster may be a pied-piper, but his powers have little effect upon his own small son Andy, who has to suffer torments from his fellow schoolmates just for being the man's son. And as much merriment as Rooster provides his young teen friends, he has few gifts for the very young and no comprehension of how to nurture.

     Throughout this endless turbulence, Rylance, if at times going a bit over the top (how could he not in such an operatic role?) literally takes over the stage with a sort of Medea-like dance of revenge against all the hundreds of offences he suffered and committed himself.

     One seldom witnesses these days such a complete theatrical abandonment of an actor's own self into that of his character, so that by play's end one almost feels the character and his body might collapse as the actor goes flying through the high canopy of trees imported onto The Music Box stage, a feeling reinforced by Rylance's compulsion during the curtain call cacophony, to jump and up and down a couple of times as if to prove he was not really as crippled and bound to earth as was Rooster.  

     I wish only that the story were half as convincing. Beyond the bad boy behavior of its characters, Butterworth presents little else except to suggest that Rooster is heir and kin to a long tradition of English, Druid, and Nordic brutes, including St. George, the slayer of dragons, on whose celebratory day the events occur. Rooster, the author hints, is one of the giants of English lore, who must battle against the petty societal demands that he faces, including a trio of dangerously violent brother who are convinced that he has had sexual intercourse with Phaedra, and, of course, the court decree with bulldozers waiting nearby to shatter his castle come morning.

     After a bloody beating and brutal branding by the Whitworth brothers, Rooster pours gasoline across his yard, curses the earth about him for anyone who touches it, and calls out the names of his family genealogy as he beats the drum he has told the children will bring out the giants. Rooster has also revealed to his son that he bears within a kind of "royal" blood, obviously of Blood group O, for which each month Rooster is paid for donating, the source of his money for all the good times.

     Royal blood, giants in the earth, blood kinship, curses and revenge—all the tribal and clan claims that have so plagued ancient Asian, African, Mid-Eastern, European worlds and modern cultures everywhere are the forces that Johnny "Rooster" Byron finally calls up! Except for a few stuck-up descendants of Plymouth Rock, the USA has nothing quite like this, which explains our absurd fascination, I suppose, with English royalty, along with so many Americans' Anglophile obsessions, and, probably, some of the audience members rapt appreciation of this play.

     Despite Rylance's wondrous performance, however, I was not convinced that those curses, the drumbeats, even the sonorous rumbles, would bring anyone to his rescue to save his sacred green garden from the bulldozers about to descend. The gasoline might set one such machine afire, but there are others—there will always be others—behind it, and the people of Flintock and environs have already been cursed by the contingencies of contemporary life. But then, I never believed in the regeneration by rain in The Wasteland either, a poem written by another Anglophile equally evoking hierarchical myths of tradition. If Rooster is Faust, so is any passing thug.

      I'll put my faith in the young Lee, the boy who perceives that it's necessary to escape, and has a number of intelligent and silly reasons for having chosen Australia. Even his desire to change names—completely incomprehensible to the leaden-brained Davey—suggests Lee seeks a new identity and life, free from all the things that Rooster attempts to conjure up. If that is Butterworth's point, I toast Jerusalem as a play as well as a great vehicle for Rylance's talents. But if we are to suppose that the man who once died, only to come back to life, will rise again, next time I'll root for the dragon.

 

New York, May 9, 2011

Reprinted from USTheater (May 2011).

Harry Partch | Partch Dark, Partch Light / 2009

why the hell did you come?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harry Partch Partch Dark, Partch Light, performed by the group Partch at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall on May 29, 2009

 

A true American musical maverick similar in some respects to Charles Ives, composer Harry Partch was born, the son of Presbyterian missionaries, in Oakland, California in June 1901. Much of his youth was spent in isolated Arizona and New Mexico towns, where, reportedly, he heard and sang songs in Spanish, several American Indian languages, and Mandarin, sung to him by his mother, who had spent time in China.

     He attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with the intention of a musical career; but in 1925 he discovered the book On the Sensations of Tone by the German physician and physicist Hermann Helmholtz, a study of the psychological effects of musical tones, and soon after dropped out of school to study by himself, exploring the musicality of speech and constructing his own instruments that "underscored the intoning voice." As Partch wrote:

 

             I came to the realization that the spoken word was the distinctive expression my

             constitutional makeup was best fitted for, and that I needed other scales and 

             other instruments. This was the positive result of self-examination—call it 

             intuitive, for it was not the result of any intellectual desire to pick up lost or 

             obscure historical threads. For better or for worse, it was an emotional decision.

 

 His first instrument was the "Monotone," an "adapted viola," which later joined with numerous others including The Diamond Marimba, The Quadrangularis Reversum, the 11-key Bass Marimba, Bamboo Marimbas (nicknamed "Boo" and "Boo II"), Cloud Chamber Bowls, an instrument he called "The Spoils of War" (which included Cloud Chamber Bowls, artillery shell casings, metal whang-guns, and wooden piecings), The Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs, an xylophone augmented with tuned liquor bottles and hubcaps (The Zymo-Xyl), Kitharas, and Harmonic Canons (played with fingers, picks or mallets).

     Receiving a Carnegie grant in the early 1930s, Partch traveled to London, meeting the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who gave him permission to set his translation of Sophocles' Oedipus as an opera. Transcribing the inflections of the Abbey Theatre actors, Partch performed his piece on monophone, intoning "By the Rivers of Babylon." Yeats was delighted by the effects.

     Yet the grant soon ran out, and the following year, 1935, Partch returned to the US at the height of the Great Depression, and lived for nine years wandering as a hobo, doing odd jobs and designing his instruments.

     Important works of this period were "Dark Brother," performed at the concert I saw by the Partch group, a piece from Thomas Wolfe's "God's Lonely Man," which reiterates Partch's own sense of isolation and separateness. Most of Partch's relationships were with males, and his feelings of disengagement with the whole of society were obviously intense.

     Yet many of the works of this period are brilliantly comical, including the "Yankee Doodle Fantasy," sung in accompaniment with tin oboes and other instruments, that satirizes patriotism, serious club women, and even his 43-tone note system. Similarly lighter Partch pieces, two based on James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "Isobel" of 1944 and "Annah the Allmaziful" of the same year, were, along with his utterly charming tribute to Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," ("O Frabjous Day!"), highlights of the evening.

     One of Partch's most strange but yet arresting works is his "Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions," based on messages left by hitchhikers just outside the Mojave Desert junction of Barstow:

        

         The scribbling is in pencil. It is on one of the white highway railings just outside

         the Mojave Desert junction of Barstow, California. I am walking along the 

         highway and sit down on the railing to rest.

              Idly I notice the scratches where I happen to drop. I have seen many 

         hitchhiker's writings. they are usually just names and addresses—there are 

         literally millions of them, or meaningless obscenities, on the highway signs, 

         railings, walls.

              But this—why, it's music. It's both weak and strong, like unedited human

         expressions always are. It's eloquent in what it fails to express in words. And 

         it's epic. Definitely, it is music....

 

Indeed, upon first hearing each of these numbered pieces, presented in a kind of sprechstimme-like performance by guitarist John Schneider, the words are almost laughable. But Patrch allows us after the original statement to hear the echoes of those words, by repeating them with emotionally-charged after tones and dramatic additions ("ha-ha-ha," "dum-de-dum," etc) that transforms them into haunting expressions of fear and joy. The first one, for example, begins with a young man returning to Boston, Massachusetts, wishing he were dead, yet oddly adding "Today I am a Man." Is his manhood defined by his desire for death or for some sexual encounter that he has recently had? There is no one answer; but the echo of the two, filled in by Partch's joyful exclamations, alter the whole, and suddenly what might have been simple banality is awash with glorious possibilities.

      Similarly, the young girl of "Considered Pretty," whose name and Las Vegas address appears merely to be a sexual invitation, is transformed by the final statement: "objective matrimony," while the sly admission that she is "considered pretty," pulls at our hearts when connected with her obvious desires.

      "Jesus Was God in the Flesh" begins as a simple announcement of belief, repeated over and over like a prayerful charm song instead a statement of faith. "You Lucky Woman" recounts the self-described charms of a passing man, whose braggadocio might be completely disgusting were it not for his final challenge to the opposite sex that "all you have to do is find me." And the final piece "Why in Hell Did You Come?" is shouted out almost in irritation for those hitchhiking complaints of the writer and others suffering the itinerant life. Yet in that ironic cry we hear the numerous echoes of drifters catalogued by John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, and others. 

       The evening began with Eleven Intrusions of 1950, written while Partch was staying in Gualala, on California's northern coast, at a ranch owned by pianist Gunnar Johansen. There, among the redwoods, Partch created many of his instruments and worked in relative splendor in comparison to his earlier days. But the isolation apparently became oppressive, and the darkness of these Japanese-inspired works, almost haiku-like studies—each piece generally performed by two instruments that present a sequence of microtonal dissonances—of a rose, a crane, a waterfall, the wind, the street, the lover, soldiers, and other concerns reveal the darkness of a life that formerly seemed to be able to survive great depredations.

      This was, I am sorry to say, my first encounter with the music of Harry Partch, a man who, as I describe above, was rescued later in his life by my friend Betty Freeman. It will not, however, be my last Partch concert. And the day after this event I listened with wonderment to Partch's "Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales" and, again, to "Barstow" on the record Just West Coast with great pleasure.

 

Los Angeles, May 31, 2009

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2009).

 

Lily Blau | The Missing Pages of Lewis Carroll / 2015

differential equations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lily Blau (developed in collaboration with Sydney Gallas) The Missing Pages of Lewis Carroll / Pasadena, California, The Theatre at Boston Court / the performance I saw was on Sunday, February 8, 2015

 

 It has long been known that certain pages of the private journals of Charles Ludwidge Dodgson were excised from the year 1863. One page was apparently removed by Dodgson himself, perhaps feeling that he had expressed something too awkwardly or emphatically; another missing page was been accounted for by his habit of mis-numbering the pages of his journals. Yet the pages of June 27-29 of 1863 were clearly razored out, and soon after that date it appears that his formerly close relations with the Liddell family, whose daughters, particularly Alice, he photographed, came to an end. It is also presumed that the Alice of his great book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, were based on Alice Liddell—although there is much evidence to the contrary—and, since his death, rumors have consistently arisen that, whether consummated or not, Dodgson had had a pedophilic relationship with the young girl. In fact, it may have been his nieces who later removed the pages from his journal, as they and other family members attempted to wipe away nearly all evidence of Dodgson’s relationships with women, including older women, feeling it might color the popularity of his pseudonymous publications under the name of Lewis Carroll, in which they also had a financial stake.

      Several works of fiction, film, and drama have dealt with various aspects of the life of this professor of mathematics at Oxford, including the oddly metaphoric work by John Logan, based on the fact that, at the age of 80, Alice Liddell Hargreaves met Peter Llewellyn Davies, the latter the inspiration for James Barrie’s young Peter Pan; the play obviously deals with two children whom, for the adults surrounding them, unintentionally became symbols for youth, beauty, and, love, but also may have both been the focus of pedophiles.

     Yet none of the theories surrounding Liddell and Dodgson’s relationship has ever been established, and there appears to be other evidence that he might have been attracted to Alice’s older sister or that he was courting the girls’ governess at the time of the rupture between him and the Liddells. The break in social intercourse may even have had more to do with university politics and his lack of support for Dean Henry Liddell than with his relationship with the Liddell children. The fact that he gave up photography in the same year of Alice’s marriage to the cricket-player, Ronald Hargreaves, also may have nothing at all to do with his relationship to the girl.

      Yet clearly, his photographs, if nothing else, reveal a fondness for the young Liddell daughter, and there are clearly many links, direct and indirect, that connect the Alice of his stories with the child whom he photographed. Is it necessarily shocking or perverse to believe that he simply did find Alice quite attractive and even contemplated, in a day in which youthful marriages were not uncommon, proposing marriage to her?

 

     The new play by Lily Blau at Pasadena’s The Theatre at Boston Court, in various ways, explores all the possible alternatives without dismissing any of them. And that, in turn, is what elevates this work from a simple piece of gossipy sleuthing to a drama that, inevitably, given what we know to be the themes of Dodgson’s Lewis Carroll works, transforms it into a mediation on the uncertainty of all knowledge, particularly within an age in which surety was seen as a necessity for adult action. The British Victorians were necessarily confident—even smug—in their acquisitions of colonies, explorations of new territories, and belief in their societal invincibility.

      Dodgson, as least as performed by the memorable actor, Leo Marks, was anything but confident. A man who stuttered in front of most adults; a mathematician who was perceived by many to be a superior intellect to those such as this play’s M. Lapin, who held higher positions in his department; the son of a minister, who himself preached, despite his obvious difficulties, about personal sin; and, self-evidently, a natural skeptic who was graced, nonetheless, with humility, the Dodgson of Blau’s play seems happier at the children’s table where he mightn’t be expected to show a Victorian stiff upper lip.

     The Dodgson of this play clearly is delighted by Alice (Corryn Cummins), and is desperately in love with her; apparently, he has done nothing to shame himself—except, of course, in his own imagination. But there, to use Shakespeare’s old saw, “lies the rub.” Even if he has done nothing wrong, how can he expect to get away with his sinful thoughts, plagued by his religiosity, his fear of being “found out” as a social fraud, and his terror—at least in this telling—of breaking with the conformities of his social position? Certainly, an Oxford professor might feel perfectly free to express a certain amount of eccentricities: Dodgson could “play” with photography, tinker with toys, write up imagined tales, create linguistically tongue-tying poems (which, oddly enough, The Missing Pages does not really explore, despite Dodgson’s inability to speak straightforwardly), even, on occasion, buy his young pupils presents, including a bright blue dress which he awards Alice so that she might match the girl in his story books; but there were limits that even differential calculus might demonstrate to him. As differential equations made clear, for example, “the derivative of the momentum of a body equals the force applied to the body.” Accordingly, whenever Alice moved toward him, he moved further into the distance. But what he had not accounted for is that, as she grew older, Alice might apply a force to his body that could not equal his resistance.

     Indeed, some sources, as I have suggested, hint that his relationship with the Liddells was ended by the indignant parents when it became clear that Alice had fallen in love with Dodgson, or, perhaps, after Dodgson determined he could no longer resist, he asked for her hand in marriage.

     In Blau’s play these dilemmas are melodramatized through warnings of his fellow professor, Lapin (Jeff Marlow), co-conspiring with the white rabbit of his tale. Mrs. Liddell (Erica Hanrahan-Ball), catching up her visitor with a mother’s insight every time he might even imagine stealing a kiss or, more terrifyingly, conjure up an image of actual rape, becomes the Red Queen demanding his head be chopped off.

    Blau’s play, which supposedly occurs on the day when Alice has planned a visit to Dodgson for one last photograph before she marries Hargreaves, is a sad one, not only because it calls up all the quandaries of reality and imagination that, no matter how he actually lived his life, Dodgson surely faced, but because it finally reveals that his great failure in life was not doing some dreadful deed, but doing nothing. Alice gently faults him not for becoming a gray-haired old man, but for refusing to become the rather young and dashing man who unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally) courted her as a child, and with whom she fell in love. Like Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice—whose crime is not that he lusts after the love of another of his own sex, but that he concentrates that unrealizable love upon the visage of a boy—Dodgson’s failure was not that he fell in love with a bright young girl, but that he did not reasonably act upon it. If he truly loved her, mightn’t he have simply waited for a few years to her to have become a woman and proposed the marriage she also sought? Or did he, her parents horrified by the implications? Or did he refuse her, after all, because he was a pedophile who could love only girls of a certain age?

     The playwright proffers no answer, but hints at it through the apparent emptiness of Dodgson’s life. In the end, after giving up even his hobby, he has little life left as Dodgson, having become a literary figure, instead, for all times, dying as a nonexistent being (Lewis Carroll) who expressed sorrow for having written his books, a man who looked perhaps too deeply into a world which existed, as brilliant as it was, only in his imagination.

 

Los Angeles, February 9, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance