Richard Foreman performed by the Wooster Group | Symphony of Rats / 2024

the finale of seem

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Foreman Symphony of Rats / performed by the Wooster Group, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte / the performance I attended with Deborah Meadows and James Sherry was on October 22, 2024 at Redcat Theatre in the Walt Disney Music Hall

 

Things are bad for the President of the US (the remarkable performer Ari Fliakos). He’s been having fever dreams after being vaccinated for COVID-19 and his series of different hallucinations which include strange and quite improbable visions embracing a “Tyger Tyger Song,” referencing William Blake’s famous poem, an incident on a Ghost Ship which hints at Richard Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, a brief Rat Opera which improbably calls up Théophile Gautier’s description of his notorious “rat” ballet, a Tornadoville encounter which most certainly takes us into the world of The Wizard of Oz, a wonderfully appropriate short rendition of Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” a brief video excursion into D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, a head-bobbing association to Charlie’ Chaplin’s famous sequence in The Great Dictator wherein a bouncing ball becomes an icon of the globe’s survival, as well as the experiences of the world of golf and a sexual engagement with a woman wherein our President gets to wear a larger than life dildo, presumably a reflection upon Reagan’s notoriously astounding penile appendage*—and these are just a few of Foreman’s and the Wooster Group’s associative allusions to literature, art, and profane pop culture—make it clear to the men of a hyper-hysterical laboratory who attempt to analyze, encourage, and explore the President’s hallucinations, that something is very “wrong.”

     These figures (Niall Cunningham, Jim Fletcher, Andrew Maillet, Tavis Miller, Michaela Murphy, and Guillermo Resto) sing, dance, and encourage the Commander in Chief with sexual come-ons (both homosexual and heterosexual), songs, dances, and analyses that basically seem to only trigger further fevers, until the President no longer knows even if he is still on planet Earth or has truly been transplanted into outer space.

     This play, originally performed in 1988 through a memorable collaborative production with the Wooster Group, called up US leaders, past and present such as Nixon and Reagan, but now, of course, echoes the horrors of a current Presidential nominee. What we have in this production is a highly layered work, whose dramatic devices, video representations, and endless stage machinations ululate and reverberate not only the terrorizing political situations in which the US has repeatedly discovered itself floundering, but speak to something much larger and more significant regarding the differences and similarities of the various theatrical viewpoints that attempt to reiterate those cultural issues.

      In his review of the other day, Los Angeles Times critic Charles McNulty quite brilliantly explained what he perceives as the difference of these two companies, both (along with, I would argue Mabou Mines** and the Theatre of the Ridiculous) have had an enormous effect on US theater in the 1970s through the present. McNulty summarizes it:

 

“Lurking behind Foreman’s madhouse phantasmagorias is the mind of the artist interrogating its own secret chambers. Beneath the layers of the Wooster Group’s postmodern antics, on the other hand, are only more layers of performance. There is no single consciousness beneath the work. Reality itself is a form of theatrical interplay.”

 

      Foreman gave this company full permission to rethink and reimagine his original work, and they took full advantage of his allowances. But the Wooster Group inevitably mirrors the original playwright in the figure of Guillermo Reso, who speaks much like a shaman speaking into a basketball hoop. It’s not he that offers, in which McNulty describes as his Darth Vader proclamations, anything that might “explain” the dreams we are sharing with the stage figures who are attempting themselves to makes sense of the irreality of living, but his empty sagacity layers this wonderful dream with yet other possibilities.

       What we experience in this version of the truly fascinating Symphony of Rats is the very history of the complexity of contemporary American theater. Although the Wooster Group’s production has little patience with the winking nods to gay culture of the 1960s Warhol Factory and Ronald Tavel’s and Charles Ludlam’s The Theatre of the Ridiculous, in its ruminations of OZ and Women in Love, along with Fliakos’s insistent physical touches of the twinkish Cunningham, it clearly permits a homoerotic reading not unlike the thoroughly down-and-out sexually gay version of Tennessee Williams’ Vieux Carré in which Fliakos starred in 2009.

          As Helen Shaw recently suggested in The New Yorker there is a kind of gay texturing in this work that refers us back to the 1960s and 1970s allusions of Warhol, Tavel, and Ludlam: “Fliakos wears the kind of dun-colored tank top and many-zippered pants that you’d expect on the engineering mate of an interstellar cargo tug, and when the screens play snippets of video, it’s flotsam like “Ghost Ship” or a YouTube cooking tutorial, or, in one extended sequence of homoerotically tinged violence, a murderous scene from ‘The Suicide Squad.’”

      In short, just as McNulty suggests, in any Wooster Group production there are layers upon layers which reveal the cultural acculturations through which we attempt to explore the strange and dangerous visions of our leaders and the society in general.

      Symphony of Rats is not truly about our presidents, the outrageous monsters who would wish to control us such as Nixon, Reagan, and Trump, but about our own delusions, the feverish dreams and the dangers of the culture in general moving endlessly away from a more normative reality—or at least if not “normative” toward a more meaningfully coherent notion of reality which involves imagination, dream, and the acceptance of something beyond the ordinary.

     A breakdown is perhaps not truly as bad as it appears, but a necessary re-exploration of what our so-called reality is all about. As Anthony Howell quite profoundly commented on Ludlam’s original production:

 

“This idea of breakdown pervaded the entire play, usually couched in terms of Foreman’s longtime dialectic between imagination and reality. After confessing that his “mental Polaroid is broken,” the President engages in a dialogue with one of the video robots, who declares that “getting a handle on reality is what most humans spend most of their time working on,” but that he prefers “the twists and turns of the human imagination.” In Foreman’s ontological analysis, reality is a social con-job; and breakdown, even at the cost of a loss of personal identity, is a moral imperative: “It’s time to relieve yourself of the belief systems you only partially believe in.” By having the President give up sober control and submit himself to imaginative chaos, Foreman (who began working in the ’60s) presents a ’60s idea recycled in ’80s terms: that imagination is the only value that can rescue us from the tyranny of an existence defined and constrained by social convention.”

     What this truly significant production reveals is that it is only through art, especially those divergent possibilities of it, that we might be redeemed from the false visions of horror, leadership, and tornadic terrors that we doomed to encounter. We need “all of it,” the end of categories, the whole kit and caboodle of challenging thinking if we are going to survive.

     In both Richard Foreman’s 1988 work, as in this production, metaphor no longer has meaning. As confusing as reality is, it is, as Stevens made clear in his 1923 poem, precisely what it is: there is no other way to possibly express it except in the chaos of its own vertigo. The “emperor of ice cream” is only a clone with a cone on his head, no other clothing can hide his naked existence.

     I must add that through this fascinating production we finally need to recognize that along with Kate Valk, Ron Vawter, Willem Dafoe, Spaulding Gray, Frances McDormand and so many others to which this company has introduced us, it is time to recognize Ari Fliakos as one of our very greatest of performers.

 

*Just the other day, Trump reiterated is compulsion with penis size in his discussion of golfer Arnold Palmer. I can’t imagine that the original playwright and the current production might have expressed it any better: "This is a guy that was all man," the former president said. "This man was strong and tough, and I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, 'Oh my God, that's unbelievable.'"

**Mabou Mines, I would argue, is also dependent upon collaboration, but simply in a more contained manner. That “collaborative hub” of David Warrilow, Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, and Philip Glass has general worked in pairs or trios rather than in entire company involvement, but also with equally felicitous effects.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2024

Reprinted from World Theater, Opera, and Performance (October 2024).

Arthur Schnitzler | La Ronde / 2010 [reading of play]

what's love got to do with it?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Arthur Schnitzler La Ronde, translated from the German by Nicholas Rudall (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,

2010)

 

La Ronde, originally titled Der Reigen (a round-dance or roundelay, published as Hands Around in English) was first "handed-around" in a private edition in 1900 Vienna. The play, which follows the sexual affairs of 10 couples, one each appearing in the next scene, was recognized as too outspoken even by its author. Schnitzler was, nonetheless, shocked that when the play was produced in 1903, it caused a major scandal, anti-Semitic riots, and the banning of the play. It was not revived again in that city until 1920.

      Translator Nicholas Rudall, disliking the notion of being "handed-around"—since it implies the idea of the possible disease of syphilis, an interpretation of that has delimited discussion of the work's themes—takes his nod from Max Ophuls great film rendition of 1950, La Ronde, which retains the concept of the dance while including other "circles" such as the circle of friends that make up the sexual partners of the play. Frankly, one of the weakest aspects of Ophuls' film, for me, is the constant repetition throughout of waltz music, a carousel motif, and even images of the frames of film itself as they weave through the spool of the projector. Personally, I prefer the German title, or even that of the original English, with its social connotations of being handed around or even handed-off, if one can forget that it calls up venereal disease.

      None of the play's characters, despite the intense denials to the contrary, are innocents. The young prostitute of the first scene readily seeks out sexual contact with the sailor, offering her body up to him for free! The young maid of Scene II, knows very well how to flirt with the soldier while drawing him into the bushes near where they have been dancing. She is equally willing to bed with the young son the house, who may be inexperienced but is quite clearly "ready" for the attack. Although the Young wife of Scene 4, may need a more careful seduction than the maid, the young gentleman has prepared for almost everything, and even though he fails the first time around, he soon comes alive in her caresses.

      It is, in fact, in Scenes 4 and 5, that the play truly comes alive, and begins to intimate Schnitzler's true concerns. Part of the method that the young wife uses to arouse her would-be lover is to question him, not only about his own past, but his affairs with other women, his own position in relationship to sex. While this is not completely an innocent series of inquiries, we also feel that she is seeking for some sort of understanding, if not about sexuality in general, at least about her own feelings and her own break with cultural taboos. This becomes more apparent in the next scene, where we come to understand the cause of her frustrations—her business-man husband is much older than she and his sexual relations might be described as a purposeful on-and-off again activity, what he describes as an attempt to keep the honeymoon alive!

      He cannot even imagine that she might be unfaithful, and insists that she should dessert any woman acquaintance who might possibly even be thought able to do such a thing. Yet she insistently questions him, it is clear, just to comprehend why these situations occur. Has he ever had sex with a married woman? He grumpily admits that he has—before meeting her. But we see in the very next scene we see that he is not himself adverse to having extra-marital affairs.

     All of these sexual couplings are heterosexual, in part, because Schnitzler intentionally presents relationships in which men and women are quite equal, at least in terms of their hypocrisy. The last two scenes, however, portray a man who has his mind, at least, occupied by something else. In Scene 9, the handsome Count (beautifully portrayed in Ophuls rendition by Gérard Philipe) visits the actress midday with the permission of the woman's mother. To her suggestion that they have immediate sex, he is startled; he's not ready for it, he argues; it's like having a drink in the morning. No, they must wait until after of the theater, after dinner, at the appropriate time and place. Meanwhile, he talks not of love (The Count claims that "there is no such thing as love"), but of his good friend, Louis and other men in his regiment. The actress finally must ask him to remove his sword, and when the seduction scene arrives, it is she who conquers.

    In the final scene, the Count awakens in the room of the Prostitute, not even knowing who she is or where he is, and certain, given his drunken condition, that the woman in the bed and he have never had sex. The only thing he remembers is that he was in his carriage with his friend Louis. In a final series of questions he reminds me of the stock-gay-figure: the straight-man who gets drunk to have sex with homosexual men, conveniently forgetting everything come morning.

 

                         COUNT: (stops) Listen, tell me something. Doesn't it mean

                         anything to you anymore?

                         WHORE: What?

                         COUNT: I mean, don't you have any pleasure doing it anymore?

                         WHORE: (yawning) I need some sleep.

                         .......

                         

                         COUNT: Last night...tell me. Didn't I just collapse on the sofa

                         right away?

                         WHORE: Of course you did....with me.

                         COUNT: With you...well, I...

                         WHORE: But you passed right out.

 

     Love, even pleasure is missing from most of these encounters. It's the interchange accomplished through the revolutions of the dance and the attendant dizziness that matters. Schnitzler's consistent "blackout" at the moment of sexual contact, as established in this translation, is the perfect device in that it indicates the unimportance of the act itself. 

     Early in the play the Maid with her soldier cries out just before the sexual act, "I can't see your face." In a 1982 translation by Sue Barton, the Soldier retorts, "What's my face got to do with it," while Rudall simplifies the Soldier's words into a question: "My face?!"* I am not interested in judging which translation is better here—Rudall's translation seems to me to be a muscular, performable version—but the former does remind me of the title of the famed Tina Turner song, "What Does Love to Do with It?" which I couldn't get out my head while reading this work.  

     The characters of Schnitzler's play talk endlessly of love, but it's the sex they are after, and, in the end, it is their search for it that spins them off a life-long dance. The moment he finishes with the young maid, the soldier returns to the dance hall. The young wife returns to her husband after her dalliance with the young man. The Count surely is reunited with his friend Louis, uncertain whether or not anything happened with the sleepy prostitute, who reminds him of someone he has met long ago, perhaps the actress of the previous scene. In the end, Schnitzler's world is not so much an immoral one as it is a society of dissatisfied beings.

 

*Marya Mayne's 1917 English-language translation represents the Soldier's line as, "Face, hell!"

 

Los Angeles, August 12, 2010

Reprinted from Rain Taxi

Sebastian Galvez | An Afternoon with Tennessee Williams / 2018

going crazy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sebastian Galvez An Afternoon with Tennessee Williams, directed by Paul Sand / the performance Pablo Capra and I saw was at the Robinson Gardens mansion in Beverly Hills on March 14, 2018

 

On March 14, 2018, with Pablo Capra, I visited the lovely mansion, Robinson Gardens in Beverly Hills, where Sebastian Galvez presented his one-man show “An Afternoon with Tennessee Williams,” directed by our mutual friend Paul Sand. The Spanish born Galvez looks amazingly like a thinner-faced and younger Williams, and managed a fairly convincing Southern accent, without overdoing it. Certainly, he is a far better version of Williams than the rather effeminate portrait in the Los Angeles Taper Forum’s version of The Glass Menagerie of a few years ago.

     The gracious greetings and introductions of the Robinson head-of-staff who greeted the small audience of about 30 individuals from the entry room to the small library where the play was presented, was a near-perfect prelude to the rather suave and dapper Williams who Galvez portrayed.

      Bringing out the hidden actor through a few knocks on a nearby door, Galvez centered his one-man play basically on Williams’ gay sexual relationships, which, although widely known, has been somewhat ignored. The actor describes his relationship, first, with Pancho Rodríguez y González with whom he traveled to Provincetown, there to finish his play, A Streetcar Named Desire, where he was also visited by the then-young actor, Marlon Brando, for a read through of what Williams had written—evidently so impressive that his agent and he both immediately agreed to cast him in the role of Stanley.

     The jealous Poncho, however, stormed out and began a crisis in their relationship. This morning Pablo sent me a photograph of at least one of Williams’ encounters with Brando (although the playwright argued that he never had sex with his actors), with the note, “No wonder Poncho was jealous.”

     Although Galvez’s version—based evidently on Williams’ own memoirs—suggests that soon after in Provincetown, the playwright met his long-time lover, the Sicilian would-be actor, Frank Merlo, a recent biography on lyricist John Latouche suggests that Latouche had previously introduced Williams to that lyricist’s former lover. In any event, it is apparent in this production that Merlo was central to Williams’ most successful years (1948-1963), the lover serving, as well, as the playwright’s personal secretary, organizing his correspondence, finances, and much else besides peacefully enduring Williams’ storms of drunkenness, drug addiction, and sexual straying. The two lived both in Manhattan and in a small home in Key West.

     Galvez makes it evident, through numerous swigs of bourbon or Johnnie Walkers and even, at one point, a few stage-prop Seconals, that Merlo was the true of love of Williams’ lifetime, and when his lover was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, he returned after their breakup, to care for the dying man. Merlo’s death put Williams into a nearly catatonic state at a time his own career, primarily due to the writer’s shift to plays that can now be perceived as almost post-modern works, was waning.

      I love many of these late plays, and have published one of them, The Gnädiges Fraülein, in my and Mac Wellman’s anthology, From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Drama 1960-1965. But audiences simply didn’t take to them at the time, and the scathing reviews helped further to bring down a suffering and fearful-of-death Williams.

      

     The one other major love of his life was his sister Rose, who, as he put it in the poem, “The Paper Lantern,” was always quicker than him in everything—until she fell in love and became, so it was diagnosed, schizophrenic. A failed lobotomy sentenced her to a life in a mental institution, and the love and sorrow the playwright feels about her is revealed not only in the character of Laura in his The Glass Menagerie, but his life-long devotion to her, visiting her regularly in an upstate New York private institution for which he paid. The failures of his family life, Williams’ determined hatred of his own mother, and his own ghost and addictions—to gay, young lovers, alcohol and drugs—becomes a major theme in Galvez’s rendition of Williams’ life.

      The actor even does a remarkable version of the playwright’s death, with a plastic bottle-top lodged in his mouth as he, attempting to apply eye-drops, collapsed and died in his suite in Hotel Elysée in New York at the age of 71.

       One might long to hear more about Williams’ writing, which clearly was at the center of his survival. Yet Galvez’s and Sand’s “Afternoon” is a fascinating look at aspects of Tennessee Williams that are often overlooked. The small, but truly enthusiastic audience—many friends of either the actor or the director—felt, I believe, like they were sharing an afternoon with the ghost of a beloved playwright in his own living room.

     I love all things Tennessee Williams, so this performance was a true pleasure, even if I might have wished for a little deeper view of the man who I think is definitely the greatest of US playwrights.

     What I particularly loved about the author I have grown to know was his great sense of humor. It is rumored—and I believe it—that he laughed throughout the opening of A Streetcar Named Desire, as well he should have, Blanche being clearly a “hoot” out of world few of us have ever known. But it is Williams’ special territory, a haunted, spooky, Southern past in which people never behaved as they might have been expected to that ultimately draws us into his plays. Blanche, like Rose, was already moving toward insanity, even as she tried to escape.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2018

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

Giacomo Puccini, Lugia Illica, and Giuseppe Giacosa | Madama Butterfly / 2016

a kind of turandot

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giacomo Puccini (composer), Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (libretto, based on the play by David Belasco and the story by John Luther Long), Anthony Minghella (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Madama Butterfly / the production I saw with Howard Fox was the live HD broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast / 2016

 

The new HD production of New York’s Metropolitan Opera’s Madama Butterfly was Howard’s and my third visit to the popular work in the last 8 years, the other productions being described in My Year 2012; so I need not say much about what has almost become a war-horse for opera companies around the nation. Coincidentally, the LA Opera production we saw in 2012 was also revived this year.

      What I did notice, however, was that when I last wrote about this production in 2009, I seemed to put as much blame on Cio-Cio-San’s refusal to perceive the truth of her situation as upon the behavior of the heartless American Lieutenant Pinkerton. But this time, struck with the handsome Roberto Alagna’s posturing, I grew even more disgusted by the ugly American character, feeling that even the morally-grounded Sharpless (performed again by Dwayne Croft) did not do enough to stop his countryman’s cruel behavior.

    Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton—named perhaps for Franklin’s reportedly licentious behavior in his Paris days—has arranged his marriage with Cio-Cio-San with the same bemusement that he has arranged for the 999-year rental of their Nagasaki home. From the very beginning this barbarian, it is clear, has utterly no intention of keeping his marriage contract with the 15-year-old girl. At least Humbert Humbert stayed with his Lolita as long as he was permitted to. Pinkerton openly jokes about having a woman in every port and “dropping his anchor” around the world, using the words obviously as a metaphor for sexual dalliance.

      Pinkerton not only makes it clear that someday he will break the marriage contract with Cio-Cio-San by marrying an American woman, but he does not even attempt to hide the fact his interest in the young innocent (played this time round by a rather robust adult beauty, Kristine Opolais) is a product of simple lust. Perhaps I missed it in the early Met production, but this time I was struck by how clearly that lust was expressed as he sneaks a view through the Japanese screens of his young bride getting undressed. Even though he already possesses her, it is clear that his interest in the underage beauty is the product merely of, as my companion Howard honestly expressed it, a hard-on.

      During an intermission, Alagna described his character in less negative terms, arguing that he perceives him as simply a young sailor who has made a terrible mistake, and commends his later admission to his American wife and decision to adopt the child. “Think of him as a young soldier in Afghanistan,” he suggested, a lonely boy who finds pleasure in the beautiful local.

      The problem with such a forgiving view, however, is that, although Pinkerton may have regrets, he is not honest enough to openly express them to his former lover; upon his return to Nagasaki with his new wife, Pinkerton has no intent upon even seeing Cio-Cio-San, and only when Sharpless reports to him that she has had the lieutenant’s baby does he bother to make a visit—with the express purpose of taking away the only thing she has to give her solace. And even then, the small band of greedy Americans plans their visit early in the morning so that they might not have to face Cio-Cio-San but merely convince her faithful Suzuki (Maria Zifchak) to tell her of their plans.

     Opolais described her character as representing the highest attainment of womanhood: a woman who is beautiful, loving, passionate, loyal, forgiving. Cio-Cio-San does not even put blame on Pinkerton’s wife, but suggests that she should be the happiest of all beings, since she will now have everything, while Cio-Cio-San will have nothing.

     Yet Cio-Cio-San, justifiably perhaps, is also vengeful, demanding that she will give up her son only if Pinkerton comes to see her, already plotting, surely, that he will arrive only to discover her dead body. It may be that she perceives that the only way to deal with these soulless barbarian Americans is to force them to realize the consequences of their lies and deceptions. Part of the reason that her suicide is so powerful is because we know that Pinkerton and his wife will be forced to live the rest of their lives with the image of Cio-Cio-San’s disemboweled body, just as she has lived with the knowledge of her father’s death ordered by the Mikado. The happiness she has wished for Pinkerton’s wife will be nearly impossible given the circumstances of Cio-Cio-San’s death. Moreover, as I pointed out earlier in that earlier essay, it will certainly have a lasting effect also on her own son; even her names for the boy, “Sorrow/Joy,” suggest that he may live a life of a manic-depressive.

     In the end, it appeared to me, seeing the opera again, that if Cio-Cio-San remains an innocent, by opera’s end she has also become a kind of Turandot.

 

Los Angeles, April 4, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2016).

     

Poor Dog Group | The Murder Ballad (1938) / 2015

an american epic

by Douglas Messerli

 

Poor Dog Group The Murder Ballad (1938), performed by Jessica Emmanuel and Jesse Saler, with music by Jelly Roll Morton / the performance I saw was on Friday, April 24, 2015 at Los Angeles’ Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall

 

We have music historian and archivist Alan Lomax to thank for the recording by the legendary self-declared “creator” of jazz, Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Murder Ballad,” a raunchy, salty, tale of a woman’s love and her murder of another woman who has taken “her man,” and who is later jailed for life, describing a heated lesbian sexual encounter within a prison bed.

     Jelly Roll (born Ferdinand LaMothe) first sang the song within a New Orleans Storyville house of prostitution where we worked as a piano player and singer in his youth. Lomax found him in a small Washington, D.C. bar, where we worked as bartender, piano-player and bouncer in the late 1930s, a low point in his career, a few years before his death. Plying the jazz legend, as some histories have described it, with liquor and friendly conversation, Lomax had planned for a short recording session for the Library of Congress, which grew into over eight hours of talk, singing, and playing by Jelly Roll. In those sessions, the singer was convinced by Lomax to perform the violent, sexually vulgar song the way it was originally performed, a piece in such questionable taste that the Library did not release it until 2005. Today it’s recognized as a masterpiece of early American jazz.

     The immensely talented Los Angeles-based theater-performance Poor Dog Group took the song, just as Morton had recorded it, and set it to a riveting dance performance by Jessica Emmanuel, along with occasional interactions by Jesse Saler. If it appears to be a simple theatrical convention, the way Emmanuel twists and turns her body in ecstasy and horror throughout gives the work a new sense of urgency that has to be seen to be appreciated. Let me just say that the 45-minute The Murder Ballad (1938)—first performed by this group at Redcat in the New Original Works festival in 2012 and revived this past week at the same theater—was utterly revelatory.

     The work, as originally performed by Morton, places itself in a strange situation with regard to gender, in part because its story of a powerfully sexual woman is sung with a steady metronome-like accompaniment—which only reiterates the inevitability of the narrative it relates—by an assertive, yet time-worn voice of a male singer.

 

                   If you don’t leave my fucking man alone

                   If you don’t leave my fucking man alone

                   You won’t know what way that you will go home

 

                   I’ll cut your throat and drink your fucking blood like wine

                   Bitch, I’ll cut your fucking throat and drink you blood like wine

                   Because I want you to know he’s a man of mine

 

       Emmanuel uses the occasion to wring out her soul in whirling, leaning motions forward and backwards. Dressed only in a pair of scanty panties and a loosely-fitting white top sheath, she becomes the personification of simultaneous threat and regret, a forceful ogre who is at the edge of desperation for her man’s neglect, reminding me a little of the position of the jilted Santuzza in Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, the opera I saw a few hours later. But while the betrayed Sicilian woman causes the death of her former lover, the woman of Morton’s ballad actually shoots the other woman dead, for which she is sentenced to life in prison.

     What’s interesting is that the narrative, at this point, shifts from the first person to the more objective third. The “I” is transformed into a “she,” which further isolates the wronged woman:

 

                  She said, open your legs, you dirty bitch, I’m gonna shoot you between

                      the thighs

 

                  She said I killed that bitch because she fucked my man

                  She said I killed that bitch because she fucked my man

                  She said I killed that bitch because she fucked my man

 

—the trinity of reiteration driving the home both the cause and effect, “Policeman grabbed her and took her to jail.” And for several more stanzas the work remains in the third person, as she is brought to trial and sentenced.

      It is only when she returns to the subject of sex that the first person returns, creating an even odder relationship to the male-telling of her story:

 

                  I can’t have a man, so a woman is my next bet

                  I can’t have a man in here; woman is my next bet

                  She said to be a good-looking mama: baby, I’ll get you yet

 

It shifts back to the third person immediately as the sex actually occurs, but changes soon after, creating an even deeper sense of sexual confusion as the poem recounts those very issues arising in the woman herself:

 

                 She said, I could learn to love you like a did that boy

                 She said, I should learn to love you like I did that boy

                 To play with my thing like that is pleasure like a toy

 

                 Every morning I want you to give me some of this good cunt you’ve got

                 Every morning I want you to give me some of this good cunt you’ve got

                 Because it sure is fine, it is good and hot.

 

     Presumably, this purposeful confusion of gender here is why the company decided to bring Jesse Saler, a male dressed in a jockstrap, on stage, as a somewhat effeminate surrogate, in opposition to the tall and statuesque Emmanuel, to symbolically play the other woman of whom the ballad now sings:

 

                 I want you to screw me, screw me like a dog

                 Screw me behind, sweet bitch, screw me like a dog

                 When it gets good, I want to holler out like a hog

 

And from this point on, the narrative voice returns to the first person, as the murderer declares her sorrow for her acts (“I’m sorry, sorry, sorry to my heart.”) and finally turns to prayer (“I pray and pray and pray and pray and pray.”), facing her final destination: “a box in the prison yard.”

     It is the very crudeness of the repeated words that creates the intensity of the ballad about a woman who sees sex from a point of view which was then stereotypical that of a man, and sung by a man (almost a boy when Morton first sang it). In the end the narrative encourages us to be both enchanted by its honesty and disgusted by the events it describes, while finding ourselves somewhat seduced by the fierceness of its sexuality if appalled by its lurid details. In short, it has everything than an epic American work has to have: innocence, sex, revenge, violence, guilt, regret and personal salvation! I had a great time.

 

Los Angeles, April 26, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performane (April 2015).