David Lang and Mark Dion | Anatomy Theater / 2016

where is evil?

By Douglas Messerli

 

David Lang and Mark Dion (libretto), David Lang (composer) Anatomy Theater / Los Angeles, Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in Disney Music Center; the performance Howard Fox and I saw was at the matinee on Sunday, June 19, 2016

 

Composer David Lang’s and designer Mark Dion’s new work, Anatomy Theater, which received its world premiere at the Disney Center’s Redcat theater is more like a Broadway operetta in the manner of Sweeney Todd than being a true opera. Yet the LAOpera’s Off Grand production, the last of this season’s productions, represents a fascinating contribution to the musical canon that cannot easily be forgotten.

     Based on true occurrences in early 18th century, when criminals and paupers were publicly dissected after their deaths to determine where the evil existed in their bodies, this manifestation concerns a young woman, Sarah Osborne (Peabody Southwell), who, beaten and sexually abused by her step-father, was locked out of her own home and was forced to survive as a prostitute. After marrying her pimp, she was regularly beaten by him as well. Lacing her husband’s gin with laudanum, she then proceeded to smother him before hushing her two young children and suffocating them in turn.

       Beginning with the confession in the theater’s art gallery, Sarah is promptly hung before the eyes of the gathered opera audience who have been served up, as they might have in the 18th century, ale and sausages. The Master of Ceremonies, Joshua Crouch (Marc Kudisch) then encourages the crowd (“Follow me quickly, gentlemen”) to enter the theater proper to observe the anatomy itself.

       Accompanied by the anatomist, Baron Peel (Robert Osbourne) and his operating assistant, Ambrose Strang (Timur), the trio then proceed to anatomize the tools they will be using before cutting, yanking, and dissecting the various parts of Sarah’s naked and bleeding body—the work’s program note humorously begins, “No singers were harmed in the creation of this opera—in the attempt to find which of her organs was responsible for her horrific behavior.

       Obviously, there is rank smell of the mob in this theatrical presentation, and Crouch does his best to bring out the bestial lusts of his declared male audience (surely the sight of a beautiful nude woman upon an operating table whose dead body was being, quite literally, raped—her innards being carried away—must have titillated audiences of the day, and even today’s audience began with oddly-placed giggles before settling down to a more serious consideration), and, accordingly, we are made to comprehend, even in viewing this “representation” of the act, our inward lusts. Yet the self-inflated anatomist, Peel, argues that it is a necessary act to prove that all parts of the body must be attune with the others and the world around them in order to allow us to be a good citizens of the world.

       One by one, the bowels, the pancreas, the heart, and even the uterus is removed by Strang and inspected, as blood pours from the dead woman’s body—still the very live singer Southwell, who claimed she had to study meditation to bring her breathing down to a slight pulse for the 45 minutes of her “operation.”

     “Where is evil?” is the question the trio ask again and again. Yet they can find no contagion in any of her parts. It is apparent that the evil they are seeking lies not in the corpse, but in us, the human society which turned a blind eye to all of her abuse. And, obviously, as Lang has hinted in his comments, that fact makes this opera very contemporary, particularly within the context of the mob of haters who embrace a candidate such as Donald Trump.

       Lang’s music, as Los Angeles Times musical roots, as critic Mark Swed has written, is difficult to name. Obviously, as a founding member of the “Bang on the can” composers, percussion is essential; yet here there are beautifully lyrical moments, as well, such as Southwell’s lovely, operating table-aria, concerning the pureness of her heart despite her horrible deeds, where flutes, piano, viola, cello, and even accordion take precedence. At one point there is a rousing trumpet solo by wild Up performer, Aaron Smith. 

     Lang has become an increasingly impressive American composer. My only complaint is that I wish the run of this work had a bit a longer so that I might have returned to hear it again. Maybe a reprise next year? The Long Beach Opera did this quite successfully with Lang’s and Mac Wellman’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field.

 

Los Angeles, June 20, 2016

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

 

 

Philippe Quesne | La Mélancolie des dragons / 2015

elemental theater

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philippe Quesne La Mélancolie des dragons / the performance I saw was in Los Angeles at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/Calarts Theater) in Disney Music Center on September 23, 2015

 

As the audience moves to their seats in the production of Philippe Quesne’s play La Mélancolie des dragons, we observe a stage apparently covered with snow, a large white mat of felt on the floor and a series of seemingly dead (or wintry) trees covered with the substance. In the middle of the field sits an automobile attached to which is a small trailer of the kind that reminds one of the traveling performers in the opera Pagliacci, but here arriving in a dead world instead of a vitally excited small colorful Italian city.

     From time to time, we get a notion that there are people in the car, and, as the lights go down, we see there are indeed four individuals in the auto, all with very long tresses, munching on chips and swigging down cans of beer, while the car radio blasts out various heavy-metal, and from time-to-time, even classical pieces, the four nodding their heads in their rhythms.

     It is difficult to perceive the sex of these folk, and, at first, appears that two are males and the others of the opposite sex, perhaps a pair of couples on a strange date. If this small car-bound head-banger fest seems to go on a little too long, it is, in part, because we are voyeurs, watching them without invitation, kept on the outside of their world as we are.

    We soon discover, in fact, that we have been mistaken about their genders, perhaps hinting what Quesne’s play soon reveals: people are not always who or what they appear to be. At that very moment, a middle-aged Asian woman (Isabelle Angotti) bicycles into the glen, the four gradually piling out of the car a bit like circus clowns, revealing that they are all men.

    Three other equally long-haired men soon after exit from the back of the rectangular trailer.. We now might imagine that these are aging band members on their way to a concert, whose mother has just arrived by prearrangement. But, in fact, the woman, in her puffy purple vest, is there to check their car, evidently—given the vast number of engine parts she tosses out into the “snow”—in bad need of repair. As she crawls into the engine to further inspect, followed by a quick telephone call, she reports to this group of strangers that new parts will not be available for another week.

      Were these 7 heavy-metal dudes actually on their way to some gig, the news might have resulted in a great deal of grumbling and even teeth-gnashing, but these are apparently very gentle men, who, speaking English with slightly French accents, seem to be as placid and slow-minded as tortoises.

     When the Asian woman queries them about their trailer, they respond that it is, in fact, a kind of amusement park, and gently invite her to become the onstage audience of their show. Lifting up the felt snowpad, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, they plug in a cord which lights up the trailer to reveal it is fronted by glass, and holds within a selection of wigs all held on rings, as if suggesting a group of like-minded hirsute men. One explains that they also have a video projector to project words on the side of the trailer, helping to explain the objects and their actions.

     Another bemused deadhead displays of a small bubble machine, and yet another shows a small fountain that shoots water into the air. One of their group takes out of the car trunk a carton of books and, setting them up within the trailer, creates a small library of everything from monograms on art and pop-up children’s books to works by Antonin Artaud, Freud, Nietzsche, and numerous others great authors, so they tell her, who have influenced their activities—although, given their doltish use of language, it is hard to imagine any of them having actually read these books.

      A bit later, one of their kind displays a small snow-making machine, suggesting that the winter wonderland around them, in fact, has been of their creation. Presenting her with a pair of skies, the men take her through a ski run by lifting up and rolling the felt padding so that she might pretend to ski down slopes.

      Their small trailer also contains a fan, which they soon put to use by blowing up a large white plastic bag, carrying it ritualistically through the landscape. With lighting and projections, they change the colors of the landscape and suggest possible names for their cabinet of curiosities-amusement park.

       Throughout all of this, the car repair person seems genuinely amazed and absolutely delighted to have been able to immerse herself in their surprising world. Bringing out champagne and glasses, these 8 individuals—who may be, after all, not as simple as they appear—celebrate their success, quickly promising one more grand amusement: shortly after they, one by one, blow up four even larger black plastic bags, uprighting them to look a bit like a black forest of, very possibly, the melancholy dragons of the play’s title, which ends both their entertainment and the “drama” we have been observing—restating what he have recognized all along, that the work’s actions and significance are one in the same.

       The message here, a quite simple one, is that a wondrous and charming theater can be created out of the simplest elements of technology and imagination. As the program notes of Quesne’s Theatre of Vivarium Studio: the author-director’s stagecraft uses “a kind of mechanical research,” is “a technical theatre lab which cleverly modifies the conventions of genre.”

       If all of this is meant to sound like a radical intellectual redefinition of theater, at least as French critic Sara Sugiharabio would have it, in fact, it is rather too simplistic. While La Mélancolie des dragons presents us with the wondrous childlike roots—the innocent amusements—which are at the heart of all theater, as a play it is not that profound. If this is how theater begins—and it is good to be reminded of that—Quesne’s play eschews all the deeper and richer possibilities of dramatic literature, arguing rather that art is most transformative at its simplest.

     The wonder of theater, as playwright Mac Wellman has suggested in his early anthology of plays, Theater of Wonders* is that the greatest of its marvels are often arrived at through the most linguistically challenging and thematically complex of issues, some of which are inexplicable. While elemental theater surely reveals the genre’s charms, it may be at its best as a more highly artificed combine.

      La Mélancolie des dragons, however, is significant enough that I look forward to seeing other works by Phillippe Quesne and his Theatre of Vivarium Studio, and am joyful that Redcat has brought his work to Los Angeles.

 

Los Angeles, September 24, 2015

Reprinted from AmericanTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2015).

       

*Mac Wellman Theatre of Wonders: Six Contemporary American Plays (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985),

 

Tennessee Williams | In Masks Outrageous and Austere / 2012

medea’s last dance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tennessee Williams In Masks Outrageous and Austere / New York City, Culture Project / the performance I saw as a matinee production on Sunday, May 6, 2012

 

On Sunday, May 6, I attended, with Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, the premiere of Tennessee Williams’ last play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere—uncompleted at the time of his death—at Bleecker Street’s Culture Project. Despite rather dismissive reviews—David Finkel in The Huffington Post, for example, describing it as a “turgid” and “ludicrous” cauldron of "picked-over Williams obsessions” and Ben Brantley of The New York Times summarizing it as inhabiting a “tepid, in-between realm” that permits neither “audacious sincerity” or the permission to “go ahead and laugh,” I found the play and production utterly fascinating and far less problematic that almost all the reviewers had determined. Williams himself, while still working on the text (which he continued to do up until is 1983 death), described it as “important,” “extremely funny,” and “bizarre as hell.” It is, in my estimation, all three of those assessments—but then, one might describe almost any Williams’ play in the same way.

 

   Although the Culture Project’s production suffered a bit from their attempts to encourage the “over-time-top” sensibility of Williams’ text with pixel-projected flat screens, video renditions of telephone conversations with the central character’s advisor and doctor (distorted images and voices of Buck Henry and Austin Pendleton), banks of white, red, and blue lights, and eerie musical interludes by Dan Moses Schreier, this production did conjure up a sense of dreadful foreboding of a world of the edge of the apocalypse, a kind of Key West-like Babylon that might, at any moment, sink (or even be burned up) into the ocean waters so detested by the major figure of the play, Clarissa “Babe” Foxworth (Shirley Knight).

     With the exception of Knight and Alison Fraser’s absurdly comic Mrs. Gorse-Bracken (channeling a slightly hysteric version of Bernadette Peters) most of the young actors of the cast, it is true, have not yet mastered the sort of anti-naturalistic-driven voices so necessary to properly perform Williams’ lines (a problem as well for the language-driven playwrights such as Mac Wellman, Len Jenkin, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Foreman and numerous other contemporary playwrights). But then, except for Babe and Gorse-Bracken none of them truly matter, their characters serving merely as examples of sexual variations upon which Babe and, occasionally, her spiritual opposite, Gorse-Bracken, serve as commentators.

  

     Despite many critics’ assertions that In Masks Outrageous and Austere was simply a restatement of all of Williams’ previous themes, I’d argue that in this play that, even if Williams has returned to all of the themes of his previous plays, he took them much further, almost laying all his cards on the table so to speak, in the process, creating a far more straight-forward and, yes, honest, statement of his sexual obsessions than he previously had.

     There’s no question that behind every Williams male and many of his females is a homosexual, lesbian, or “perverse”—by the general societal standards—sexual being! It is hard to think of the few “normal” individuals (although no such word is truly possible in Williams’ canon, since it is those who believe themselves “normal” who are the most abnormal beings): Stella, perhaps, the gentleman visitor of The Glass Menagerie, maybe. After that, it gets difficult. Even the Big Daddy’s and Big Momma’s of Williams’ world have suffered incomparable torments in their sexual relationships. But in most of Williams’ works, up until his final short and longer plays, these figures were kept somewhat in the shadows, their true sexual identities exposed, certainly, but just so ever slightly blurred that they could escape the deficient attentions of many middle class Americans and even the harsh lights of Hollywood movies. Most viewers certainly comprehended that in the motion picture version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for example, Brick’s real problem was his homosexual attraction to his high school football companion Skipper; but people like my parents and their friends, had they even ventured out to that film (they were not adventurers) might have easily believed Burl Ives' assertion that his son’s problem was immaturity, an inability to grow up and out of his idealized friendship with his former “buddy.” They might even have convinced themselves that Blanche was a subject of small-town gossip and was just terribly misunderstood.

     Such white-washing, brain-washing slips of imagination are quite impossible, however, in this last Williams work. There is Babe, full-face to the audience, announcing one by one the sexual peccadilloes of nearly every figure in the cast: from her gay—and in this Williams play, it is “gay,” not “homosexual” behavior that is the proper description of the character’s acts—husband Billy’s (Robert Beitzel) abandonment of her bed for his ship-board dalliances with his  Harvard-bred “secretary,” Jerry (Sam Underwood) to her own lesbian past (which she characterizes, humorously, in the old-fashioned expression of “acts of Bilitis”). She, a pure sensualist, determined to “gratify everything in me as the luna moth dies at dusk,” announces to us that, as the wealthiest woman in the world, she has purchased her current love-interest to fulfill her needs. But he has failed her, just as her endless cocktails of vodka and champagne have failed her, her dying father has failed her, her nerves have failed her, and, now, even her guardians, the nefarious Gideons—a security force made of up of internally-loving gay boys hired by the Kudzu-Clem corporation watching over her wealth—have seemingly failed her. She, in short, is the perfect exemplar of Mick Jagger’s and Keith Richard’s lyrical wail: “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” So too does she announce, in case the audience has turned a blind eye, that her neighbor Mrs. Gorse-Bracken, living in an invisible nearby house, is obviously engaged in a incestuous relationship with her forever-masturbating son, Playboy; that her maid, Peg Foyle (Pamela Shaw) is a slut; and determines that Peg’s current boyfriend, Joey (Christopher Halladay)—whom Peg has met in a local church—is a stud worthy of her attention. Babe, in short, is the Chorus to Williams’ ridiculous Greek-like tragedy, where the masks fall from the character’s faces as quickly as they might attempt to attach them. Despite its lugubrious title, there are, in fact no “outrageous masks” possible given Babe’s revelatory announcements. 

   If nothing else—and there is a great deal else to be said about this play—Babe’s drunken pronouncements, which Knight delivers in a kind of stammering delight which, at times, appears to suggest that the overwrought actress has almost forgotten her lines, is like a slap in the face, an outrageous howl of sensual disappointment.  That she, along with her slim-waisted and mentally wasted husband, have been abducted and deposited into this seaside hellhole in a manner similar to the Church of Scientology’s alleged imprisonments of their own doubting adherents, only ratchets up Babe’s vengeful dance of truth-telling, until finally, exhausted, she disappears into the strangely lit up aurora-borealis-like sunset to swim in a sea she has so boisterously admitted she abhors. In her absence, her current objects of disappointment are destroyed, murdered, as she, apparently, is freed to move on, like the Capitalistic world she symbolizes, devouring others in her desperate search for love.

     As a comedic-romantic Williams has always secretly equated love with suffocation, desire with greed, the sexual act itself with self-immolation; and in this play, all these tropes become quite visibly apparent. Pumped up on drugs, perhaps satiated beyond his capability to accept any further love, Williams created in Babe a startling rendition of Medea’s dance of death, a song of vengeance for all those who so disappointed this man’s, and every man’s like him, insatiable desires. For Williams’ last lover, the play’s director David Schweizer, the recreation of this text can only have been a painfully poignant reconstruction, one I, at least, felt honored to have experienced.

 

Los Angeles, May 10, 2012

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2012).

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