Monthly Archives: May 2010

“Are plays proper literature?”

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… asks David Jays in today’s Guardian. I’m rather with “zauberberg” in the comments section when she or he says, “I find the very fact that this question is posed baffling.”

But more, they’d pretty damn well be literature or the May 2010 issue of Theater journal from the Yale School of Drama is a waste of so much pulp and ink. This new issue specifically addresses the current status of play-as-text or vice versa, featuring new performance texts from the Nature Theater of Oklahoma (Romeo and Juliet) and Big Art Group (SOS), as well as essays by editor Tom Sellar, Juliana Francis Kelly, Jacob Gallagher-Ross and Karinne Keithley. I suppose I provide my own response to Jays’ question in my own contribution to the issue, “The Booking of the Play” — about six thousand words of it, I think, and only available to paying customers there, or on your local newsstands now.

But in brief: are plays literature? Of course they are, and capable of being interpreted from a variety of valid standpoints as readers: for entertainment, for study, for formal qualities. It’s just that, like novels, poems and other forms, sometimes they’re very bad literature indeed.



In conversation

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Those who were unable to attend the 10 May Howard Barker at the Segal Center event can now listen online to “A Conversation with Howard Barker,” conducted by Prof. David Ian Rabey of the University of Aberystwyth, at theatreVOICE. The hour-long discussion is divided into two parts: part one (“about history, abandoning social realism, and creating new definitions of political theatre”) is here, and part two (“about tragedy, working with actors, and the ethics of directing”) is here. There is also a question-and-answer session that concludes part two.

Books: Essays by Wallace Shawn

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On the late lamented television show Murphy Brown, Wallace Shawn occasionally guest-starred in the role of Stuart Best, a former newsman who was occasionally invited to deliver short, whimsical, observational essays in the high-pitched whine for which Shawn is perhaps best known. His vacuous, folksy, cheery commentaries, utterly devoid of content and which always ended with a broad smile, shrug and the cheery admission “That’s all’s I know!” would eventually drive Murphy into homicidal furies that would almost lead to her leaping across the desk to strangle him.

Shawn’s own commentaries in Essays, written over a twenty year period and recently collected between hard covers, are not as bad as all that. His meditations here on politics in the first half of the book and theatre in the second are deeply-felt considerations of the intersections between public and private morality, and Shawn makes few concessions even when he considers his own capacity for violence and injustice. But, like David Mamet’s prose style in Theatre, it partakes (like Shawn’s style in dialogue) in that faux-naïf quality that I identified as a failing of American writing about theatre in general:

Our family was privileged, but it was carefully explained to me that we were not rich, only “middle class,” and so, oddly, I would need to “work for my living” rather than just receiving it automatically — in other words, the little package that was the life I’d evitably possess would be waiting for me in the baggage room with my name written on it, but, annoyingly, it wouldn’t be delivered to the house, I’d have to get into a taxi and go get it.

Despite this, I grew up lazy, and I’ve stayed lazy. I’ve always like to eat ice cream and cake, and the line of least resistance for me has always been close to the border of sleep. What I was nine or ten, I kept an enormous mound of comic books on the floor of my bedroom, and my favorite thing was to burrow into my mound, find myself a comfortable position there, and in this wonderful swamp, which was also readable, I would reach a state that fell exactly midway between reading and napping.

This excerpt is selected almost at random from the first half of the book, on politics, in which the policies of the Bush and Clinton administrations are excoriated for their global brutality, and Shawn’s honesty in confronting his status as a member of the leisure class in an advanced Western democracy is entirely welcome. But because the stakes he discusses are so high, this “that’s all’s I know” quality becomes, at times, problematic. Charles McNulty in his Los Angeles Times review of the book, called Shawn’s tone “Pollyannaish,” but that’s not the worst of it: “[C]omplicated questions are approached with a simplicity that strips the conventional barnacles from the search for truth. There’s something bracing about this when it works. But when it doesn’t — which is about one-third of the time in this collection … — it can seem as though reductive cliches are being replaced with tendentious caricatures.” Perhaps McNulty had this passage about Bush in mind:

The love of killing is inside each one of us, and we can never be sure that it won’t come out. We have to be grateful if it doesn’t come out. In fact, it is utterly wrong for me to imagine that Bush is violent and I am not, that Bush is cruel and I am not. I am potentially just as much of a killer as he is. … But we can’t deny that Bush and his men, for whatever reason, are under the sway of the less peaceful side of their natures. From the first days after the World Trade Center fell, you could see in their faces that, however scary it might be to be holding the jobs they held, however heavy the responsibility might be for steering the ship of state in such troubled times, they were in fact loving it. Those faces glowed. …

Which, for all’s I know, might be true. But it’s just this tendentiousness that makes the first half of the book sometimes grating reading, even when you agree with the man. Because those stakes are higher, so should be the discourse: the reader balks that things might not be as simple as all that, an observation with which Noam Chomsky (whose interview with Shawn appears in this volume) famously trounced William F. Buckley in a 1969 debate.

Shawn is much better in the second half of Essays when he discusses the art form to which he has devoted his life, the theatre. Like David Mamet (the anti-Shawn, perhaps), Shawn has created a body of work unique in the American theatre as well: plays which explore and examine the nexus of morality and amorality in both the public and private spheres. Human viciousness emerges in a variety of characters and private situations, especially those that are most intimate: a bickering married couple (Marie and Bruce, which will be revived this winter by The New Group); the personal and almost erotic relationship between an older woman who defends America’s right to bomb Cambodia and an impressionable, innocent younger woman (Aunt Dan and Lemon); and especially Shawn’s masterpiece to date, The Designated Mourner, an elegy for the decline of culture in the midst of barbarism and that culture’s responsibility for it. In this play as well as in his most recent, Grasses of a Thousand Colors (which regrettably does not have a New York premiere date yet), Shawn eases his characters and thoughts into a dystopia of the near future, narrated from the distance of time by those responsible for those dystopias; their monologues, which crawl and twine back upon themselves, say far more about our oral culture of rationalization than any other plays of our time.

And, as Mamet has his own theories on the status and decline of American theatre in his time, so does Shawn. Shawn’s diagnosis is perhaps more persuasive because more broad-reaching:

… the people who would ultimately hear what I had to say were the theatre-goers. And who were the theatre-goers? In my country they were a small group, altogether, because theatre in the United States has simply never caught on in the way it has in England or on the European continent, for example. … The habit simply had never been formed. For most people in the United States, the issue of theatre simply didn’t arise. And as for those who, somehow, had gone to see a play or two — well, the experience had left most of them rather nonplussed. …

So the theatre-goers in the United States — the loyal followers of theatre, the ones who, despite everything, loved the theatre — the theatre-goers were an odd little circle, a funny old group. Not the sophisticates, one would have to say. Not people who listened to Hugo Wolf or George Crumb or Charlie Parker on their evenings off from the theatre. Not the aesthetes, with their well-worn copies of Kawabata and George Herbert. And, of course, not anyone who was poor or desperate or hungry or oppressed, because theatre is only for the middle class. …

No one would reward me, and no one would punish me, if I followed the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre or rejected them, if I wrote in a more naturalistic style or in a more surrealistic style. In writing a play, should I draw my inspiration from George Balanchine’s ballets? Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries? The verses of James Merrill, Fra Angelico’s frescoes, the songs on the radio, the day’s newspaper, my own life? No one cared.

In the corner of the universe where I’d be writing, there’d been a breakdown in the system of rewards and punishments that behaviorists would consider the only possible system of teaching a dog or a writer how to do a task well. And yet the breakdown meant I was totally free.

I quote at length like this because Shawn’s prose style, like his monologues, turns back on itself and reveals, deliberately, more than the surface intends, and this takes time (both The Designated Mourner and Grasses clock in at two-and-a-half hours or longer). Shawn’s drama draws in his interests in aesthetics and philosophy and recapitulates them as detail in the turn of a phrase.

As also suspected, Shawn is at his best in writing about sex in the theatre, particularly his own. Like Mamet, he saves the best for last, and in “Writing About Sex,” the final essay of the volume, he reveals the power of sex and drama to provide an exemplar of contemplation and self-invention in the midst of a growing authoritarian culture. “Sex seems capable of creating anarchy,” he writes, “and those who are committed to predictability and order find themselves inevitably either standing in opposition to it, or occasionally trying to pretend to themselves that it doesn’t even exist. My local newspaper, the New York Times, for example, does not include images of naked people … because if it contained such images it couldn’t be the New York Times, it couldn’t present the portrait of a normal, stable, adequate world … which it’s the function of the New York Times to present every day. … The contemplation of nudity or sex could tend to bring up the alarming idea that at any moment human passions might rise up and topple the world we know. … [Sex is] a symbol of the possibility that we might all defect for one reason or another from the obedient columns in which we march.”

Like David Mamet’s Theatre, Shawn’s Essays is also a maddening and enlivening read: for many different reasons, perhaps. But it too defines a lack of a certain concept for drama on the American stage, and the centrality of this drama to the culture in which it’s produced (or unproduced, as the case may be). Between these two books can be gleaned a shimmer of those ideas and experiences that remain absent from the American art of the theatre.

Openings: Ben Brantley on That Face

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In the comments section of yesterday’s post on the New York opening of Polly Stenham’s That Face, Aaron Riccio wrote that its New York reception “[doesn't have] anything to do with the Enron divide, though. This isn’t a symbolic or showy production; it’s a dismally effective glimpse at how illness affects a family.” Well, hell, Ben Brantley thinks it does, in his New York Times review of the play today:

That Face created a sensation when it hit London several years ago, moving quickly from the Royal Court Theater to a West End run. The excitement was generated partly by the youth of its author, who was only 19 at the time. … That Face also opened at a time when the newspapers were full of lamentations about the sorry state of British youth, and it was a good moment for a “blame the elders” play, written by an enterprising younger person.

As the recent Broadway failure of the West End smash Enron reminded us, the tastes of London and New York theatergoers are not always in sync. And Manhattan audiences may be less eager to embrace That Face, especially the cripplingly self-conscious version directed by Sarah Benson. …

Perhaps Ms. Benson, who did a smashing job with the New York premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, is trying to tone down the play’s more flamboyant aspects, the better for us to see the wounded souls behind the fireworks. But without a Martha who tears up the stage, the play starts to look like a series of unconvincing poses, a problem compounded by the stiffness that can afflict American actors doing posh British accents.

Don’t blame me; I didn’t start it, though perhaps given what I mentioned about accents in my post yesterday I should set up shop as a prognosticator of New York Times theatre reviews.

I’m not sure what’s more condescending about this review: Brantley’s call for a “moratorium” on plays about crazy moms (though he doesn’t seem to have a problem with those who sing, as his admiration for Gypsy and Next to Normal attests) or his recent explicitly parochial disdain for new British plays, especially by teenaged playwrights with a bone to pick with their parents.

Brantley is right that the mother-child relationship is a central thematic element in theatre, as it is in the other arts, for it is central to human experience. When mental illness and class issues infest this relationship, drama arises, as it should; perhaps Brantley believes that, only at a safe historical distance (Medea, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie to name just three plays), it becomes more palatable, even amusing and entertaining when the mad mother is Ethel Merman. It is neither, either on stage or off. Which just makes me more interested in seeing That Face, though my time and my $75.00 must be spent when I’m not at my day job in raising my growing family and buying diapers.

It’s fine that he didn’t like the play; but perhaps he should have just left it at that, instead of providing more grist for the blogospheric mill, as it likely will.

Upcoming: That Face

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The Manhattan Theatre Club production of Polly Stenham’s That Face, directed by Sarah Benson, is currently in previews, and should be an interesting test-case scenario in the recent London/New York debates that surrounded Enron‘s failure on Broadway. Stenham’s first play, written when she was 19 years old, was nominated for one of Britain’s highest honors, the Olivier Award, and according to Alison Croggon’s recent review of the Australian premiere, the play has a particularly British perspective:

There’s an unspoken history [lying beneath the play] that is still playing out in Britain. In his unfond memoir of his prep school St Cyprians, George Orwell described the brutalities of his middle class boarding school as a training ground for the front troops of Empire, fostering the lack of empathy and Darwinian competitiveness necessary for ordering around, and possibly shooting, the brown people who lived in the pink bits of the map. Another association, more telling perhaps in its poignancy, is from Michael Apted’s 7-Up series: the unhappy middle class teenager Suzy, devastated by her parents’ divorce, introvertedly twirling her hair as her pet dog chases and kills a rabbit in the background.

This resonance simply doesn’t translate to Australia: yes, we have class in our society, but it’s quite a different deal here. We might even have colonial imitations of the British class system, but they don’t function in the same ways or with the same codes. Consequently director Sarah Giles’s decision to stage That Face with Australian accents effectively reduces it to an enclosed family psychodrama. It still works, but you have to listen hard through the unfocusing that results: and aside from the ramifications of class, the diction remains too specifically English to sit easily with Australian accents.

Will it be perceived as “an enclosed family psychodrama” here, whatever the accents that Benson decides upon? Maybe. If Alison’s note that the play’s power rests in “its precise observations of a family locked in the crisis of mental illness,” you won’t find that in the publicity materials for the MTC production, which describe the play’s plot as “a powerful and darkly comic look at an affluent family in freefall. Mia has been suspended from boarding school. Her brother, Henry, has dropped out altogether. And Martha, their mum, manipulates them all. Money can no longer fix their problems — now it’s up to them” — not a mention of mental illness to be found (or, for that matter, class upheaval, though there’s the glamour of money to be sure) and more, indeed, an “enclosed family psychodrama” among the affluent. Never mind the director; the press material has it simplified from the start. Is the play’s Martha a “a fragile, damaged creature teetering wildly on the edge of a catastrophe curve,” as Alison describes her, or a “Real Housewife of Contemporary Great Britain”? Is there a significant difference? The production will tell.