Monthly Archives: September 2010

Good housekeeping

Posted on by

You missed a speck

UPDATE: Interestingly, judging from his comments below, Cameron Woodhead has just mentioned at Alison’s Theatre Notes that he is starting his very own theatre blog (whether it will be under the umbrella of The Age or on his very own bat remains to be seen). If you can’t beat ‘em …

***

Just doing some sweeping up around Superfluities Redux. Note that all of the recent posts on the history of American drama now have their own category here; I’m glad to see that these entries are getting some traffic, but then the academic year has just begun and all those undergraduate survey courses in American drama are getting underway (beware, professors, of plagiarists! unless it’s you who are doing the Google searches). Fear not, regular readers: the usual suspects, including Samuel Beckett, Howard Barker, Theodor Adorno, George Bataille and others, will return to these pages next week, and these short essays on American drama will become somewhat more sporadic.

Keen-eyed readers will also note that the “Organum” and “Critique of Tragedy” entries are no longer available through the main menus, although existing links to these individual entries should still be active. Much of this material will be published in a revised form in Word Made Flesh, coming in just a few months from EyeCorner Press.

My corner of the blogosphere operates as a gift economy — the writings here intended to be available, without cost, to the reader, and I receive no remuneration for them either via either a publisher or advertisers — and so it took some consideration before reaching the decision to archive these online versions, which after all have been available for free since the projects began about five years ago. But as second editions of books come out, their first editions go out of print; because the book will contain heavily revised versions of this material, it will constitute, if it’s only a first edition in print, a second edition in reality.

I have been fortunate in that this gift economy has worked so well. Although I’ve received not a penny for the writings here since its inception almost seven years ago, I have received other, far more valuable gifts, not least those remarkably close friendships which have formed between me and my readership; these friends are among the most perspicacious readers of Superfluities Redux, but they’re far more than that to me.

I had this in mind while I was reading Chapter Two of the Croggon/Woodhead contretemps in Australia; the debate that began at the Critical Failure conference last week has spilled onto the pages of The Age, for which Woodhead is the chief drama critic, and into the comments section of several of Alison’s posts, including Alison’s review of Martin Crimp’s The City. Most recently, Woodhead published in his column in The Age an essay called “If you’re a critic on the internet, everyone can hear you scream,” a sort-of denunciation of much of the dramatic blogosphere. A few excerpts:

In the face of my internet silence, the blogosphere proceeded to hate me in ways that have multiplied and gone viral and feral. To be fair, I’ve had the odd defender on there, too. …

A global community of such critics has flourished, and the best theatre discussion it produces is lively, informed and illuminating, though it is no coincidence that our brightest online critics have worked — or do work — in more mainstream media.

On the internet, everyone can hear you scream. And with no editor to rein you in, the responsibility that comes with online criticism is terrifying.

More than one print journalist has fallen from grace by failing to observe ethical standards in public discourse, especially on social media. …

Considered reviews are all very well, but ill-considered and intemperate flaming is, alas, much more likely online. And in the blogosphere, there is no ink — the stain won’t wash away.

The two media — newspapers and pamphlets; print media and the internet — should complement as well as compete with each other.

What they should not do is race to the bottom, defaming critics and journalists who operate in one medium or the other, discarding critical thinking and the ethical dimensions of public discussion along the way.

I quote so extensively from Woodhead’s article not because I disagree with it — I don’t, really — but to point out that deleted from the excerpt above are several divisive comments on Ms. Croggon’s “misrepresentation” of Woodhead’s opinions (that unforgiving Internet allows you to judge for yourself on whether he’s been misrepresented or not; a video of the panel discussion is here).

That Woodhead has devoted 750 or so words to the controversy in his newspaper column — for which he has presumably been paid, generously or not as the case may be — points up one of Alison’s more cogent observations in her original piece for ABC’s The Drum Unleashed blog: “What the internet means for the old-fashioned print critic,” she said, “is the end of institutional authority. That so many of these critics mistake institutional authority for critical authority says everything you need to know.” The shade of a respected publication, as well as a hand in its pockets — whether it’s The Age, Time Out New York, or The New York Times — provides comfort and protection, along with that putative authority. How nice for the old-fashioned print critic.

Unfortunately, the readership makes this same mistake, but it’s upon this mistake that these critics rely for their continuing status. Like Woodhead, I have been the subject of “ill-considered and intemperate flaming” (“the blogosphere proceeded to hate me in ways that have multiplied and gone viral and feral” as well; next time you’re in New York, Cameron, I’ll buy you a drink), but unlike his situation it has not come from bulletin-boards or unpaid individual outlets like this one, though there has been some share of that, but from that institutional  media upon which print critics (and increasingly online critics, such as those who write for The Guardian) depend for their authority. As part of his responsibilities as editor of Time Out New York‘s theatre section and its blog “Upstaged” — which have far greater circulation figures, online and in print, than Superfluities Redux ever did — David Cote was paid, received financial remuneration in some small way, for his flaming, as Woodhead is being paid for his contribution to the “You started it/No, you started it” argument into which the current debate has devolved. I’d also like to know, per Woodhead’s statement that “with no editor to rein you in, the responsibility that comes with online criticism is terrifying,” who edits editors like David Cote. In a gift economy, this can be accounted something of a theft — of reputation, if nothing else — in the pursuit of what? defensiveness? rationalization? money? entertainment? whatever.

I wouldn’t bring this up except that Woodhead’s also right in that attacks like this are indeed “stains that won’t wash away.” I have a thick skin, but it is not made of steel; although David’s piece was published in July of last year, a friend and well-respected director and playwright here in New York recently brought it to my attention again recently, and although it caused me no pain, it was embarrassing; it’s hard enough getting on in this gift economy without having this crop up again and again.

But this is thankfully rare. I’m not sure how much Woodhead thinks about these attacks against him when he writes for print publication in The Age or deposits his paycheck. I must say I don’t think about Cote’s piece much either as I continue pursuing Superfluities Redux, prose style and all; no mainstream print publication or paycheck for me, however. And I’m afraid the rest of the blogosphere will have to answer for itself to Woodhead’s arguments. I continue to possess, after all, the gifts that I receive — and these are beyond all price or measures of popularity.

Upcoming: Paul Cava

Posted on by

Paul Cava's Nemaleon #2 (2005), archival pigment print, 16-1/2" x 13-1/2"

Paul Cava’s 30 Years, a retrospective of this remarkable photographer’s work, will open at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery on 14 October and run through 29 November. Paul’s work is a breathtaking examination of the tactile qualities of flesh and nature, a brilliantly sensual rendering of the ephemeral qualities of eros and the world. More information about the exhibition is here; I wrote about another of his works, Listrum Vulgare, here.

One of Paul’s photos will grace the cover of Word Made Flesh, my book due from EyeCorner Press in January 2011. But don’t miss this chance to see a career-long retrospective of this astonishingly sensitive and sensual American photographer.

The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill

Posted on by

Eugene O'Neill in rehearsals for the Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh, 1946

The Iceman Cometh. A play in four acts by Eugene O’Neill. New York premiere: Martin Beck Theatre, 9 October 1946. Production and lighting design by Robert Edmond Jones; produced by The Theatre Guild; directed by Eddie Dowling. With James Barton (Hickey), Carl Benton Reid (Larry Slade), Dudley Digges (Harry Hope), Paul Crabtree (Don Parritt), E.G. Marshall (Willie Oban), Jeanne Cagney (Marcie), Leo Chalzel (Hugo Kalmar) and others. Closed 15 March 1947 (136 performances). Text: The Iceman Cometh, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. With an introduction by Harold Bloom.

If you were to ply me with drinks at a cocktail party (which doesn’t happen often enough, by the way) and ask for my nominee for the greatest American play of the twentieth century, my answer would be The Iceman Cometh, without hesitation. One of O’Neill’s two great masterworks of the postwar period, O’Neill completed the play in 1939 then withheld it from production for the duration of World War II. “A New York audience could neither see nor hear its meaning,” he wrote to Lawrence Langer. “The pity and tragedy of defensive pipe dreams would be deemed downright unpatriotic. … But after the war is over, I am afraid … that American audiences will understand a lot of The Iceman Cometh only too well.”[1] O’Neill was wrong about this; the play lasted a scant six months on Broadway, its power and brilliance recognized only with the 1956 revival of the play off-Broadway at the Circle in the Square theatre, directed by Jose Quintero and featuring Jason Robards as Hickey (Robards’ performance as Hickey in the 1985 Broadway revival of the play, also directed by Quintero, is one of the most indelible memories of my entire theatregoing experience). And it is the product, most certainly, of a tragic, and not a comic, consciousness.

O’Neill’s consideration that the play might be received as “unpatriotic” points to the peculiarly American nature of its theme — the “pipe-dream” as the dream of America, new beginnings and, once again, a prelapsarian experience that would leave European history behind. I use the word “theme” deliberately, for the play’s structure itself doesn’t resemble the three-act structure of Ibsen or the five-act structure of Shakespeare but rather the four-movement structure of a symphony, containing a theme and its variations more important than a storyline. O’Neill’s reputation as a repetitious writer may have some of its ground in a consideration of the play’s four-hour length, but it was not a failing of O’Neill’s work as much as a well-considered compositional approach. Bogard also cites a moment during rehearsals for the play when producer Lawrence Langer noted that one point had been made eighteen times — “O’Neill told him ‘in a particularly quiet voice, “I intended it to be repeated eighteen times!”‘”

The musical structure is additionally revealed in the first act of the play, by far the longest of the four at 81 pages in the published text. The fifteen denizens of Harry Hope’s backroom (no doubling possible here, either), significantly set in 1912, just before the First World War, engage in a lengthy polyphonic fugue of their dreams and aspirations, all of which they will fulfill “tomorrow”; it is a suite of voices of varying tone and note. And it is a polyglot tongue with which the play speaks, reflecting also the mass immigration to America at the turn of the century; Dutch, Irish, British; a Harvard-educated law student next to a cop and a carnival barker; Hugo Kalmar, an anarchist revolutionary who has spent ten years in prison and upon his release has been easily assimilated into the America which Harry Hope’s back room signifies;  and the black Joe Mott.[2] There are three women as well, generating an aural soundscape of urban America at the time.

At the end of the act the salesman Hickey arrives for his annual bender on the occasion of barowner Harry Hope’s 60th birthday, but he arrives this time selling something to the denizens of the bar — a release from illusion and pipe-dreams, urging them to take action to make these dreams true. It is, as it transpires, something of a trick; Hickey knows that none will be able to do so, but convinces them to make the effort in a project to bring “truth.” In attempting to reveal the lies beneath human hope, he reveals also the nothingness that lies beneath both eros and death.

The title of the play, The Iceman Cometh, is a sickly double-entendre marrying death and orgasm; while death is the iceman, so is Hickey, for even the peace to be found in death is an illusion. Perhaps its key can be found in the realization achieved by Larry Slade, an ex-anarchist who believes he has resigned himself to the failures of the human spirit, describing himself as a “grandstander,” waiting for the peace of death. But even this is a lie, in the words of the play a “pipe-dream”:

LARRY (With increasing bitter intensity, more as if he were fighting with himself than with Hickey): I’m afraid to live, am I? — and even more afraid to die! So I sit here, with my pride drowned on the bottom of a bottle, keeping drunk so I won’t see myself shaking in my britches with fright, or hear myself whining and praying: Beloved Christ, let me live a little longer at any price! If it’s only for a few days more, or a few hours even, have mercy, Almighty God, and let me still clutch greedily to my yellow heart this sweet treasure, this jewel beyond price, the dirty, stinking bit of withered old flesh which is my beautiful little life! … You think you’ll make me admit that to myself?
HICKEY (Chuckling): But you just did admit it, didn’t you? (168)

Hickey has turned his merciless project onto himself already, having killed his wife Evelyn in an effort to relieve himself of the guilt of being human, a guilt which Evelyn was willing to forgive; but it is something in the human spirit, some mysterious force which hovers over all the characters of the play, which turns eros to violence. The second act of the play is perhaps one of the most telling, as Hickey’s admittedly successful attempt to tear the illusions from each of the characters leads to the physical violence — racial, political, sexual — among those who peaceably enjoyed each other’s company, drunk as they were, in the hours before Hickey’s arrival.

But death, whether it comes to Evelyn through murder or Don Parritt through suicide in the last moments of the play, does not bring peace. This truth confuses Hickey as he surveys the broken human community he has created; but he has sold this truth. In Act Four, which features Hickey’s tortured 40-minute monologue describing his murder of Evelyn, the drunks of Harry Hope’s bar can’t even find peace in the booze, which has “lost its kick.” It is only with Hickey’s departure that it regains its effect.

If Don Parritt is the Judas figure of the play, having ratted out his anarchist mother out of both hatred and greed (and Larry Slade just might be his father), Hickey is its corrupt Christ, bringing a spiritual truth which he himself may not fully understand. What is left is the human figure of Larry Slade, and the human community. It is no surprise that the final curtain falls on a raucous cacaphony of popular song, drinking and laughter:

([Hope] starts the chorus of “She’s the Sunshine of Paradise Alley,” and instantly they all burst into song. But not the same song. Each starts the chorus of his or her choice. Jimmy Tomorrow’s is “A Wee Dock and Doris”; Ed Mosher’s, “Break the News to Mother”; Willie Oban’s, the Sailor Lad ditty he sang in Act One; General Wetjoen’s “Waiting at the Church”; McGloin’s, “Tammany”; Captain Lewis’s, “The Old Kent Road”; Joe’s, “All I Got Was Sympathy” [and on for a bit] … while Hugo jumps to his feet and, pounding on the table with his fist, bellows in his guttural basso the French Revolutionary “Carmagnole.” A weird cacophony results from this mixture and they stop singing to roar with laughter. All but Hugo, who keeps on with drunken fervor.)
HUGO:
Dansons la Carmagnole!
Vive le son! Vive le son!
Dansons la Carmagnole!
Vive le son des canons!
(They all turn on him and howl him down with amused derision. He stops singing to denounce them in his most fiery style.)
Capitalist svine! Stupid bourgeois monkeys!
(He declaims.)
“The days grow hot, O Babylon!”
(They all take it up and shout in enthusiastic jeering chorus.)
“‘Tis cool beneath thy willow trees!”
(They pound their glasses on the table, roaring with laughter, and Hugo giggles with them. In his chair by the window, Larry stares in front of him, oblivious to their racket. Curtain.) (218-219)

Metatheatrically, the “dirty black curtain which separates [the back room] from the bar” at upstage right (7) is a mirror of the proscenium curtain that separates The Iceman Cometh from its audience, and indeed the curtain falls. In these final moments, O’Neill masterfully presents a remarkable picture of America (this is Walt Whitman’s America singing, its democracy to be found in the individual songs each singer chooses to bawl), drawing the audience too into that back room and rendering them similarly denizens of illusion. Even the ideals of Hugo’s revolutionary political fervor are rendered as just one additional instance of the noise of America, a putatively joyful noise which isolates those who have learned the truth, who have pierced through the illusion to see the yawning abyss beneath it; once truly seen and recognized in the self, it is impossible to turn away again and lose oneself in that community, as Larry Slade knows. (O’Neill, interestingly, was also one of America’s few dramatists with a firm grounding in philosophy, especially that of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer; as Harold Bloom notes in his foreword to the Yale University Press edition: “We live and die, in the spirit, in solitude, and the true strength of Iceman is its intense dramatic exemplification of that somber reality. … Life, in Iceman, is what it is in Schopenhauer: illusion.” [x]) America — and the newly Americanized world — have not become less cacophanous since 1946; over sixty years later, with the Internet, mass media and other devices, it may be more cacophanous than ever, rendering The Iceman Cometh perhaps the greatest American play of the 21st century as well. O’Neill’s work is a deeply moving, shockingly sublime and disconcerting (in the best sense of the word) experience on the page or on the stage; anyone who does not know it does not know the American theatre, what it has been, is, and could be, for better or worse. It is, with the novels of Herman Melville, the canvases of Mark Rothko and the music of Morton Feldman, among the most majestic expressions of the tragedy that lies at the heart of the American experience.

***

A DVD of John Frankenheimer’s very good 1973 film of The Iceman Cometh, with Lee Marvin as Hickey, is available from the Superfluities Redux bookstore. And via YouTube, two more Hickeys: first, Al Pacino reads from the play in this excerpt from Ric Burns’ 2006 PBS documentary on O’Neill (I admit it is of sentimental value; a DVD of this documentary was the last present I received from my father before his death):

And Jason Robards as Hickey in an excerpt from Sidney Lumet’s 1960 television production of the play — and your eyes do not deceive you; that’s a very young Robert Redford as Don Parritt:

Footnotes
  1. Cited in Travis Bogard’s notes on the play in Contour in Time, available online here. [↩]
  2. It is little noted just how O’Neill’s extraordinary and subtle sense of the black experience in America makes its way into his plays; the romance between a white woman and a black man in his 1924 All God’s Chillun Got Wings brought the play to the attention of the New York mayor’s office. [↩]

Interview: Adam Seelig, Director of “Ritter, Dene, Voss”

Posted on by

Adam Seelig. Photo: Lauren Stryer

This coming Thursday, 23 September, Thomas Bernhard’s play Ritter, Dene, Voss receives its New York premiere at La MaMa ETC. The play’s director (and artistic director of One Little Goat, the Toronto-based company producing the play), Adam Seelig, took time out from a busy rehearsal schedule to respond to a few brief questions on the play. Tickets are available here; more information at La MaMa’s Web page for the play; and you can find a short video excerpt of both the original Vienna production and the One Little Goat production at my earlier notice on the production here.

For another interview with Seelig, see this Q&A with Jonathan Taylor.

***

“Poetic theatre” is a term that’s bruited about quite a bit — what makes the plays that One Little Goat produces distinctively poetic enough to claim that OLG is North America’s “only theatre company devoted to modern and contemporary poetic theatre”?

The definition of “poetic theatre” is a work in progress. I’m defining it as the Goat goes, further specifying and broadening it with each production. Yehuda Amichai, Thomas Bernhard, Jon Fosse — the authors whose work we’ve premiered have significant roots in poetry, and consequently are able to do what most playwrights per se cannot: bring ambiguity to the stage. Conventional theatre speaks of actors making choices and of directors, well, directing, but poetic theatre  is often choosing not to choose, allowing the performers to incline away from “showing-not-telling” toward a kind of “being-in-lieu-of-showing.” Show less to present more. To be more present — that may be it. But doing the plays comes first; theory and definition follow. So, for example, when you came across my recent essay, “EMERGENSEE: GET HEAD OUT OF ASS: Charactor and Poetic Theatre,” it was in response to doing the plays first. Those ideas weren’t in mind, at least not consciously, before staging.

Why Bernhard, and how does Ritter, Dene, Voss reflect the definition of “poetic theatre”?

It helps that Bernhard’s plays are highly interpretive: no punctuation (other than line-breaks, making the text look almost stanzaic) and few stage directions.

Here’s one quick example of how Bernhard’s writing achieves the kind of clarity-through-ambiguity of poetic theatre — two lines from Ritter, Dene, Voss spoken by the younger sister to the older about their brother:

Ludwig means everything to me
that’s what you’ve always said

If the line had been, “You’ve always said that Ludwig means everything to you,” there’d be only one interpretation: younger sister accuses older sister of being consumed with brother Ludwig. But as Bernhard puts it, the first line makes it sound like younger sister is admitting to her own obsession with Ludwig. It may be a simple device (a more sophisticated version of teasing “… not” statements like “I love you …  not”), but it certainly generates multiple possibilities and opens up that space between speaker and listener: younger sister may mean the line it one way while older sister, like the audience, initially hears it differently.

Bernhard is best known to North American audiences as a novelist, but more interestingly, as a distinctly European, even Austro-centric writer. (His plays are scarcely known here at all, though he was consistently produced at the Burgtheater, with its nearly 1200 seats, for years.) What do Bernhard’s plays offer to a North American audience?

A powerfully intuitive sense for what makes actors tick (not to mention what ticks them off), resulting in brilliant, muscular writing that somehow combines the anxieties of Beckett, antics of Ionesco, and provocations of Genet.

Ritter, Dene, Voss was written with three specific performers in mind. Given what you’ve written about character/charactor, how does distributing these parts and characters to entirely different performers change the play, if it does so at all? Are they then performers acting performers, in a sense, another level of theatrical distance? How do your performers then approach these roles?

Having new actors perform these roles changes the play enormously. I’d go one step further to say that changing even one actor in the cast changes the play enormously. The play is not independent of the actors performing it; the play is the very actors performing it. That’s what I love about Bernhard’s actor-centric title. I’d be happy to rename it Perreault, Beaty, Pettle after the outstanding Toronto cast that will be performing at La MaMa! It would better reflect our production after all, because Shannon Perreault, for example, is not playing Ilse Ritter, but rather “the younger Worringer sister.” Still, both Worringer sisters in the play are actresses, so no matter what, we’re in a metatheatrical world of actors playing actors. Can they be believed, or is it all just for show … ?

Upcoming: Field 309

Posted on by

Title:Point Productions takes the Incubator Arts Project stage beginning 23 September for Field 309, a new production written and directed by Theresa Buchheister. “Staring with wide, dry eyes into the enticing spiral of the mundane,” says the press release, “listening as if at the end of a tunnel, you keep working. Because no one is number 1(!) And someone is watching(?) Field 309 is Title:Point’s sticky wade through absurdity, haunted by loss, failure and fear. It is a comedy.” Tempting. Also tempting is the cast, which includes (in the video portion of the production only — my thanks to the Incubator Arts Project for this information) two Smiths who last appeared on the St. Mark’s Church stage in Richard Foreman’s King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe, T. Ryder Smith and Jay Smith. Tickets are $18; you can purchase them here.

The current production at the Incubator Arts Project, Michael Gardner and Matthew Freeman’s Brandywine Distillery Fire, runs its final four performances this weekend, and after Field 309 the Hybrid Stage Project will bring their new production of The Void to the venue on 7 October. It’s located at St. Mark’s Church, 131 East 10th Street at Second Avenue. Both shows worth a visit.