Category Archives: American drama

Ezra Pound’s anti-theatrical prejudice

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Ezra Pound in 1967.

Ezra Pound in 1967.

Unlike the situation in continental Europe, the relationship between Modernism and the English-language stage has always been uneasy. Several “High Modernists” wrote for the stage — Yeats, Eliot, Stein, and notoriously Henry James — but, at least in the American drama, Modernist trends were never fully embraced. In America, only Eugene O’Neill wrestled with these ideas and sensibilities at length. Most of the plays of his middle period were attempts to fuse his Modernist sensibilities with the American tradition of melodrama (according to Marc Robinson, melodrama may be the most pervasive and characteristic genre to be found in American theatre), which sought to elicit emotional responses from the collective audience through the manipulation of plot and character, leading, more often than not, to a “happy” ending that satisfied audiences. But somehow it never quite worked. In O’Neill, the Modernist and the Melodramatist were in constant struggle throughout his plays of the 1920s and 1930s. The struggle, more often than not, came to a draw.

Among the High American Modernists it would be hard to find a Higher one than Ezra Pound. Though he translated both Greek tragedies and Noh plays, he never felt the necessity to write directly for the stage himself. In September 1915, James Joyce sent the manuscript of his play Exiles to Pound for his comments, which elicited from Pound this characteristically spiky, polemical response about the theatre in general:

My whole habit of thinking of the stage is: that it is a gross, coarse form of art. That a play speaks to a thousand fools huddled together, whereas a novel or a poem can lie about in a book and find the stray persons worth finding, one by one seriatim. …

and if I had written this letter last night (2 a.m.) just after finishing the “Portrait”, I should have addressed you “Cher Maitre”.

Now what would he want to write for the stage for

?????

Can one appeal to the mass with anything requiring thought? Is there anything but the common basis of a very few general emotions out of which to build a play that shall be at once

A. a stage play
B. not common, not a botch.

There is no union in intellect, when we think we diverge, we explore, we go away.
When we feel we unite. [1]

In the contemporary American drama, it seems that this union is by far the driving force. Unfortunately, it leads to the death of the individual mind, at least in the theatre.

Footnotes
  1. Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. Forrest Read. New York: New Directions, 1967, p. 57. [↩]

Next season at the Public Theater

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The Public Theater on Lafayette Street.

The Public Theater on Lafayette Street.

Ah, youth. In 1978, at the green age of 16, I first visited the Public Theater on Lafayette Street on a short weekend trip from my home of Hazleton, PA, for a day of theatregoing that could easily bruise the sensibilities of a callow youth. In the afternoon, I enjoyed Robert Woodruff’s staging of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class; after a dinner break, I returned for Thomas Babe’s A Prayer for My Daughter (a play ripe for revival here in New York; it had a London revival in 2008).

Those were the glory years for Joe Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival; A Chorus Line was providing a fresh infusion of cash into the Public’s coffers, and it was a rare night on which any of the Public’s (five stages? six?) performance spaces were dark. I returned several times over the next twenty years or so, but I never found the same electricity as I did that March day in 1978. Papp died in 1991, and by then the Chorus Line cash cow wasn’t delivering quite as much milk. During the tenures of JoAnne Akalaitis and George C. Wolfe as subsequent artistic directors, the Public fell into something of an aesthetic and business funk — then, indeed, there were many days and weeks during which all of the Public’s stages were dark.

As a tyro playwright, even in those days, I duly submitted my plays — dreadful imitations of Brecht and Pinter — to the Public’s literary office, which still accepted over-the-transom manuscripts, and after no more than a month always received rejection letters (though sometimes with an encouraging handwritten note asking to see my next play, a sheer godsend for a teenager smitten with the theatre). The Public liked playwrights back then. Legend has it that when Joseph Papp discovered that Wallace Shawn had to work in a copy shop just to make ends meet, he offered Shawn the same amount of salary just to permit Shawn to spend his days writing plays instead. These days, this would constitute a revolutionary commitment to the “emerging playwright”; in those days, it was just good sense and a favor from an artistic director to an artist. (And it paid off, as you’ll see below; on one of my subsequent visits to the Public, I saw Shawn perform The Fever.)

Over the past few years, the Public, under Oskar Eustis‘ artistic direction, has been generating a little more of that electricity — and yesterday’s announcement of the Public’s 2013-2014 season exemplifies the energy. The Public will be co-producing the US premiere of Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors in the fall (and a revival of his best play to date, The Designated Mourner, this summer); also this fall, the Public is bringing in the Foundry Theatre’s new production of Good Person of Szechwan, directed by Lear deBessonet and starring Taylor Mac, which first opened at La MaMa earlier this year. There’s also Arguendo, a new performance from Elevator Repair Service; four “Apple family” plays by Richard Nelson in rotating repertory; new plays from Suzan-Lori Parks and the Civilians; a new production of Antony and Cleopatra; and 29(!) monologues from Mike Daisey.

It is, even by the standards of the grotesque hype and Facebook blubbering that accompanies these season announcements, a tempting menu, even for a confirmed skeptic like myself — and maybe one that will bring Ron Rosenbaum down to Lafayette Street again. More information here.

Drama of new consciousness

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I’ve spent some of this weekend thinking about what draws me as an artist, critic, writer, and unabashed enthusiast — not to mention as all of these wrapped up, along with everything else, into what we might call “my person” — to the plays of three very disparate English-language dramatists: Richard Foreman (b. 1937), Wallace Shawn (b. 1943), and Howard Barker (b.1946). Readers of Superfluities Redux will be aware that I’ve written about all three at some length, and at first glance the work of all three writers seems to share little in common. The unique idiosyncrasies of approach, language, and form of each of these writers forestalls extended comparison, either with each other or with the work of other playwrights of the period. I’m not entirely sure that if you put all three of them in a room together, they’d even have much to talk about, and might even regard each other with some suspicion and ambivalence.

But there may be more linking these dramatists than first meets the eye. It is no coincidence, I think, that all three first emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Foreman’s first Ontological-Hysteric play, Angelface, premiered in 1968, and Barker’s professional debut, Cheek, came only two years later. Our Late Night, written in the early 1970s, opened at the Public Theater in 1975. All three writers matured in the political, cultural, and sexual storms of this most chaotic and revolutionary period, and their work reflects a confrontation and negotiation with these storms; they also matured as theatre was turning from traditional dramatic texts to explore more experiential strategies in the forms of performance art developed by a variety of practitioners.

So much can be said for so many playwrights, but Foreman, Shawn, and Barker share more than this. Foreman and Barker, of course, saw the need to form and lead their own companies apart from the institutions of both commercial and non-commercial theatre for a continuing exploration of their very individual projects, and Shawn has similarly devoted a great deal of his professional career working outside the confines of mainstream theatre. But beneath this there is more, I think. I gingerly describe a few strains of similarity below.

The theatres of all three dramatists are text-based; their plays first originate in the generation of a text for the stage created by an individual author. The three dramatists in question accept the primacy of written and spoken language as the driving force of the theatrical experience. Similarly, their approach to language is lyrical, rather than dramatic, epic, or narrative: it is an approach that suggests a vertical rather than horizontal approach to the confrontation with language, an absorption in the individual moment of experience rather than a story. Language creates character; characters do not “speak” their own language, and notions of subtext take a subservient role to the explicit sound and surface of language itself.

The theatres of all three dramatists employ strategies of post-Brechtian estrangement — literally, a “making strange.” Foreman’s description of his plays as a series of “unbalancing acts” and Barker’s notion of a “theatre of catastrophe” indicate an impatience with, and repudiation of, accepted norms of theatrical and dramatic experience: an effort to undermine the preconceptions of both theatre and culture with which audience members enter their theatres. Similarly, Shawn’s plays confront his audiences with a series of shocking, disturbing images and linguistic structures that aim to unsettle the audience’s sense of a predictable and comforting self.

The theatres of all three dramatists suggest all-encompassing landscapes of experience largely divorced from realism and naturalism. While none of these dramatists have written what might be called “site-specific work” — plays written for performance in a particular non-traditional space — they nonetheless situate their plays in scenic environments that challenge norms of narrative drama. Both Foreman and Barker direct and design their own productions, generating unique landscapes and soundscapes for the presentation of their texts; and while Shawn does neither, his work has been staged in a variety of non-theatrical environments, including individual apartments and disused gentlemen’s clubs, for example. They are more interested in providing theatrical and dramatic environments for exploration rather than telling stories or preaching to the converted.

The theatres of all three dramatists center in a contemplation of eroticism and death. If these three dramatists explore the extremes of experience, they do so through presenting the fragility and the ecstatic potential of the human body. All three dramatists press against the confines of cultural taboo and transgression, and they do so through the most intimate physical and spiritual of the body’s potentials, sexuality itself.

The theatres of all three dramatists aim to explode conventional notions of consciousness in an effort to free the individual spectator to think for himself, providing the promise of change and rebirth, rather than as a collective — they are politically, socially, and culturally anti-ideological. Taken together, the above characteristics represent a challenge to culturally conventional ways of thinking about experience, and ways of experiencing thought. They do not seek to teach or explain; they do not seek to provide catharsis; they do not seek to tell a story (though they still seek to amuse and entertain in the most profound definitions of these words; if anything else, they are showmen). Instead, they intend to provide a theatrical experience that undermines convention and provokes new ways of seeing, new forms of consciousness that are more inclusive of the world’s possibilities and impossibilities than traditional theatrical and dramatic forms. They are, in this sense, radically open works that repudiate closure. While they do not exclude or dismiss the necessity of living within a collective, they place emphasis on the individual consciousness and the ways this consciousness impinges on the definition of collectivity itself. Additionally, the plays of these three dramatists undermine and parody Cartesian definitions of existence that would divide consciousness into thinking, feeling, or spiritual experience. The dramatists encourage thinking with the body, feeling with the intellect, recognizing the spiritual in the material, the quotidian in the noumenal, and so on.

Foreman, Shawn, and Barker, then, each in their own idiosyncratic ways, provide examples of the revolutionary potentials for the 21st century drama, theatre, and culture: revolutions of perception and consciousness that, in the wake of the disastrous social and cultural revolutions of the 20th century, may provide new promise for experience and redemption. I do not find it mere coincidence that these writers came of age in the chaotic but uniquely promising 1960s, nor that their work became increasingly complex and confrontational as the 20th century progressed towards its technocratic, postcapitalist, electronic and digital end: their projects of dramatic and theatrical revolution always were conceived in confrontation with and in opposition to these impulses.

It is not necessary to fit them into aesthetic or critical boxes or definitions to recognize certain interesting similarities. But tracing these threads allows us to see the broader implications of their work for the theatrical and dramatic art of the 21st century, and hope for a renaissance of theatrical and dramatic sensibility in a culture which increasingly seems to be hostile to it.

Review: The Fever

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Simona Maicanescu in Wallace Shawn's The Fever.

Simona Maicanescu in Wallace Shawn’s The Fever.

UPDATE: For a chance to hear another early Wallace Shawn play, New Dramatists is offering a reading of Our Late Night (1975) on Monday, 28 January, at 7.00pm, followed by a conversation with “the legendary” Shawn and Francine Volpe. More information here.

The Fever by Wallace Shawn. Directed by Lars Norén; adaptation by Norén and Simona Maicanescu; lighting by Jean Poisson; costume by Chatoon; sound by Sophie Buisson; artistic collaboration with Nelly Bonnafous and Bob Meyer. With Simona Maicanescu as the Traveler. At La MaMa ETC, First Floor Theatre, 74 East 4th Street, 24 January–3 February 2013. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission. Tickets here. Reviewed at the 24 January performance. More about the play here.

For nearly all of The Fever‘s hour-and-a-half running time, Simona Maicanescu is confined standing in a small chalk-white box drawn on the floor, stage center, all of her body’s energy funnelled through her constantly moving and disciplined hands and face. They become a bodied representation of the cultural delirium charted in Wallace Shawn’s The Fever: expressions of fear, rage, and finally self-loathing, ultimately energy that has nowhere to go except outward to the audience. Once the audience absorbs that caustic energy — well, what then?

It’s a good question; the play itself provides no answer and, to its credit, neither does Lars Norén‘s production, which opened at La MaMa ETC last night and runs through 3 February. Premiered in 1990, performed by Shawn himself first in private apartments and then at the Public Theater, The Fever had a peculiar reception from New York Times critics. “[It's] nothing if not a musty radical-chic stunt destined to be parodied: a brave, sincere and almost entirely humorless assault on the privileged class by one of its card-carrying members,” wrote Frank Rich in 1990; about Shawn’s performance at a 2007 New Group revival of the play, Charles Isherwood smugly and dismissively wrote, “[Shawn] should know that a 90-minute monologue gives too much rein for straying thoughts about dinner plans and how best to catch a taxi after the performance” — something about the play brings out the obtuseness of Times critics, apparently. I note this only because performances of The Fever by actors and actresses other than its writer permit a clearer assessment of the play’s literary and dramatic achievements. (I describe the play in further detail here, where you can find a description of its narrative and structure.)

For this production, Maicanescu and Norén have trimmed the play somewhat, adding to its effectiveness (though the text concludes quite differently from that of the published version), and Maicanescu is a fascinating figure, constantly tense and coiled though wrapped in a fetching and elegant little black dress by costumer Chatoon. Her performance is possessed of a strange childlike innocence, underscoring the hypocrisy of the Traveler’s social position and alleviating somewhat the self-conscious irony inherent in the monologue form itself.

And, as I note above, it is a particularly bodied performance, appropriate to the many references to body in the text of the play: Jean Poisson’s lighting design traps Maicanescu in a variety of confinements: as her awareness of the poor is raised through the first half of the play, a second chalk-white square appears around the first in which the actress stands through the production, a broadening of consciousness; in the final third of the play, a gobo throws the shadow of prison bars across Maicanescu, trapping her in an awareness of her own responsibility for the world. It is otherwise a simple production (though, compared to Shawn’s own spare presentation at the Public in 1990, its scenic elements are as lush as any Franco Zeffirelli opera), elemental and sufficient.

On the other hand — and I would be dishonest if I did not admit my reservations about the play, apart from its very fine text, production, and performance here — I have a nagging feeling that, at the play’s conclusion, we are left with an affirmation of the social and economic determinism that the play itself seems to castigate. Like Mike Daisey’s monologues about globalization, The Fever is the presentation of the emergence of political awareness in American upper-middle-class consumers; it is a consciousness-raising work. But once that consciousness is raised, what is it precisely are we supposed to do with it? Obviously that’s up to us — but, given the United States 25 years after The Fever‘s premiere, the condition of political discourse in America, and the continuing poverty of the world, I wonder if that’s enough. It’s true that art does not provide political solutions — but this is a rationalization as well as a truth (as many rationalizations are, which The Fever admits).

Still, on a cold winter night, The Fever may leave you colder, not at all a bad thing. There is no reason to miss it; tickets are available here.

“What didn’t kill us made us watch”

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billy_endoftheworldBertolt Brecht and Wallace Shawn represent two kinds of political theatre; Reverend Billy represents a third, more raucous and comic variety. The activist persona of Bill Talen, Reverend Billy, it must be said, does not preach to the converted: for almost twenty years, the good Reverend, accompanied by his Church of Stop Shopping Choir, has gained an international reputation for his form of guerrilla political theatre, occupying shopping malls, building atriums, and Times Square to present his anti-corporate message — ever dashing, ever musical, and always thrilling.

All this to mention that the Reverend’s new book, The End of the World, is scheduled for publication by O/R Books in February. In the words of the Web page for the book, “With soaring parables from protests as far apart as the bank lobbies of Barcelona and the underground police cells of New York City, our preacher raises a resounding ‘Earthallujah!’, turning back the devils of debt and destruction, rallying those of radical faith to save themselves and save us all.” Over the past few years, I’ve noted a more surreal, more apocalyptic tone entering the Reverend’s rhetoric, and am looking forward to seeing how far the new perspective reaches. The End of the World is available for purchase here.

The Reverend Billy Project, written by Savitri D and Bill Talen and edited with an introduction by Alisa Solomon, is a fascinating account of the comedian/activist’s career. He was also the subject of the last review I wrote for The New York Times in 2006. His Web site, with much more information, can be found here.