Still, more than three decades after it was written, [Wallace Shawn's] Marie and Bruce … continues to make many people recoil. And that’s because it is the opposite of a feel-good play. It’s a feel-bad play. That means it lacks the emotionally redemptive features of other works with similarly bleak worldviews: the catharsis of classical tragedy, or the outsized, blazing pessimism of Strindberg’s plays of marital warfare or the exquisite, compassionate lyricism of Chekhov and Tennessee Williams’s melancholy dramas. …
Similarly, we still expect the theater to abide by certain conventions of style. If you’re going to say something nasty, or flout taboos, say it with satire or poetry or larger-than-life passion. The Book of Mormon, this season’s hot-ticket Broadway show, makes fun not just of Mormonism but pretty much all religions, and it has a relentlessly foul mouth. But it is also a classic feel-good musical. Even the dark, violent Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Rajiv Joseph’s new play about the war in Iraq, uses the artifice of comedy to keep us at a distance.
The last show at which I sensed the kind of unease I felt among the audience of Marie and Bruce was the New York premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted several years ago. This British drama imagines an England in the grip of an internecine, nobody-wins civil war (inspired by accounts of the Balkan wars), and everybody in it behaves about as badly as people can. Unlike Marie and Bruce, Blasted is a shocker. It features acts of rape and mutilation. But it shares with Mr. Shawn’s play a hopeless view of humanity that goes way beyond cynicism. …
At a time in the theater when anything goes (to borrow the title of an old comfort-making musical now being revived on Broadway), making audiences squirm isn’t easy — and perhaps not even desirable. …
Brantley may be offering that last clause (emphasis added by myself, by the way) as a rhetorical gesture to spur further conversation. Or perhaps not; it is hard to tell whether Brantley is speaking for himself, or if he is speaking for what he considers to be the mindset of the audience (a mindset which, to grant him the benefit of a doubt, he may not himself share).
Classical tragedy, Strindberg and Williams are all found to be “emotionally redemptive” (whatever that may mean, whoever is to be redeemed, whether it’s the characters in the play, the dramatist or the audience), but Shawn and Kane apparently fall short of this laudable goal. In this, the conservative quality of contemporary theatre is to be found: the need for catharsis far outweighs any discomfort which might be created in the spectator, lest the spectator be expected to take that discomfort home with him. Regardless of the headline on the story, there seems to be very little joy in what Brantley characterizes as “feel-bad” theatre. The catharsis of classical tragedy was a social convention as well: the haste with which so many Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedies seek to tie up any loose ends bespeaks a fear that the tragedy has unleashed ungovernable energies that can’t be tied together in Aristotelian closure: the ending, the catharsis, is imposed, not organic to the dynamics of the drama.
As Mr. Brantley says, “We still expect the theater to abide by certain conventions of style.” Indeed; it is expected to behave with propriety, to refrain from exploration beyond those formal and topical limitations; a theatre work must be a “classic feel-good musical” or adhere to the “artifice of comedy,” however much its energies may lead it astray from these apparent virtues.
I was speaking the other day to a friend who has seen more — and written more about — theatre over the past several decades than I possibly ever could hope (if that’s the word) to do; I wager she’s also got Brantley beat by quite a few miles as well. “I don’t go to the theatre for fun,” she told me. “If I want to have fun there are plenty of other things I can do that are far more fun than the theatre. I go for a walk or I watch TV or almost anything else.” The theatre should be a place that opens us to those “undesirable” recognitions that are denied to us by the television or film or music that must appeal to a far broader audience. Its intimacy makes it the pre-eminent arena for the searing investigations that the best theatre offers. But indeed, they do not close at the end, but should remain open: open for us to bring to our homes, to consider both our selves and our place in this world. And this, it must be said, is a talent at which Kane and Shawn excel.
I’ve written in the past on both Sarah Kane (here) and Wallace Shawn (here).
Marisa Tomei and Frank Whaley will take the title roles in a new production of Wallace Shawn’s 1979 play Marie and Bruce at The New Group; previews begin on 14 March for a run that officially opens on 5 April and continues through 7 May. Marie and Bruce is one of Shawn’s most angry and acid plays, a violent portrait of a marriage gone sour. According to The New Group’s Web page for the production:
Relentlessly daring playwright Wallace Shawn returns to The New Group to continue his vibrant collaboration with Scott Elliott (Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever, The Threepenny Opera). This comedic masterpiece of marital strife recounts the day that Marie (Marisa Tomei) finally resolves to tell her charming and impossibly positive husband Bruce (Frank Whaley) that she’s had enough.
It is an unsettling play, haunted by loneliness and cruelty, and filled with the brilliant monologues for which Shawn is justly renowned; at times, Marie and Bruce makes Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? sound like an episode of The Bickersons. I recently wrote about Shawn’s latest play, Grasses of a Thousand Colors, here; tickets are on sale for Marie and Brucehere.
Miranda Richardson and Wallace Shawn in the Royal Court Theatre's production of Grasses of a Thousand Colors. Photo: John Haynes. Courtesy Royal Court Theatre
At the worst, a few people will conclude that it’s worthless. And I will have spent 10 years doing something ridiculous. But I’ve decided to take a bet on my subconscious. Isn’t all writing to some extent about trying to get through the layers of propaganda and false interpretations and received ideas and clichés that prevent us from seeing what’s going on? I think that’s the enterprise. Wallace Shawn[1]
Issues of power, and more specifically hegemony, and how they are writ in both the broader cultural and more private landscapes of human relationships have always been at the center of Wallace Shawn’s plays. His dramatic voice, also, is unique and unmistakable. In both these senses he is an American equivalent to Harold Pinter. The seemingly intimate disclosures, emotional violence and manipulations of Shawn’s early plays like Our Late Night (1975) and Marie and Bruce (1978; this play is being revived next month by New York’s The New Group) became more and more politically and culturally acute, without losing the sense of sexual dynamics and hostility, through the 1980s with Aunt Dan and Lemon (1985, which explored how political hegemony is exploited in the personal realm through the relationship between a girl and a family friend) and, especially, The Fever (1990, a monologue about a Western traveler in a foreign country under siege) and The Designated Mourner (about the role of intellectuals in an increasingly authoritarian Western culture, 1997, perhaps Shawn’s masterpiece to date). As the dates here indicate, many years separate one Shawn play from another, and in the immediate aftermath of 11 September 2001 Shawn expressed his concerns about changing American culture not on the stage but through editing Final Edition (2004), a single-issue periodical which included Shawn’s interview with Noam Chomsky, essays by himself and Jonathan Schell, and fiction by Mark Strand and Deborah Eisenberg.
There is no mention of 11 September nor, indeed, of the United States in Grasses of a Thousand Colors, which opened two years ago at London’s Royal Court Theatre. The geographical setting of the play itself may indeed be Great Britain (placenames in the text include the British-tinged “Pushbroom Lane” and “Apple Street”), and chronologically the play is set somewhat in the future, not the past. But at its center, the drama is about the unconscious play of technological and emotional hegemony through fantasy and contemporary sexual relationships. The three-act play is, at the outset, presented as a reading from a memoir: Ben, a scientist who has achieved a certain level of celebrity, begins to read from his autobiography, Loaves, with Fishes, for Dinner, a title with a Biblical undertone. Ben is a distinctly American pragmatist and optimist, he admits:
You see, I’m an optimist — I come from an optimistic generation. Everyone I know from my generation — we’re fixers, improvers. That’s what we are. We were born that way, apparently. Do you have a problem? Fine. Problems can be solved. Are you dissatisfied with how fast you can run? Are you dissatisfied with how fast you can think? These are problems that can be solved. So if something isn’t right, for God’s sake, fix it. (10)
The problem that scientist Ben has apparently fixed is the problem of world hunger, and he has done so by genetically changing the nature of the world itself. He explains:
There was, on the one hand, an enormous crowd of entities — ourselves and others — roaming the planet, trying to sustain themselves, or in other words, looking for something to eat; and on the other hand, there was a tiny, inadequate crowd of entities available on the planet to be eaten. So it was a problem of food. It was all about food. There wasn’t enough food. So, as a generation, working really across all the nationalities and all the continents, we figured out ways to create food where there’d been no food — whether it was by giving a certain frog a simple injection so that he and his friends could live off the corpses of other frogs, when, formerly, a dead frog would have worked as a poison in the body of a frog, or by forcing certain substances into the upper atmosphere, so that an odd sort of rain would sprinkle down onto fields full of cows, so that cows who formerly could only live off grass could happily live off skunks and rats and foxes instead … that was the work of our generation. And, in the way of things, we ended up deriving some benefit ourselves from that, through various ridiculous instrumentalities we call salaries, stocks, investments, what have you. …
[Showing a photograph of himself and a dog] This was one of our earliest successes, because my good friend Rufus here was the very first large mammal ever to be raised entirely on the meat of members of his own species. … (11-12)
The American expression of capitalistic competition, “dog eat dog,” indeed — and problem solved, evidently, until the genetic mutations that Ben has introduced mutate beyond the control of science, turning meat (and eventually vegetation) not only inedible but poisonous to human beings. (So much, too, for “man’s best friend.”) It soon becomes clear that this has catastrophic implications for the future of the human race; in changing life to solve life’s own problems, technocratic rationalism has signed its own death sentence.
Ben is interrupted by a memory of his first wife, Cerise, who appears to introduce a second metaphor of the animal kingdom, one which will grow to control the unconscious lives of all the characters and the structure of Grasses of a Thousand Colors itself. “I’m going to be very frank with you and tell you something true rather than being euphemistic about it,” she tells the audience:
Cats like to tease mice. They like to play with them a little. … Cats like to tease mice. In other words, I’m saying, it’s not something that happens by accident when they’re pursuing some other more respectable purpose. No. They like to do it. … And of course everyone knows that cats punish mice. They inflict many different types of punishment on mice — they can inflict capital punishment, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, and many other sorts of punishments. So they tease mice, they play with them, and they punish them. They pummel them, and they eat them. But what’s not generally known is that cats also sometimes protect mice. They protect them, they pardon them, and sometimes they reward them, way beyond what any person would think they deserve.
Oh yes, and there’s one other thing I know about cats which is not generally known, and that is the interesting fact that cats mate for life. That’s right. You heard me. They mate for life. Like humans. (17)
Ben’s professional and personal life is the content of the first act of the play; however, the metaphors of the animal world soon mutate themselves into a picture of the unconscious sexual life of all three characters, mutating this sexual life as well into a series of pornographic fairy tales about the animal kingdom that reflect the irrationalism that lies beneath technocratic rationalism and ultimately determines the direction of its hegemony and cultural force. This direction allows for the freer play of the arbitrary and capricious love, hate and emotional devastation of intimate human relationships. This irrationalism also bursts out in the most casual of human relationships, as Ben’s genetic mutations poison the food upon which the human race needs to survive.
Before long, however, the monologue becomes a memory play populated by three women from Ben’s past, his first wife Cerise, his midlife partner Robin, and finally his latelife lover Rose; as Ben grows older, his successive loves grow younger. As the global catastrophe engendered by Ben’s work begins, however, the play makes a sharp shift in the second act to an extended eruption of bestial pornography involving cats and donkeys — an unconscious eruption seemingly shared by all of the characters in the drama. The site for this fantasy is a secluded house in which Ben finds sexual comfort with a large cat, Blanche (who in the third act is transformed into a memory of Cerise), while Robin finds herself disturbed in a presentation of male sexuality exhibited by donkeys. The gross deliberate obscenity of the monologues of the second act — which turns Victorian-style children’s literature and erotica upside-down — is emphasized through its hour-long length as Ben finds his penis (with which he has what he describes as “a love affair”) an evocation of aggressive male sexuality, which yet desires to be teased and comforted by his new feline companions.
Emily McDonnell, Miranda Richardson and Jennifer Tilly in Grasses of a Thousand Colors. Photo: John Haynes. Courtesy Royal Court Theatre
Ben’s misogynistic aggression — and the global crisis that his research has engendered — becomes more complex with the third act of the play, which combines the more realistic tone of the first with the fantastic of the second. The three women — ex-wife Cerise and mistresses Robin and Rose — form a triumvirate for mutual support even as the world is crashing down. Ben is subjected to the emotional manipulations of Robin (who uses the threat of suicide as a means of revenging herself against Ben’s abuse). At the same time the human world is quickly coming to an end outside of the increasing solitudes of all four characters; the human body reacts to the genetic mutations with vomiting, first occasionally, then frequently, then finally, as Ben puts it, “the typical end of life which everyone knows they can look forward to now, the moment when the vomiting doesn’t stop.” (78) Death comes as a release from this cultural and environmental catastrophe, and eventually Ben becomes a victim of his own hegemony over nature. ” … while vomiting was awful, and suffering was awful, death in itself was a trivial process, the fearsomeness of which had been ridiculously inflated by generations of people who apparently had had nothing else to talk about.” The play concludes with his own:
Quote unquote “death” will actually feel no different from a dreamless sleep — although everyone else will notice that you’re not waking up. Well, this was all in a certain way a little bit more than I needed to know at that particular moment — but I still suppose maybe it did sort of put me into the right frame of mind as Blanche set me off on my way across the meadow. As you might have guessed, it was just the time of day in which the direct sun on one’s face was totally agreeable and not at all too hot, and, sure enough, by the time I was halfway across the meadow I desperately wanted to lie down and fall asleep. So I found a very pleasant mossy spot and — you know — what can I say? — I mean, don’t be envious about it — I have to admit, it felt quite nice. (88)
The extremes of sexuality and violence in Shawn’s play are comically undermined by a satire of popular culture, in which sexuality and violence themselves become trivialized to the extent of becoming merely another gesture of public identity. “So you see, for me, the way things are now still seems astonishing — I mean, the fact that people talk about their penises and vaginas in public, at dinner parties, in magazines and newspapers — I can’t get over it. Ha ha ha! I can’t get over the way in interviews, not just actors but even politicians mention genitals so freely — ‘my vagina,’ ‘my penis’ — and of course all the plays, the films, whatever — well, it’s all changed so much,” Ben observes (perhaps several decades after Bill Clinton leaves semen stains on Monica Lewinsky’s dress and Lady Gaga repurposes transgressive sexuality for commercial purposes) (23). And, in this near future, Rose gives out business cards with a picture of her vagina on them (57). But the ease with which the intimate secrets of sex have entered public discourse does not alleviate, nor reveal, the power of the darker urges expressed in intimate relationships. It is a means of titillation, with which everyone eventually grows bored.
Shawn shares with Howard Barker a sense of how cultural and historic crisis can give rise to expressions of transgressive sexuality, sexualities which may serve to reconstruct the self. As in Barker’s plays, however, political power issues in Shawn’s plays do not guarantee any kind of redemption; indeed, they may make this individual valorization impossible and drive those in power, like Ben, to ever more violent disruptions of both the psyche and the body. Though they are, like Barker’s plays, often witty and very funny, they are not hopeful.
If Grasses of a Thousand Colors concludes with the end of the world, it leaves open the question of whether the world, and the people who inhabit it, are capable of saving themselves. That some human and natural traits remain unaddressable through rationalism, or because of the irrationalism of the human spirit, is neither misanthropic or pessimistic, terms which have been associated with Shawn’s plays as well as those of Barker and another dramatist to come under consideration here soon, Neil LaBute: it may be merely a statement of fact. By repudiating any attempt to analyze or explain the emotional and physical extremes his characters seek, Shawn leaves to the spectator the question of what it means to be a human being and a citizen in a world which is becoming more thoroughly administered, militarized and delusional that these problems are soluble, especially through science and political administration. For a play which remains resolutely without reference to contemporary events, Grasses of a Thousand Colors demonstrates that Shawn may have his finger more sensitively upon the pulse of America at the beginning of the 21st century than any other American dramatist.
Below is a short interview with the dramatist, conducted by Royal Court Associate Ola Animashawun in June 2009; below the video are links to a few other references:
Related material:
Superfluities Reduxreview of Wallace Shawn’s Essays
John Lahr’s review in the 1 June 2009 New Yorker (those who care about such things will be amused to note that Shawn portrayed Lahr in the 1987 film Prick Up Your Ears)
Brief notice by Ben Brantley in The New York Times, 26 June 2009
Charles Spencer’s negative review in The Telegraph, 19 May 2009 (“dirty-minded and supremely self-indulgent … sickening”)
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 Timesreview 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.
