Some Sort Of Awakening (Unabridged Version)

by Mark Zimmerman

As if laying a critical foundation for the discussion of modern theatre (I speak, of course, of true modern theatre, as opposed to the Corporate Real Estate Conglomerate Production), Octavio Paz wrote, “In order to decipher a hieroglyph, a writer’s only recourse is signs (words) that immediately form another hieroglyph.” Conversely, Henry Miller wrote that “we realize the function of the theatre is not to hand us back the everyday familiar reality, but to give us intimations of a super reality which knows no bourne.” Both statements — naked, fecund with awareness — offer us translations of the theatrical statement. In short, if I may: theatre should distill the arrangement of languages and bring us a momentum of artistic reverie or exaltation. By its very nature theatre should communicate and transcend; the banal becomes glorious, the heroic tragic and suspect.

The Wooster Group’s production ofHouse/Lights, an adaptation — or deconstruction — of Gertrude Stein’s work Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights at the Performing Garage, offers a fine example of Paz’s pronouncement on the hieroglyph. Much acclaimed for their bold tradition of experiment, The Wooster Group’s strength lies in collaboration, a collaboration not only within the troupe itself, but also with the audience, rapt in the depth of performance and/or confusion. In art, absurdity is a grand, though still dangerous undertaking; the seeming obtuseness of it all, if used with indignity, may bring us into the fold of the artist, the challenge to the audience making for a pure creative union. However, if the effect fails at some level, the work presented may degenerate into self-absorbed ramblings, a sad mire of convoluted phrasings, and, in performance, an over-analytical motion of dancing and settings. To The Wooster Group, the absurd, even at its bluntest, most obtuse, is merely part of the whole, a part of their history of performance and of continuing experimentation which they share with their audience.

The Wooster Group inhabits the same continuum as the Latin American writers of the earlier part of the century. Tablada, Vitier, Vallejo, Neruda and later, of course, Paz, show us an example of artists transcending a language and tradition. These writers could be called “Post-European,” in that their work was an effort to go beyond the European masters and to create forms of their own, signatures not dependent on classical norms. The beauty of The Wooster Group is that they, like these writers, go so far beyond what we generally relate to as theatre, destroying to create, directing the viewer towards a position beyond rectilinear time and place. And here they challenge the most important mother of all the modernists, Gertrude Stein herself, the embodiment of Anglo-American experimentation.

As directed by co-founder Elizabeth LeCompte,House/Lights, with its aggressively sculptural set by Jim Findlay, brings together dance, literature, video, and installation to challenge the linear mind. The work may be appreciated on many levels (especially the performance of Kate Valk as Elaine/Faustus), but the point is not to dislocate any single aspect of the work. An initial denial or acceptance of the work is irrelevant. For instance, much of the choreographic movement is, in fact, quite childish (not childlike), but this is merely an aspect of the experimental format. To fully grasp the tenor of their work, a viewer must go back to a corner, perhaps in darkness, as if enveloped in the loss of love, to reflect on what is being encountered as it happens. Like a novel that demands multiple readings, a performance of The Wooster Group forces viewers to confront their own skills of cognition and artistic insight, the failures of their own thought structures. This is demanding performance, not the token offering of skills and ego so often on display in the current downtown scene, wherever that downtown is located. The Wooster Group is about an art of the body itself, as well as the mind. Their collaborative oeuvre insures the possibility of further explorations into expression by bold young actors and directors of the future. Their work inspires in us the actuality of what we are capable of achieving and, more importantly, what we are capable of understanding.

Cab Legs, presented at Performance Space 122 in New York and venues in Europe, showcases the free-ranging talents of an intensely physical theatre, at once cryptic and relevant, referential and stoic. Contriving a kind of universal comedy, Elevator Repair Service, a collaborative of writers and performers (including Steve Bodow, John Collins, Bradley Glenn, Rinne Groff, James Hannaham, Blake Koh, Leo Marks, Katherine Profeta, Scott Shepherd, Clay Shirky, Susie Sokol, and Colleen Werthmann, some of whom have worked with the The Wooster Group) exploits a sublime minimalism to turn attention to the swirling undercurrents of the performers’ various idiosyncracies and body language. In this age of “post-everything,” this would still seem to be at least one of the goals of any group aspiring to create theatre. But where such acclaimed writers as Mac Wellman contort language into a nonsensical hash, Elevator Repair Service achieves moments that funnel meaning and story to an apex of expression not by tossing aside language and dialogue, but by enmeshing delicate glimmers of speech within a framework of often brutish motion that recalls body art. Co-directed by John Collins and head writer Steve Bodow, Cab Legs tells the story of the wayward Dr. John Biltmore, gambler, womanizer, drinker, prodigal son returning to a small town and to his father’s tradition-bound medical practice. As portrayed by Scott Shepherd, young Biltmore lounges and grimaces through a bravely existential role. This is the young man of learning who, it could be said, has learned too much. Enamored of the neurotic Linda (Rinne Groff), a woman who is dominated by her insecurities, her senile mother (Susie Sokol) and puritanical father Reverend Calloway (Jonathan Feinberg), Shepherd’s Biltmore is a study of ambition gone wrong, the ambition of another, carried like an albatross.

But this is a comedy. Groff’s performance presents Linda as strongly emotional; as Linda riffs maniacally on the greatness of the medical profession, she drags the audience into a disturbing whirlpool of obsession and desire. A strange sexual sub-current emanates quite perfectly from Linda; she is the woman longing to escape, but without the tools (emotionally, mentally) to do so. Linda’s ability to hold us so raptly comes from an embarrassed alliance she blindsides us into; we are laughing at the same woman we’ve seen at uptown parties, the same woman we share breakfast with (for one reason or another) in the dim mornings after an unusual drunk. Physically, Shepherd, Sokol, and Feinberg dominate the stage with sheer, if anguished, confidence. Shepherd’s slouch is a thing of impeccable grace, exhibiting a very American nonchalance. Sokol keeps things moving even over the sexually laden exchanges of silence with her inventive, understated movements. Like Sokol, Feinberg draws attention to the unspoken through use of an understated presence; the blink of an eye could hold the drop of tragedy we seem to await.

The choreography by Katherine Profeta derives from the dance rituals of contemporary Indian film; the dances in these movies are substitutions, flowery metaphors for things that cannot be shown, substitutes for modes of sexual engagement. They are exaggerated moments, time extended and suspended as the emotional state of the forbidden action is explored. Since everything can be shown on the American stage, these moments could come across as absurd to those not knowing the context and not understanding the formal requisites of such set pieces. Here the troupe, clearly understanding the radically divergent traditions, utilizes the Indian idiom to deconstruct the idea of the musical number in the American musical theatre tradition. The honesty and energy with which the troupe engages in such recreation rescues this from mere camp-laden pastiche. Each of these artists is trained to become, not simply to impersonate, another being. This corps of actors demands rapt attention. They control the stage as if it were a religious space, balancing silence with the creaking of a chair (a paean, it would seem, to Cage). The Reverend Calloway mutters only a handful of lines, yet the stern visage of Feinberg tells us all we need to know. Susie Sokol’s tittering lunacy as Mrs. Calloway plies deep into the recesses of madness and the degeneration of age and stasis.

This is a theatre of strange darkness and atticism; its art is an art that seems to have devoured its references, eating its parents and birthing its own poetic and comedic child, always reminding us of things best kept hidden. And through it all we are laughing. It is funny because it is awkward. It is powerful because, at some level, we get it. . . . Nothing more.

Out of the unlikely well-spring of Victorian England emerged a poet, essayist, playwright, and novelist — Oscar Wilde — whose very nature and presence of meaning accosted the fabric of the society he would so fully redefine, even as it destroyed him, in a joyously pitiless pursuit towards the understanding and the attainment of beauty. In the early pages of Death in VeniceThomas Mann writes: “For an intellectual product of any value to exert an immediate lasting, it must rest on an inner harmony, yes, an affinity, between the personal destiny of its author and that of his contemporaries in general.” The many destinies Oscar Wilde contrived became alluvial mirrors turned loose on the world, particularly England, and himself. Wilde developed a hinged, somewhat decorative language to burrow into the deepest recesses of beauty and truth, both fabricated and profound. His was the beauty of the sleeping dog under the hand of a master at his leisure, the lilies of Pound’s imagist work, the pulse of a wit, so effulgent as to offer its witness the succor of having never known otherwise.

It could be argued that Wilde was capable of discerning the innermost workings of human experience more than any English writer of his day. Indeed, beyond the French masters, notably Proust, De Maupassant, and Gautier, only the names of Hemingway and Bukowski in our century seem — to me at least — to come to mind in terms of matching the audacious awareness of Wilde regarding our exterior condition. On the surface the comparison could seem ridiculous: the brawling Americans aligned with the effete Irish dandy, courting the rich and cultured. However, viewed closely, the grace of Hemingway’s brutes — drinks in hand, perhaps at the Dome, waist-deep in the Two-Hearted river — or the boxer waiting for his predestined fate in a cheap hotel are spiritually the same nuggets of supreme beauty that Wilde engaged in scenarios from the learned parlors of “hook-nosed dowagers.” As for Bukowski, no writer in any language has amassed a body of work so steeped in the quest for beauty and cognizance. Again, Bukowski and Hemingway may seem at the polar opposite to Wilde’s lyrical philosophy, yet, to understand the incredible power of Wilde’s genius and accuracy, it must be understood that what these writers shared was a need to detach grace and merit from the shackles of the masses, a need to manipulate fully the confines of art so as to lead us and them forward in  . . . nothingness, perhaps. Their need was to create, to carve, and doing so, to gain a sort of accelerated empathy.

Almost a century after Wilde’s death, the Tectonic Theater Project has produced Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde,written and directed by Moises Kaufman and based on the trials from the libel suit that Wilde brought against the Marquis of Queensbury and on through the final trial that found Wilde sentenced to two years of hard labor for gross indecency. Through use of transcripts, actual notes, letters, and, of course, the work of Wilde himself, Kaufman has edited and pieced together a dialogue of supreme import and seeming authenticity. A small cast and a complexly minimalist set design by Sarah Lambert, with appropriate costumes by Kitty Leech and sound design by Wayne Frost, allow the flow of Kaufman’s pacing to dictate an amplification of tragedy and spectacle. Leech’s costumes and the clever use of a sort of chorus allow us to feel and comprehend the time we are to be sent into, held sway by the passionate narration and, at times, the knowing stare of the actors out towards the ink mass of shadow blurred by the piercing blades of stagelight.

The story is a complex, fittingly tragic one. In 1894, Queensbury left with the concierge of a private club in which both he and Wilde held memberships his calling card with a note denouncing Wilde as a sodomite (Queensbury misspelled the note, much to Wilde’s amusement). At the time the darling of the London theatre, with The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband playing to much acclaim, Wilde was recognized as one of the era’s preeminent writers and thinkers. Queensbury’s hatred had been triggered by Wilde’s homosexual relationship with the Marquis’s son, Lord Alfred Douglas, an erudite, if minor, poet. Douglas became Wilde’s supreme muse and confidant. As passages from The Picture of Dorian Gray are read aloud as evidence, the audience is levelled by the loving, almost mourning descriptions of yearning and ennui. At Douglas’s urging, Wilde, sadly, pursued his case of libel, to historically disastrous effect. When Queensbury’s defense counsel came across four hoodlums said to have slept with Wilde, the prosecutor withdrew Wilde’s charge, thereby opening him up to his own inquisition.

That Wilde was a victim of his own time and his own pride is evident, if not wholly obvious. But the poetry, if you will, of this particular destiny is in the fact that Wilde so fully understood his role as an artist, fully appreciating the scope of influence and position his work afforded him to the ages. A man ever at ease with his celebrity, Wilde introduced his time to a re-viewing of the Xanadu Coleridge depicted: the sanctuary of a frame of mind turned towards art and pleasure. A telling moment in Gross Indecency is when Wilde, played by Michael Emerson in the performance I saw, declares that “everything I write is for publication. . . .” Of course. Much as Picasso took to signing scraps of paper bearing lines from pencils, Wilde was compiling a legacy, a statement for a time for which he may have thought he was writing. Clearly Wilde’s own ambition, to a degree, was toward the archives. He was not shy in acknowledging his genius or, to a certain extent, his lifestyle. How ironic that his archival fancy may have doomed him in the end. It is the love letters he wrote Douglas that first started his downfall, those words so elegant, so lyrically sensual. This was nearly a century before Ginsberg more or less dumped verse and began clinking finger cymbals, smoking pot, and discussing the virtues of young boys.

Kaufman’s victory here is, in part, based on his choices in the visual presentation, as well as the laudable taste exhibited in the linear/non-linear patterns of action and setting. With material of this power at his hands, Kaufman wisely lets the drama of actuality weave its own dense cord of appeal, allowing us the privilege of getting insight into so formidable a life and mind. This is the beauty Wilde himself aspired to: the synchronicity of knowledge and expression. We see Wilde as larger than life; his strengths become heroic, his attenuations familiar and disconsolate. Michael Emerson, as Wilde, is a brilliant, albeit lithe, image of the portly artist; with pursed lips, his head tilted back in shock, invention, or passion as required, Emerson grasps the weight of what and who he is to present; his Wilde is a creature at once coward and hero, avatar and lover.

Whatever weakness Wilde may or may not project, he deserved a better end. In short, the worst that could be said of Wilde was that he may have been catty and a snob (at least when dealing with the “Philistines,” not enjoying the physical prowess of his young male urchins). Artists in general run a more distanced line from their fellows. Weakness of some sort is bound to follow; living a life so bound to passion and awareness, though it may have its rewards, can be a cruel, frustratingly numbing sentence. Could this be one (pallid) explanation for the proclivity of artists toward vice, neurosis, and solitude? Metaphorically speaking, do we drink in the languid noon of summer because we are thirsty? Or do we thirst for what we know is at hand? A few years after his release from prison, Wilde died of a lingering infection that had plagued him since his incarceration. He died in Paris, more or less an outcast. During the trials, a French headline of the day exclaimed: “This is how the English treat their poets.”

Gross Indecency, like its subject, is important on many levels — the play is clear and intelligent, a sophisticated comedy of the profound. Theatre is an art of community; it should be the standard of reflection, yet it seems so often to settle for mere entertainment. Kaufman’s work is all the more “gracious” for its stunning entertainment value. At its apex theatre should expose us to the creative concord the Greeks envisioned, the synthesis of Apollonian and Dionysian; the words should be lifted from the writer’s page like trout from a stream in the grip of a young eagle. In this collaboration, this brutal, lyrical biodrama, Kaufman nearly reaches the pinnacle. The union between subject, detail, case, design, and production offer us the chance to know an artist in peril, pilloried for his very existence, his body of work turned against him in a court of law. By contrast the cries of so many contemporary artists for recognition, grants, and identity seem particularly vapid.

Wilde was — and probably saw himself at the end as — a Christ-like figure, a Buddha under a tree; he had a faint grin of satisfaction in despair. Art is a form of religion; its practiced lend themselves to worship and, of course, divination, if only for a quicksilver moment. Wilde truly illustrates a Christian motif: he died allowing us to move forward. In A Plea for Intellectuals, Sartre wrote that “no society can complain of its intellectuals without accusing itself, for it has the intellectuals it makes.” The facts and the work Kaufman has created are telling comments on England in the dawn of the violent beginnings of the modern age. The Irish Wilde, so very English, was the artist England needed him to be — a pop star before the term meant anything, exposed to scandal and deposed. How very modern.

The death of the artist is, in the end, just another death. Of course, the work and the life of an artist become a creation in and of themselves — a bounded composite series of actions and interpretations. Nietzsche’s life was one of strict contemplation; his ideas came vicariously as well, vacant, mad, incognizant. Wilde’s death seems drawn out and particularly cruel. I sense that he felt death, in some form, soon after the conviction and carried that weight to its decisive conclusion, to lay bare the irony: his suffering and collapse; the trials, individually and as a whole; the romantic terror; the eloquence. Each element is Wildean. Perhaps it was a brief concession of peace.

The New York Theater Company’s production of the young English playwright Mark Ravenhill’sShopping and Fucking brings us to terms only with the superficial existence of superficial personalities as it follows the tale of a tragic love entanglement between a crime lord and a fourteen-year-old male prostitute in London. The stage is dominated by a grotesque marquee flashing neon clues to what we should see going on before us, while the soundtrack blares the roaring vulgarity of house music.

Whereas The Wooster Group deals with the deconstruction of text and emotional (or referential) sequences, Ravenhill’s work mines the more familiar territory of character, plot, and referential (or referential) sequences. As directed by Gemma Bodinetz and Max Stafford-Clark,Shopping and Fucking attempts to create a poetry of the co-dependent, victimized, and pathetic, a concept that fails to bring any philosophical nutrition or commentary to the table. This is not to say that Ravenhill’s work is poorly written — or below a certain standard of intellectual argument; indeed, much of the dialogue, with its extreme scatology, approaches brilliance, especially the charged meandering of the serpentine underworld lord, Brian (portrayed in the performance I saw with appropriately villainous charm by Matthew Sussman). The miasmic air of failure looms over the stale content and its actual presentation, not just in the lives of the characters. For example, the performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Mark, the slobbering co-dependent, is fine as performance goes, but it is all acting tricks: we’re not going to learn much from his character. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect to, but shouldn’t we gain, somehow, an enlightenment? Where is the meat of expressive rhetoric? the silk storm clouds that hover over the territory of art?

Shopping and Fucking deals with addiction (in a variety of forms, including drugs, sex, money, fidelity, infidelity) and the material is excellent fodder for any story or idea. Sadly though, the author fails to bring home the goods; there is no growth, no real philosophy. The work loses its grip in its venal discussion of intense, if fashionable, subject matter. Rape is a climactic moment, brutality and gutter language a flowering experience, and the use of drugs seems primarily a counterpoint to the use of sex. Still we seem to get nowhere beyond the most basic definition of things, as if the work transmutes its contents to its criticism, the material and the superficial. Could Ravenhill honestly expect the act of shopping to morph into a solid metaphoric totem? Possibly, but I think not. His fault lies in an apparent defense of weakness, for the underlying status quo, a rationalization for well-made-play platitudes in interaction and life.

As is so often the case when dealing with contemporary performance, Shopping and Fucking is so completely timely in its content and attitudes that it negates any impact beyond its time. It is devoid, it seems, of a dialectic. This is far from Henry Miller’s discussion of “a super reality that knows no bourne.” This is an illustration of a reality that knows — nothing at all really. A reality some of us face and disregard daily, in one form or another: the reality of fast food and credit, insurance and coupon clipping, only to stand in line. And that’s the point: we face this and deal with it or it destroys us. At the very least it dulls our ability to see or, if we choose, clouds what we see.