Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (1992)

Saturday, January 08, 2000  | 

By Tony Kushner

Note: These are my initial thoughts on Millennium Approaches, written as a journal assignment in the fall of 1998. I'm tempted to revise it or pull it down altogether, but I've decided to keep it up here as an artifact of sorts.

• • •

A copy of Perestroika is sitting within my reach. I refuse to open it until I finish this journal. In this first part of Angels in America, Tony Kushner offers a modern deconstruction of the American family drama, along with political/social commentary (and humor!), united perfectly in a crosshatch of formal realism and fantasy. Quite a feat. I'm not sure where to begin.

"I took the bus that I was told to take and I got off — well it was the very last stop, so I had to get off." — Hannah

That Millennium Approaches references Tennessee Williams should not be a surprise. Kushner, a gay playwright whose work addresses issues of family, love, acceptance, and destruction, is obviously indebted to his predecessor. That his play so often references A Streetcar Named Desire specifically is of a bit more interest. The allusions are hardly subtle. In Harper, for instance, Kushner paints for us a portrait of what Blanche DuBois may have looked like while she still struggled for life at Belle Reeve. Like Blanche, Harper has genuinely fallen in love with a man whose homosexuality, admitted or not, has ruined both their relationship and her sanity. And also like Blanche and her desire for "magic," Harper prefers "pretend-happy" to the ugly truth. "[It's] better than nothing," she tells Joe.

Near the end of Millennium Approaches' first act, Harper finally confronts Joe about his sexuality. Her words are biting, laced with religious condemnation. "I knew you . . ." she tells him before stopping herself. "It's a sin, and it's killing us both." I can practically hear the strains of music drifting through Blanche's mind, stopped suddenly by a gunshot. Although Joe does not end his own life (reflecting, I think, some social change in America over the last forty years — the gay man musn't necessarily be punished), Harper's accusations do effectively end their admittedly superficial marriage. For Harper, as was famously the case with Blanche, the truth is too difficult to face. So instead, she slips into the darkness, both literally and metaphorically.

Perhaps the most obvious allusion to Streetcar (aside from Prior's and Belize's quoting of it in Act 2, Scene 5) occurs near the beginning of Act 2. Joe returns to the apartment to find Harper "sitting at home, all alone, with no lights on. We can barely see her." When Joe asks her why she sits in the dark and then turns on the light, Harper screams, "No," and shuts them off again. By the end of Millennium Approaches, Harper, again like Blanche, has fled reality completely. It is only when she travels with Mr. Lies that Harper is able to survive in a "very white, cold place, with a brilliant blue sky above."

"Eric? This is a Jewish name?" — Rabbi Chemelwitz

You've got to love any work that begins with a Rabbi eulogizing in a very Woody Allen/Mel Brooks kind of way, his sentiments alternating between moments of divine wisdom and hilarious asides. In Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud exposes the genealogy of the Jewish joke, noting its remarkably long and often self-critical history. The Jews, according to Freud, have developed such a rich comedic tradition as a response to centuries, millennia actually, of persecution and anti-Semitism. What better catharsis is there, he might say, than a good laugh?

In Millennium Approaches, Kushner uses jokes in a similar manner, expanding their range, however, to encompass not only issues of anti-Semitism and Jewish stereotypes, but also of homophobia. The result, I think, is the formation of living, breathing, and oft-suffering characters, as opposed to the two-dimensional cutouts who often inhabit Gay and Jewish roles. Kushner acknowledges stereotypes, then undercuts them. "My grandmother actually saw Emma Goldman speak. In Yiddish," Louis tells Prior. "But all Grandma could remember was that she spoke well and wore a hat." Henny Youngman would be proud. "It's an old Jewish custom to express love," continues Louis. "Here, Grandma, have a shovelful. Latecomers run the risk of finding the grave completely filled." The lines echo with Borscht Belt rim-shots. But instead of allowing the jokes to flatten Louis into a stereotype, Kushner uses them to expose other forces which have contributed in varying degrees to the formation of his identity — Louis is not just gay, not just well-educated, not just a word processor. Being aware of his identification as a Jew helps us better understand the many conflicts in Louis' life. Jews aren't supposed to be gay. The importance of this conflict is, of course, echoed in Joe's and Harper's struggle. Mormons aren't supposed to be gay either.

Jokes, I think, are used in a similar manner to humanize the homosexual characters in Millennium Approaches. Again, Kushner acknowledges stereotypes — Prior exposing Louis' embarrassment about his sibilant S, for instance. But he also moves beyond those stereotypes and confronts the audience with casual, though often graphic, references to homosexual sex. "Oh and by the way, darling, cousin Doris is a dyke," Prior tells Louis. "You don't notice anything. If I hadn't spent the last four years fellating you I'd swear you were straight." The discomfort lines like this would cause in a large audience would, I'm sure, be lessened somewhat when relieved through laughter.

And that same laughter is also used to release the terrifying tension created by the play's greatest threat: AIDS. During research for my thesis, I was surprised to learn that most within the Jewish-American community were unwilling to even mention the Holocaust until the mid-1960s. Much of that silence seems to have been broken by people like Mel Brooks, whose Oscar-winning screenplay for The Producers featured the notoriously hilarious "Springtime for Hitler" song and dance scene. Millennium Approaches must have had much the same impact. Nearly a decade after its original production, and I was still shocked to hear Prior's light-hearted resignation:

K.S., baby. Lesion number one. Lookit. The wine-dark kiss of the angel of death . . . I'm a lesionnaire. The Foreign Lesion. The American Lesion. Lesionairre's disease . . . My troubles are lesion . . . Bad timing, funeral and all, but I figured as long as we're on the subject of death . . .

I noticed that in the notes which accompany Perestroika, Kushner calls the play "a comedy," distinguishing it from a "farce" and forbidding any amount of sentiment. Making a joke of "the subject of death," I think, is this play's greatest accomplishment, not because it makes light of a serious matter, but because it forces us to acknowledge — without the safe distance allowed by farce and sentimentality — the painful, human reality of that matter.

"You have all these secrets and lies" — Harper

I'm fascinated by the idea of trying to place Millennium Approaches in the tradition of the American family drama. It explores similar themes, particularly the destructive effects of secrets and the breakdown of communication. The obvious problem with this type of reading, however, is that, aside from Joe's mother and Louis' dead grandmother, there are few references to traditional, multi-generation families. But that, I think, is also the point. In writing the homosexual American experience, Kushner has, by necessity, thrown off common notions of family. Instead of the matriarchal "Mama" from A Raisin in the Sun, Kushner gives us Belize, a mothering drag queen, and Harper, a de-sexed woman who can only imagine fertility. Instead of offering unity within the biological family, Kushner shows us the isolated lives of gay men, first in Roy Cohn, then in the abandoned Prior. Instead of allowing an imagined familial bliss, Kushner exposes its failings. For some reason, I find the play's saddest lines belong to Joe, who describes to Roy his inability to pass for someone "cheerful and strong."

Those who love God with an open heart unclouded by secrets and struggles are cheerful; God's easy simple love for them shows in how strong and happy they are . . . I wanted to be one of the elect, one of the Blessed. You feel you ought to be, that the blemishes are yours by choice, which of course they aren't. Harper's sorrow, that really deep sorrow, she didn't choose that. But it's hers.

As is often the case in American family dramas, the tragedy of Millennium Approaches stems from the inability of its characters to live honestly. Blanche DuBois' husband committed suicide instead. Joe and Harper lived a loveless life together instead. Roy Cohn ignored the truth and sought power instead.

Labels: Drama, Kushner

The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971)

Friday, January 07, 2000  | 

By David Rabe

That's just this whole damn army messin' with me and it ain't ever gonna end but in shit.
     — Pavlo Hummel, before attempting suicide

I am in a world of shit.
     — Private Pyle, before committing suicide in Full Metal Jacket

I began to think about Kubrick's film long before I reached the end of the first act of The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. I knew little about Rabe's play, other than what I had picked up from reading his own introduction. Most notably, I knew that it was built in two sections: a first act that showed Hummel's development from raw recruit to "Regular Army," and a second that took place in Vietnam. It's that same structure that so struck me the first time I saw Full Metal Jacket. By the time Hummel began equating his world with shit (seen most clearly in the drama's finale), I found it difficult to ignore his connection to Pyle. There are other similarities as well—the "blanket party" both young men suffer, the "friend" who tries to help (Pierce in the play, Joker in the film), and, of course, the gruesome death that both men meet. Of more interest to me though, is that Pavlo Hummel, again like the film, is difficult to neatly classify into any one particular genre. In his introduction to the Viking edition of Pavlo Hummel and Sticks and Bones, Rabe responds to the label "antiwar" which has been frequently applied to his work:

I have written them to diagnose, as best I can, certain phenomena that went on in and around me. It seems presumptuous and pointless to call them "antiwar" plays . . . I think these labels [antifamily, antimarriage, antiyouth, and anticrime] do not exist because family, marriage, youth, and crime are all viewed as phenomena permanently a part of the eternal human pageant. I believe war to be an equally permanent part of that pageant. (xxv)

As is the case when I watch Full Metal Jacket, I find Pavlo Hummel much more interesting when viewed in this light—as an examination of "the eternal human pageant," that constant process of interaction, performance, and construction.

Rabe bookends Pavlo Hummel with Hummel's death scene. It's an interesting device. I've read several novels (most recently Julia Alvarez's In the Time of Butterflies) and seen a few films (Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures and, of course, Citizen Kane) that use the structure to reinforce the development of a character, either by building a mystery ("Rosebud") or by creating a suspenseful, and at times melodramatic, sense of inevitability. Pavlo Hummel, though, seems to do the exact opposite, pointing out how little its main character is capable of developing. As the play opens, Hummel is a loud-mouthed kid, boasting loudly of his own sexual prowess and jumping blindly to retrieve a live grenade. Two hours, and more than a hundred pages later, he is unchanged. It's a great manipulation of our expectations. We come to the play expecting to see a green recruit, one stupid enough to volunteer for firemen duty, grow into manhood—a nice, typical bildungsroman. Instead, we watch his journey knowing that he will be blown to bits. "You had that thing in your hand, didn't you?" asks Ardell in the opening scene. "What was you thinkin' on, you had that thing in your hand?" Even after his "basic training" and a tour of combat duty, Hummel, still the green recruit, is capable of only jumping into action. He is oblivious to any causal relationship. "[I was thinkin'] About throwin' it," he replies, as if the explosion were in no way inevitable.

On one level then, the play does criticize the basic training, as seen in act one, as a failed means of constructing some cookie-cutter-like masculine identity. For Rabe, the training is nothing but hollow ritual. (Though Rabe throws off the label "antiwar," the political ramifications of this, particularly when situated in early-70's America, are obvious.) As the act closes, Hummel, reeling from his failed suicide attempt, is chastised by Ardell for consistently proving himself to be a fool. "What kinda shit this?" he yells, after seeing Hummel's uniform lying on the floor. "Your poor ole Sarge see this, he sit down on the ground and he cry, man. Poor ole Sarge, he work himself like crazy tryin' ta teach you so you can act like a man." But the Sarge's lessons are lost on Hummel. His attempts all end in failure—he drags his pants across the floor, oblivious to the dirt they collect. Finally, Pierce and the other men come to his aid. "All is ease now," writes Rabe in the stage directions. "It is a ritual now: Pavlo must exert no effort whatsoever as he is transformed." That passive verb is interesting. The act ends with Hummel in full dress uniform, complete with sunglasses, staring at himself in the mirror. "Who you see?" asks Ardell. "That ain't no Pavlo Hummel. Noooo, man. That somebody else. An' he somethin' else." But Hummel's transformation has been passive. He has relied on others to define himself as "Regular Army," just as before he had relied on lies, foolish boasting, and empty quips to define himself as a streetkid. As Rabe mentions in his "Author's Note," "real insight never comes [for Hummel] . . . he will learn only that he is lost, not how, why, or even where."

Questions of masculinity inform nearly every scene in Pavlo Hummel. After Hummel's transformation at the end of Act One, the play shifts dramatically, moving to the "real" world of Pavlo's home. There he is united with his half-brother, Mickey, and the two share stories over drinks. Their conversation is littered with verbal attacks and retaliations. Mickey calls Hummel a "fuckin' myth-maker" and a "goddamn cartoon." Hummel protests, screaming, "I'm not an asshole anymore!" and "I don't need you anymore." But Hummel's reliance upon his new-found identity as a soldier is unconvincing. He imagines himself part of a new fraternity, referring to his fellow soldiers as "real brothers." But Mickey doesn't allow Hummel any victory, calling him a bastard and their mother a whore, and playfully mentioning Joanna, thereby reminding Hummel of his virginity.

These questions of masculinity are only intensified once Hummel reaches Vietnam. The first scene "in country" is a disorienting collage of images:

Hummel and Brisbey. Brisbey has been literally emasculated—"got seventeen years in the army; no legs no more, no balls, one arm." It's only beside him that Hummel appears virile.

Hummel and Jones. Hummel is pure green compared to Jones, the man who brokers Hummel's first sexual experience.

Hummel and Yen and Sgt. Tower. Yen undresses Hummel while Tower holds up an M-16 and chants, "You got to love this rifle, Gen'lmen, like it you pecker and you love to make love." Rabe's phallic imagery is none-too-subtle. (I can't help thinking of the recruits in Full Metal Jacket who sing, "this is my rifle, this is my gun" as they marched, their hands grasping their M-16's and their crotches.) It's no surprise that Brisbey asks to hold a rifle or that Hummel describes his first lay as: "I just about blew this girl's head off."

Hummel and the Captain. Again, Hummel attempts to define himself by emulating the examples he sees around him. "I want to feel," he says, "that I'm with a unit Victor Charlie considers valuable enough to want to get it." The consequences of such a request are lost on him.

Hummel's combat duty is further proof of his emptiness. He is injured repeatedly, but is so mesmerized by the idea of being a soldier that he passes up a chance to go home. "How many times you gonna let 'em hit you?" Ardell asks. "As many as they want," Hummel replies. But he is never able to define himself in his own terms. I love that image of the men looking to the North Star to find their own place, their own direction. Ardell asks Hummel if he's ever seen the North Star in his life and Hummel can only say, "I seen a lot of people pointin'."

Labels: Drama, Rabe

Fefu and Her Friends (1977)

Thursday, January 06, 2000  | 

By Maria Irene Fornes

To be quite honest, I don't get Fornes's play. But in this case (as opposed to a few other works I've read which have left me similarly perplexed), I feel somewhat driven to figure it out. I've decided to begin with the first clue Fornes gives us, the title. Following are my general impressions of Fefu and her friends:

Fefu

Fefu's is the first voice we hear, and quite an opening line it is. "My husband married me," she tells Cindy and Christina, "to have a constant reminder of how loathsome women are." This comment is very much at the heart of Fefu's own conflict. In the opening act, she explains her fascination with revulsion, contrasting a "smooth and dry and clean" exterior with the slimy, fungal, worm-infested underside hidden beneath. Despite her attempts to disguise her own self-loathing — "Well, who is ready for lunch?" she asks, quickly changing the subject — it is the exposure of that dangerous underside that determines so much of the action in the play. Fefu describes this danger that she feels threatening her: "It is another life that is parallel to the one we manifest . . . If you don't recognize it . . . it eats you." It's in these moments of honest reflection that Fefu speaks most eloquently, as if Fornes is representing Fefu's divided identity along linguistic lines. Her "smooth exterior" operates in the meaningless language of small talk — Did you have enough coffee? Did you find the sugar? Blah blah blah blah. But when admitting her own pain and fears, Fefu's language takes on a noticeable mechanical formality — that which is exposed to the exterior. it comes forth with bitterness and it's erratic. they can put themselves at rest, tranquilized and in a mild stupor. The ideas expressed here are almost too eloquently articulated to sound natural on stage, as if they had been carefully rehearsed again and again. This reveals, I think, Fefu's internal preoccupation with her other "life."

Fornes makes it clear, however, that Fefu's conflict is not entirely internal. That double-barrel shotgun, described even in the opening stage direction, is a very real, violent presence throughout the play. It reappears periodically. Fefu fires it at Phillip, a man who, though never seen, is an important character. Cindy tells the story of how a similar gun put Julia in her wheelchair. And, of course, Fefu and Her Friends ends with Fefu's killing of both a white rabbit and Julia with a single shot. The shotgun adds a terrifying inevitability to the play — "I feel danger lurking," says Christina; "She's been hiding all day," answers Cindy. When Fefu fires the weapon at her husband, we are set on edge, waiting for it to be fired again, guessing who its target might be. And Fefu's explanation of her and Phillip's game only raises more questions: What is at the root of such violent "play"? Are those slugs real, blanks, or possibly strictly metaphoric? Does her firing of the gun help Fefu combat the danger of her hidden life? Fornes's use of the shotgun, the play's only step away from fairly strict realism, seems to reinforce the reality of the threat posed to women. Self-loathing. Self-Doubt. These traits which, at least in this play, are particular to women, are viewed by Fornes as the real danger, a danger worth combating at all cost.

Cindy

Cindy is the lone eyewitness to Julia's accident. She is genuinely confused by the event, grounded as she is in reality (perhaps acting as a surrogate for us and our own confusion). She even asks Christina, "How do you know if a person is hit by a bullet?" in an attempt to explain away Julia's suffering. Cindy has her only moment on center stage during the "In the Study" scene. There, she delivers a long, detailed description of a dream, one filled with powerful, authoritarian men who pursue and violate her. Finally, she finds the strength to scream at the men. "Stop and listen to me," she yells, garnering the attention and "admiration" of those around her. But she is unable to maintain that strength:

Then, I said to him, "Restrain yourself." I wanted to say respect me. I wasn't sure whether the words coming out my mouth were what I wanted to say. I turned to ask my sister. The young man was bending over and trembling in mad rage. Another man told me to run before the young man tried to kill me.

Again, Fornes intertwines masculine violence and a woman's inability to say what she wants to say, admit what she wants to be, or acknowledge how she really feels. Here, the uniqueness and brilliance of Fornes's staging is on display. Rather than allowing Cindy and Christina to discuss the significance of the dream, Fornes interrupts them with Fefu's false front. "Who's for a game of croquet?" she asks. Cindy and Christina follow Fefu's example, making a joke of the nightmare.

Christina

"We are made of putty. Aren't we?" I'd love to hear Christina's comment performed. So much of its meaning is tied to the actress's inflection. Equal parts statement and question, Christina's line can be read as a hopeless admission of an individual's inability to shape herself. It can also be read as a sudden realization, as if the play's events have awakened in Christina an understanding of the forces working against her. If "Aren't we?" were stressed, the line might also offer the possibility of an exception, an opportunity to mold one's self. I'm not even sure what to make of the "we" in both sentences. Is she referring to all of humanity? To women specifically? To only Cindy and herself? As with her line, I've had difficulty understanding Christina's role. Throughout most of the play she operates as a plot device, a character whose main function is to elicit the comments of others and to advance the story. Even her longest speech tells us as much about Fefu as it does about herself. Her attempt to explain her impression of Fefu is punctuated with starts and stops, as if she is unable to even describe someone whose "mind is adventurous." She is a "conformist," perhaps simply a reflection of the status quo. Again, Fornes doesn't allow her characters to move beyond their first impressions. When Christina finishes her speech, she asks Cindy if she understands. Cindy simply replies, "Yes, I do" and the subject is quickly changed.

This inability (unwillingness?) of the women to move beyond a superficial explanation of their feelings is emerging as a central theme of my reading. It has reminded me of one of Fefu's opening speeches, a speech which until this moment I have been unable to explain:

[Men] are well together. Women are not . . . Women are restless with each other . . . either chattering to keep themselves from making eye contact, or else, if they don't chatter, they avert their eyes . . . as if a god once said, "and if they recognize each other, the world will be blown apart."

It's interesting that Christina is the only character given an opportunity to respond to Fefu's criticism of women. "I too have wished for that trust men have for each other," she says. "I know I don't have it." Christina seems to be the character most willing to "avert her eyes," to ignore her own problems and the problems of others. Fefu's response to Christina's sincere admission of an emptiness in her life is simply, "Hmm. Well, I have to see how my toilet is doing."

Julia

Julia can perhaps best be described as a victim, a poor creature destroyed by forces beyond her control. Fornes seems to use her as a warning of what fate potentially awaits all women. It is in her depiction of Julia (closely tied as she is to the shotgun), that Fornes slips most comfortably into the surreal. One stage direction for "In the Bedroom" states, "there are dry leaves on the floor although the time is not fall." Fornes offers no explanation, although the direction is laced with standard symbolic references — death, the end of a cycle, the inevitable result of life. Julia's hallucinations offer a similar dream-like surrealism. The scene is like a battle between Julia and the gender messages she has received throughout life. "The human being is of the masculine gender," she cries:

Woman is not a human being. She is: 1 — A mystery. 2 — Another species. 3 — As yet undefined. 4 — Unpredictable . . . Women's spirit is sexual. That is why after coitus they dwell in nefarious feelings. Because that is their natural habitat . . . And [women] take those feelings with them to the afterlife where they corrupt the heavens, and they are sent to hell where through suffering they may shed those feelings and return to earth as a man.

Julia's self-loathing becomes violent — her head moves as if she were slapped — and illustrates the similarities between her and Fefu.
Obviously, it would take me another five or six pages to discuss each character in depth (and I was really looking forward to doing Emma). So instead, I want to shift focus here to the play's final scene. I've reread the final four pages several times, but am still having great difficulty reconciling everything. The finale begins with Julia's and Fefu's conversation. Fornes again reinforces the similarities between the two characters. Fefu tells Julia, "I think you know . . . I look into your eyes and I know what you see. It's death." Fornes alludes repeatedly to Fefu's earlier comments about "averting eyes." Fefu grabs Julia, forcing eye contact, but Julia just turns her head or closes her eyes. The scene becomes increasingly dramatic, Julia taking on the epic proportions of a martyr. And imbedded in their dialogue are comments about Fefu's marriage to Phillip, about their problems, about her need for him. There seems to be some connection there — Fefu's self-loathing is a product of her reliance on someone else to bring her happiness, to mold her. But that still doesn't answer the bigger question, which is why shooting the rabbit saved Fefu and finished Julia. My only answer right now is that her action — her willingness to fight back, her desire to confront truth, her need to look Julia in the eye — is the key. Julia was perhaps destroyed by passivity. Dammit. I tried.

Labels: Drama, Fornes

Man of Mode (1676)

Wednesday, January 05, 2000  | 

By George Etherege

In the third act of Etherege's The Man of Mode, Young Bellair is surprised to learn that Harriet has as little interest in him (her intended husband) as he has in her. "'Tis not unnatural for you women to be a little angry, you miss a conquest," Bellair says, "though you would slight the poor man were he in power." His comment acknowledges a gender-based power struggle that drives much of the action in Restoration comedy. The conflict often takes the form of economics versus sexual favor—the men wielding the former and women the latter. In this case, upon first meeting his intended, Bellair seems capable of imagining Harriet only as a scheming tease, the stereo-typical Woman who uses her own sexuality—foregrounding, all the while, Man's helpless subservience to it—as a means of manipulation. Harriet, likewise, views Bellair as only another in a long succession of dominant, patriarchal figures, a man who has simply purchased her future from Lady Woodvill, the woman who controlled her past.

When both Bellair and Harriet discover that their preconceptions about the other are unfounded, they are forced to improvise. They struggle to create a discourse, one free of sexual tension and power conflict, within which a young man and woman might converse openly and honestly. Harriet's response to Bellair offers a glimpse into their dramatic solution. "There are some it may be have an eye like Bart'lomew, big enough for the whole fair," she says, "but I am not of the number, and you may keep your gingerbread." Harriet's allusion to Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair becomes more significant as the scene continues, for it demonstrates both characters' familiarity with the stage and with its nightly demonstrations of the performance of Love and courtship.

And it is, in fact, a performance that Harriet and Bellair act for their small audience, one consisting only of the two scheming parents. Both actors are well-studied in their roles; they move fluently through the gender-determined rituals. Harriet tells her 'pretend' lover, "I will lean against this wall, and look bashfully down upon my fan, while you like an amorous spark modishly entertain me." Bellair responds with a slight tilt of his head, a nervous playing with his belt, and a "sparkish" smile. Their performance is a success, convincing its viewers of the players' growing affections. Even Harriet and Bellair seem impressed with their new-found skill. After watching his partner fluctuate expertly between fits of laughter and moments of grave reserve, Young Bellair commends her, saying, "admirably well acted." She responds with witty pride: "I think I am pretty apt at these matters!"

Harriet is a fascinating character. She possesses the abundant wit of a Restoration 'rake,' along with the beauty and wealth of its traditional heroine. Significantly, she is also an outsider in London; but she is hardly the naïve Country Wife. Instead, Etherege uses Harriet's perspective to comment on the superficiality of 'high' social interaction. In the third scene of Act III, Harriet, referring to High Park, says, "I abominate the dull diversions there, the formal bows, the affected smiles, the silly by-words, and amorous tweers, in passing." Throughout The Man of Mode, the laughs come at the expense of such affectations, a trademark of the Comedy of Manners. But by staging his characters in a play within the play and by forcing his audience to oberve other observers, Etherege extends the satire, commenting directly on the Restoration stage itself. When Dorimant claims, "'Tis not likely a man should be fond of seeing a damned old play when there is a new one acted," (IV, ii) his metaphor again reinforces the similarities between the performances on stage and in the bedroom. But it also, I think, raises the question of what part the theater plays in supporting, if not actually determining, the roles of men and women in social interaction. Ultimately, the prospect of a platonic relationship leaves Harriet and Young Bellair with no option but play-acting. They slip into the only roles they feel are available to them. By showing this directly on stage, Etherege makes his play self-reflective, forcing us to acknowledge the influence of popular images on our own daily performances.

Labels: Drama, Etherege

Buried Child (1978)

Saturday, January 01, 2000  | 

By Sam Shepard

The Introduction

In his introduction to Seven Plays, Richard Gilman writes, "the real difficulty I share with many critics [who study Shepard] isn't so much deciding what the work is as knowing how to write about what it is." Two sentences into this response, and I'm already beginning to appreciate the precision of that distinction. And yet, despite the skill with which Gilman explores Shepard's work (his introduction has that accessible insight that seems lacking in the voice of much academic writing), I don't think he ever solves his original problem. As I read, I underlined sentences like, "[His plays] spill over, they leak. They change chameleon-like, in self-protection as we look at them," and "Above all, it's about performing, and here the relations between art and life become particularly close." Gilman's observations sound wonderful, poetic-almost, the type of critical writing I strive to produce. But I'm not sure if wielding "a critical vocabulary that won't be composed of cliches and stock phrases" brings him any closer to Shepard. Perhaps it's my own lack of experience with Shepard's work. I don't yet see him as a "dramatist who slips out of all the categories," and am therefore unwilling to concede a need to "devise a strategy of discourse" specifically for him. Instead (and I realize that this has probably been done many times before, even, I think, by Gilman himself), it seems that Shepard's plays, particularly a family drama like Buried Child, can be placed on a categorical timeline, one point in the evolution of a form. How far is it, really, from O'Neill's Tyrone to Shepard's Dodge?

The "Ready-Made Language" of Shepard's Themes

Gilman admits that "the trevail of the family" is a theme central to many of Shepard's plays. In Buried Child, Shepard updates the family drama, situating it amidst the cultural upheaval of late-70s America. As the curtain rises, we find Dodge, the family patriarch, staring blankly at a television, his face illuminated by only the blue flickering of the picture tube. For Shepard, TV seems to offer an alternative to real interaction and communication. When Halie questions Dodge from upstairs, he just continues staring, sitting silently in morose resignation and isolation. He is a chilling character, more an extension of the couch than a father. When Tilden arrives with the mysterious corn, Dodge exposes his own hopeless isolation. "I haven't had trouble with neighbors here for fifty-seven years," he screams. "I don't even know who the neighbors are! And I don't want to know!"When Dodge finally does respond to his wife's repeated calls, their communication is hampered by distance. "Dodge, are you watching baseball?" she asks. "No." "What?" she asks. This ("What?") becomes a common refrain for Halie, revealing her inability to actually hear him (or perhaps her lack of desire to do so).

Dodge's and Halie's conversations (like many others in the play) are superficial and ritualistic, consisting mostly of trivial discussions of the weather and the children. Their roles seem well rehearsed. She asks him if he needs a pill; he says no. She tells him to keep an eye on Tilden; he says things will be fine. She leaves to meet Father Dewis; he takes another sip from his hidden whiskey bottle. Shepard does complicate their interaction, though, with strange (at times, almost absurdist) moments of tension. The first occurs when Halie mentions the man who took her to the New Year's Day races. It is the first statement that elicits an emotional response from Dodge. "I bet he taught you a thing or two huh?" he says bitterly. "Gave you a good turn around the old stable." As in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, Shepard provides hints about his play's sub-text early in the opening act. Dodge's bitterness is, of course, later explained by Halie's infidelities and the resulting pregnancy.

Another, and much stranger, cause of tension between Halie and Dodge is their debate over whether or not their son, Bradley, should be allowed to cut his father's hair. It is scenes like this, I'm sure, that Gilman would say "spill over" and "leak," complicating any simple reading. I'll freely admit my difficulty with the scene, and with the one in which Bradley does, in fact, shave Dodge's head, cutting him and drawing blood. It seems ripe for Freudian analysis, an Oedipal conflict realized in the threatening actions of a powerless son. It also reinforces the corporeal nature of Dodge's body. Halie often mentions the stench of his decaying frame, and in their discussion, Dodge describes the last time she allowed Bradley to cut his hair, saying, "Time to dress up the corpse for company! Lower the ears a little! Put up a little front! . . . My appearance is out of his domain! It's even out of mine! In fact, its' disappeared! I'm an invisible man!" Once we learn the story of the buried child, Bradley's violence against his father also becomes strangely justifiable, an act of outward concern (for his father's appearance) and subconscious revenge.

Gilman mentions "the search for roots" as another central motif in Shepard's work. This search is characterized in Buried Child by Tilden and Vincent, a father and son who both return to the family in hopes of creating meaning in their lives. Shepard first describes Tilden as "profoundly burned out and displaced." He has recently returned home after getting in some trouble in New Mexico, but claims that his reason for returning was simply that he was lonely, "more lonely than I've ever been before." But Tilden is hardly welcomed as a prodigal son. He is instead seen only as a disappointment, a shadow of his lost potential. He seems to take on a ghost-like quality throughout the play, particularly in its final scene, as he emerges with the decaying corpse of his murdered brother (his murdered child?) in his arms. He also seems to have the magical ability to produce vegetables from air, those strange buckets of corn and carrots that so preoccupy him during the first two acts. Like Bradley and his clippers, the scenes involving Tilden and his vegetables throw off simple explanation. In his introduction, Gilman acknowledges those supporters who claim that Shepard has one creative foot within avant-garde circles, that he isn't "talking about anything but rather making something." The images here, particularly that of Tilden burying his sleeping father in cornstalks, is fascinating and lasting. Obviously, Shepard designed that image as a challenge. But the image is laced with too many resonating elements—the "milking stool" with its inherent maternal overtones, the fertility of the backyard burial ground, the "roots" of the fruitful crop, the burial of Dodge under the product of that crop—to be explained away as simply a message to the eyes, rather than one to the mind (to use Gilman's terminology).

Vince adds another level of difficulty to a reading of Buried Child. Like his father, Vince has also returned to Halie's and Dodge's home in hopes of uncovering his roots. What he finds instead is a family who has forgotten him. ("It's much better not to know anything," says Dodge.) Even his own father is unable to remember Vince. "I had a son once," Tilden says, "but we buried him." Vince actually spends little time on stage—his trip to fetch Dodge a bottle of whiskey becomes a night-long drive and drinking binge. Shepard instead shows us Vince's perspective through an outsider's point of view. Shelley is an interesting addition to the mix. She is the only character with "some kind of future"; she is a creature made of "faith" and "hope" (it seems that "love" is conspicuously absent, perhaps only from Dodge's vocabulary). So when she describes Vince's quest, it is one made of stops at drive-ins and football fields, a nostalgic trip through pleasant memories. His violent re-emergence, that crash through the screen door, is all the more shocking after Shelley's quiet innocence. With his return, Vince takes on his legacy, the house itself and the secrets buried around and within it. He also takes on its pain, thereby sending Shelley away.

Labels: Drama, Shepard