Long Pauses

Category: Drama

  • So Awfully, Irreducibly Real

    JOE: Why are you sitting in the dark? Turn on the light.

    HARPER: No. I heard the sounds in the bedroom again. I know someone was in there.

    JOE: No one was.

    HARPER: Maybe actually in the bed, under the covers with a knife.
    Oh, boy. Joe. I, um, I’m thinking of going away. By which I mean: I think I’m going off again. You . . . you know what I mean?

    JOE: Please don’t. Stay. We can fix it. I pray for that. This is my fault, but I can correct it. You have to try too . . .

    (He turns on the light. She turns it off again.)

    HARPER: When you pray, what do you pray for?

    JOE: I pray for God to crush me, break me up into little pieces and start all over again.

    HARPER: Oh. Please. Don’t pray that.

    JOE: I had a book of Bible stories when I was a kid. There was a picture I’d look at twenty times every day: Jacob wrestles with the angel. I don’t really remember the story, or why the wrestling — just the picture. Jacob is young and very strong. The angel is . . . a beautiful man, with golden hair and wings, of course. I still dream about it. Many nights. I’m . . . It’s me. In that struggle. Fierce, and unfair. The angel is not human, and it holds nothing back, so how could anyone human win, what kind of a fight is that? It’s not just. Losing means your soul thrown down in the dust, your heart torn out from God’s. But you can’t not lose.

    HARPER: In the whole entire world, you are the only person, the only person I love or have ever loved. And I love you terribly. Terribly. That’s what’s so awfully, irreducibly real. I can make up anything but I can’t dream that away.

    — Angels in America: Millennium Approaches, Act 2, Scene 2

    Tony Kushner is taken to task from time to time for his harsh treatment of Joe Pitts, the closeted, Republican, Mormon lawyer whose self-hatred motivates so much of the plays’ drama (and poisons his marriage to Harper). Those critics must ignore this passage, which is among the most beautiful and heartbreaking Kushner has written. It’s been at the very back of my mind for nearly a week now but came front and center earlier this evening.

  • Great Critics (And the Rest of Us)

    I was talking to a friend recently, encouraging him to post some of his film writing online, and he responded with a very simple, “Why?” He’s a bright guy, certainly bright enough to realize the value of critical thinking, literacy, analysis, etc. — all of those muscles that are exercised in the writing process. What he meant was, “Why add my voice to all of the noise when so many other critics say it so much better?”

    I’m editing the first chapter of my dissertation right now, trying, as my director recommended, to insert more of my own voice into the “critical discussion” of Arthur Miller. Yesterday I made the mistake of pulling Christopher Bigsby’s latest book from the library shelf. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study (2005) will, I assume, be Bigsby’s final statement on Miller. At 500+ pages, it covers the playwright’s entire career, from the student plays he wrote at the University of Michigan through his last major work, Finishing the Picture, and also includes essays on Miller’s fiction and “Arthur Miller as a Jewish Writer.”

    Bigsby has spent the last forty years proving himself again and again the best critic of 20th century drama. His first book, Confrontation and Commitment (1968), was one of the first — and remains one of the best — studies of the American theater during its transition in the 1950s and early-1960s from the social realism of early Miller and Williams to the more radical experiments of Edward Albee and LeRoi Jones, among others. Since then, he’s published books on Albee, Mamet, Stoppard, and Dada and Surrealism, and he’s edited ten or fifteen critical studies of modern American drama, contemporary English drama, the second Black Renaissance, and the radical imagination and the liberal tradition. And then there are the six major, Miller-related studies.

    Here’s an experiment. I’ll literally open the book to a random page, skim quickly over the text, and grab a line or two.

    On All My Sons:

    Joe is an accommodationist. His public denials are matched by his private ones. When Kate asks if Chris has discussed marrying Ann his reply is “he didn’t tell me any more than he told you” (106), though we have just witnessed such a discussion. Having practiced private deceits, he seems to have internalized his own denials.

    On The Crucible:

    To be a young girl in Salem was to have no role but obedience, no function but unquestioning faith, no freedom except a willingness to submit to those with power over their lives. Sexuality was proscribed, the imagination distrusted, emotions focused solely on the stirring of the spirit. Rebellion, when it came, was thus likely to take as its target firstly those with least access to power, then those for whom virtue alone was insufficient protection.

    On After the Fall:

    Quentin survives on something more substantial than the thin gruel of irony. The democracy of guilt holds no attraction for him. He finds in Holga the figure of his redemption, acknowledging the past and the insights of others but committing to the future. He is no longer the victim of history, his own or the world’s, but prepared to live with the knowledge of freedom and the uses to which a flawed humanity will put it.

    Reading Bigsby gives me two visions of my future. In one, I’m sitting in a book-lined office, working well into old age in a vain effort to write something as articulate and all-encompassing. In the other, I still have the books, but they’re at home. They’re my refuge from some day job. And when people ask me what I think about Arthur Miller, I tell them, “You want to know about Miller? Read Bigsby. He’s already said everything you need to know, and he said it better than anyone before or since.”

  • Kushner on Miller

    From The Nation:

    He made it clear in his plays and his essays that his critical thinking and social consciousness had their genesis in the red politics that were pervasive when he was growing up, a politics catalyzed by the suffering he witnessed and experienced in the Great Depression, a politics shaped in response to the toxic, obnoxious valorization of greed always, always re-emerging in American history as a bedrock tenet of the political right. Although he refused the mechanical determinism of the unthinking Marxist left, he created in his greatest play a drama in which it is impossible to avoid thinking about economics–money–in any attempt to render coherent the human tragedy unfolding before you.

    Consider the Lomans: What has brought darkness down upon this family? Their flaws are part of their tragedy, but only a part–every flaw is magnified, distorted, made fatal by, well, alienation, by the market, where the pressure is inhuman and the human is expendable. Consider the moment when the Nothing of tragedy is enunciated, and annunciated, in Death of a Salesman, Biff and Willy’s final fight (“Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop! Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it anymore. I’m just what I am, that’s all. Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake?”). It’s tragic negation, vast and shatteringly intimate; everything is annihilated, and at the same time something new is being born. It’s “nothing” of the tragedies of Euripides and Shakespeare, and in Miller’s postwar, marketplace masterpiece, one hears an echo of another “nothing,” tragic but also political–namely, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

  • Arthur Miller

    I am not sure what we are upholding any more—are we good by merely saying no to evil? Even in a righteous ‘no’ there’s some disguise. Isn’t it necessary—to say—finally to say yes—to something?
    — Quentin, After the Fall

    Last Thursday, while reading a recent interview with Norman Mailer, I was struck by how unlikely it was that all of the novelists and playwrights who have worked their way into my dissertation had also managed to not only survive the 20th century, but to do so productively. No small feat considering the World Wars and the Red Hunts and the fickleness of literary tastes. Arthur Miller, of course, passed away the next day. He was 89.

    I’m a few revisions away from finishing the Miller section of my project, and I’ve come away from the experience ambivalent about both his life and his work. I can’t find the exact quote right now, but I tend to agree with a comment made by Tony Kushner a decade or so ago, when he criticized Miller’s plays for their poetry-starved language. But, like Kushner, I’m still moved by so much of Death of a Salesman. You can’t not be moved by Salesman. It’s too perfectly plotted, too pathetically spot-on in its portrait of other-directed status-seeking and failure.

    I like moments in Miller’s other work, too. That I’m still frustrated and angered (rather than bored) by the inevitability of Proctor’s death, even after reading the damn play 15 or 20 times, is some testament to the craft of The Crucible. And After the Fall, though more uneven than any other landmark American play, still pleases me by virtue of its ambition if too seldom its execution.

    The Price is a perfectly structured character piece: two more brothers struggling with a father’s legacy, two more versions of Kermit and Arthur Miller, the good son who sacrificed his own dreams for the sake of the family and his younger sibling who found success only after leaving home. And I’m also really fond of a short play called A Memory of Two Mondays, an autobiographical piece about a young, would-be student who takes a job at an auto parts warehouse in order to save money for college. His (the young man’s, I mean) naive idealizing of blue collar workers is both genuine and admiring and condescending, and that tension makes the play one of Miller’s more insightful comments on America’s real political life.

    Given a lazy afternoon and a stack of Miller’s work to choose from, I would probably grab The Misfits, which is a compelling read, particularly if you’re able to divorce your impressions of it from the film and from Marilyn. Not likely, I know. But try sometime. The Misfits contains some of Miller’s most artful language. It’s also the first of his works that I would choose to teach.

    Miller positioned himself from the very beginning of his career as a left-leaning public intellectual. He wasn’t the first American playwright to do so, as some of the odes to him I’ve read this week have claimed, but he spent most of his life, I think, on the side of justice and often made real personal and professional sacrifices for the cause. His politics made him an enemy of the Right when he balked at the hypocrisy of anti-communist politicking, and an enemy of the Left when his “confused liberalism” (in the words of Eric Mottram) was deemed unsatisfactory at a time of revolutionary struggle. Miller, for his part, seemed most interested in simply understanding the human causes of human troubles. The work of the artist, you might say.

  • Media Blackout

    I’ve toyed with the idea of posting a prediction for tomorrow’s outcome, but the fact is that I’m just too riddled with anxiety. A prediction would require that I go sifting through polling data with a calculator and a map. And, even more exhausting, I’d have to think seriously about the fallout: the inevitable court challenges, the days (weeks? months?) of political posturing and legal maneuvering, the general acrimony, and the slack-jawed wonder I’ll feel when it’s all decided, finally, regardless of the outcome. I’ll make only one prediction: whoever wins — and excuse my Fre-, er, my Cheney — is fucked. I feel a bit like Ethel in Millennium Approaches: “History is about to crack wide open.”

    And speaking of the Rosenbergs, rather than making predictions (or reading any news that might spoil my distorted sense of guarded hope), I have instead been getting up each morning and working on my dissertation, burying myself in 1937-1956. The significance? In 1937 Arthur Miller was an undergrad at the University of Michigan, reporting on efforts to unionize General Motors plants in Detroit and Flint for the school paper. He was also writing his first plays, which are like Clifford Odets’ except without all the nuance. (If you’re not familiar with Odets, that was me being sarcastic.) Miller has characters say things like:

    I’m a Communist because I want the people to take the power that comes with ownership away from the little class of capitalists who have it now.

    Subtle, eh?

    In 1956 Miller was called to testify before HUAC. His hearing came nine years after the committee’s first trip to Hollywood, three years after Elia Kazan’s testimony, and three years after the Broadway debut of The Crucible, and things were beginning to change. Miller, in fact, could have gotten out of the mess entirely if he had just allowed Marilyn Monroe to have her photo taken with the committee members beforehand. But he didn’t. And he testified. And that testimony helped to secure his reputation as our moral conscience, or something. And I’m doing my damnedest to figure out what this can teach us about the American Left.

  • Living with Miller

    According to Microsoft Word, I wrote the first fifteen pages of the first chapter of my dissertation in November 2003, before life and other projects got in the way. So now I have these fifteen pages (which read quite well, actually) and no idea what comes next. I mean, I know that I have to write about Arthur Miller, but I no longer remember what I had intended to say. And so I’ve spent the last five or six days reading. And reading. With more of the same to come.

    After living with Miller for the last few days — after rereading The Crucible and After the Fall and a three inch stack of photocopied criticism — I’ve come to one significant conclusion: I don’t like Miller. His early work shows an obvious knack for wrenching every last drop of sentiment and inevitable heartbreak from a tragic narrative, but, damn, they are really unpleasant to read. His language is starving for poetry.

    But Miller is a dramatist of ideas, one might argue, which is true. It’s also the reason that he is the starting point for my project. Certainly no other American writer of the late-1940s and early-1950s was so publicly interrogating the nation’s postwar, capitalist values. But like many of his critics, I find little value in his critique, which seems to offer only ahistorical, liberal platitudes in response to particular historical conditions. It’s no coincidence, I think, that Joe Keller, Willy Loman, John Proctor, and Eddie Carbone all die at the end of Miller’s most famous plays. Suicides, murder victims, and proud martyrs make for good tragic heroes but lousy politics.

    That’s why I’m more intrigued by Miller’s work of the 1960s. Gay and Roslyn ride off into an uncertain future at the end of The Misfits, as does Quentin in After the Fall. Miller’s turn toward existentialism and toward the possibility of a life lived in good faith has real political consequences that will be fun to explore in the chapter.

  • My Dissertation (in the News)

    “A World in Which Everything Hurts,” a profile of Arthur Miller in The Forward, gets bonus points for mentioning, in a single paragraph, three of the authors I’m writing about in my dissertation:

    In contrast, for example, to Tony Kushner, whose humanism seems to spring from a secular engagement with Jewish religion and history, Miller seems to come to his universalism only through the abandonment of the Jewish tradition. And in his rejectionism, he fails to display the depth or nuance of Philip Roth, whose own critique of Jewish life — however damning — reflects an intense, intimate confrontation with his subject.

    Another key figure from my project, Norman Mailer, shows up in The New York Metro, discussing the upcoming Republican Convention with his son, John Buffalo Mailer. Apparently I’m right on track in looking back to the fall of the New Left (and books like Mailer’s Armies of the Night) in trying to make sense of the contemporary Left’s problems:

    The march on the Pentagon even ended up having a final effect that was impressive. I think it was the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam, and for a very simple reason: Lyndon Johnson saw 50,000 mostly middle-class people come to Washington to stage a set of demonstrations that were going to be opposed by troops and police. LBJ knew people well. From his point of view, most middle-class people were hardly full of physical bravery. If they were going to pay their own money and come by car or bus or train to march into the possibility of being hit over the head with a cop’s club, then there had to be millions of people behind them.

     

  • Streetcar

    The Times and the Post have published their reviews of the Kennedy Center’s revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Patricia Clarkson as Blanche. They are in agreement about Clarkson (“a clear-eyed look at one of theater’s haziest heroines”) and about the production as a whole (“vivid if uneven”). This line from Ben Brantley at the Times caught my attention:

    But the production’s cooler gaze also has the overpowering disadvantage of making the play itself appear cruder and clumsier than it usually does. A “Streetcar” without poetry becomes just another domestic melodrama, accessorized with frilly symbols, about what happens when irritating in-laws come to visit.

    Williams “without poetry.” That can’t be good.

  • And One More Thing

    For your reading pleasure: some snippets from Tony Kushner’s commentary on the Klezmatic’s recent CD, Possessed. Parts of the commentary, I noticed, have made their way into his and Alisa Solomon’s introduction to their new collection of essays, Wrestling with Zion, which I got for Christmas — given to me, no doubt, by some relative who couldn’t possibly imagine why I would be interested in a book of “Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” — and which now sits on my towering “to read” pile. This part isn’t in their introduction.

    Hebrew- and Yiddish-illiterate, I barely know how to pray; riddled with ambivalence, child of Marx, Freud, Mahler, Benjamin, Kafka, Goldman, Luxemburg, Trotsky, An-ski, Schoenberg, mongrel product of Judaism’s and of Jewish exteriority, of its ghetto-hungry curiosity, of its assimilationist genius, I now approach Judaism as Jews once approached the splendid strangeness of the Goyishe Velt: I am shall we say deeply confused, but not complacent. And this I think of course is profoundly Jewish. So perhaps I can write your liner notes after all. Of music, son of a clarinetist and a bassoonist though I be, I know nothing. . . .

    High Holy Days this year found me doing research for my new play in a tiny town in Britain with no other Jews and no shul, so I cast my bread upon English waters, said the prayers I remembered, lit candles, made Shofar noises, cried for the Dead, begged for forgiveness and decided to read the Bible.

    And then he even mentions my favorite line from Perestroika, a line that, as he admits, always gets cut.

    Why does the God in whom I may or may not believe, or rather in whose existence I simultaneously believe and doubt, why does the Almighty spend the first five books of the Bible writing such morally problematic, bewildering stories? We’ve always had the answer to that one. Because the Torah is not clarification but the World itself; it is the World’s Goad towards perplexity, interpretation, towards Midrash and Talmud. “Az er darf ringen mit zayn Libn Nomen!” as a character in Perestroika says, in a scene that’s always cut because let’s face it, the play’s too long. “You must struggle with the Almighty!” “Azoy tut a Yid!” “It’s the Jewish way!”

    I watched all six hours of Angels in America on Saturday night, and I’ve decided that that’s how it should be seen.

  • But Is It Funny?

    Dale Peck at Slate offers the best critical reading of HBO’s Angels that I’ve found. He points out something that has bothered me a bit as well: the film just isn’t very funny. Which is a shame, because the play is really funny. Unlike so many of the TV critics who have offered their half-informed opinions over the last few weeks, Peck also understands the theatrical traditions from which the plays emerged and against which they so forcefully reacted. This is just good stuff:

    Ultimately, though, the real problem is that Angels is and remains a play, not a movie. It is deliberately, powerfully anachronistic in its approach to narrative, updating–one wants to say outing–the mid-century work of Williams and Albee. Though Nichols labors doggedly at filling in the spaces even the most lavish theatrical productions leave blank, his sets come across as cluttered, unnuanced, unnecessary; his frequent angel-eye perspectives seem thrown in just, you know, because. In particular, the addition of New York City vistas, the panoramas and facades left out of the play’s backdrops, seem shuffled in from a mismatched deck. That’s because Angels, even more than most plays, is steeped in conversation, soliloquy, the linguistic pursuit of ideas. Its characters interact with each other, not their environment, because (as the subtitle reminds us) the play is a fantasia: There is something internal and not quite real about it.

    I also like his conclusion:

    Whether you regard capitalism as the thing that will save the world or the thing that will destroy it, the marketplace has proven capable of assimilating gay male notions of masquerade, subterfuge, and subversion without itself being subverted by them. By which I mean that there was a George Bush as president when Kushner first wrote Angels, and there is a George Bush as president now. By which I mean that perhaps it isn’t the movie that doesn’t do the play justice, it’s the times. By which I mean, finally, that as soon as I finished watching Angels, the only thing I could think of doing was watching it again because I wanted it to have another chance.

  • Minor Quibbles

    Well, crap. I’m thrilled so far with Angels. Mary-Louise Parker is stealing the show as Harper, and Justin Kirk is fantastic as Prior. The homage to Cocteau and the casting of the prior Priors were both brilliant. But why, in their trimming and reshaping, did Kushner and Nichols have to cut my two favorite lines from Millennium Approaches? When we first see Harper, she really should be saying:

    People who are lonely, people left alone, sit talking nonsense to the air, imagining…beautiful systems dying, old fixed orders spiraling apart…

    When you look at the ozone layer, from the outside, from a spaceship, it looks like a pale blue halo, a gentle, shimmering, aureole encircling the atmosphere encircling the earth. Thirty miles above our heads, a thin layer of three-atom oxygen molecules, product of photosynthesis, which explains the fussy vegetable preference for visible light, its rejection of darker rays and emanations. Danger from without. It’s a kind of gift, from God, the crowning touch to the creation of the world: guardian angels, hands linked, make a spherical net, a blue-green nesting orb, a shell of safety for life itself. But everywhere, things are collapsing, lies surfacing, systems of defense giving way…This is why, Joe, this is why I shouldn’t be left alone. [ellipses are Kushner’s]

    So much of the play is built from that imagery, established so early on. I imagine that Nichols thought it just too much for the opening moments of the film — too theatrical, too obvious, too wordy for a character we had just met. It’s Kushner at his best, though. “Systems of defense giving way” is, I think, the play’s richest metaphor.

    I was even more annoyed by the cutting of this brief exchange, which really should follow Belize’s description of the sky as “mauve.”

    Belize: All day long it’s felt like Thanksgiving. Soon, this…ruination will be blanketed white. You can smell it — can you smell it?
    Louis: Smell what?
    Belize: Softness, compliance, forgiveness, grace.

    Perestroika is about softness, compliance, forgiveness, and grace — grace, most of all. Can’t wait until next week.

  • For Shits and Giggles

    Meghan Keane has a review of Angels in America over at the National Review Online. I’m still waiting for a legitimate, conservative critique of the film — one that doesn’t expose the reviewer’s own ideological blindness. I expect conservatives to be offended by many of the lines spoken by Kushner’s characters; I expect conservative critics to acknowledge the distinction between the message of a particular character and the message of the work as a whole. But that is expecting too much of anyone who writes for a partisan magazine (whether the NRO or The Nation) in a climate like ours.

  • More Angels

    Richard Goldstein offers the best one-paragraph synapsis of Angels in America that you’ll ever read. (He also talks to Kushner about Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, the problems of liberalism, and his new musical, Caroline, or Change.)

    In Angels, every character you expect to be good is capable of evil, and everyone who ought to be evil can love. Never have there been so many caring, sexy Mormons in a work by a card-carrying lefty. As for the Angel, she has eight vaginas and the means to use them—even on the dying faggot she transforms into a prophet through an orgasmic act. He ascends to heaven on a golden ladder, and just when you think you’re in a Christian potboiler about the rapture, it turns out that God has disappeared and the bureaucrats who run paradise want this prophet to end the human quest for change. But he rejects this temptation and demands “life . . . more life” instead: life as rebellion against celestial stasis; change as ecstatic, unmanageable pain. This is what the pioneer woman in Angels says when she pops out of a diorama at the Mormon Visitors Center: People change when God rips out their intestines, stuffs them back in a different way, and “it’s up to you to sew yourself up.” Benjamin tried to describe that ineffable process, and Kushner admits, “I’m indebted to Benjamin to the point of larceny.”

  • Radical Pragmatism

    In this new interview, Mother Jones calls Tony Kushner a “Radical Pragmatist,” a moniker I wouldn’t mind carrying myself. (It will take some effort on my part, though. I can’t imagine any aspect of my life or politics being described as “radical” right now. Baby steps.) He talks a bit about his and Robert Altman’s* failed attempt to film Angels a few years ago — nothing new if you’ve read their interview in either Tony Kushner in Conversation or Approaching the Millennium. The meat of the interview, though, is a discussion of the current political climate. I especially like this bit. Kushner is sounding more and more like John Rawls:

    There are a lot of politically active young people, but I feel that we’ve misled them. I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left decided at some point that government couldn’t get it what it wanted. As a result, it’s a movement of endless complaint and of a one-sided reading of American history, which misses the important point: Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we’re interested in is talking about when government doesn’t work.

    On a related note, here’s a link to an editorial at GOPUSA.com that was inspired by Frank Rich’s piece from a week ago. It takes pot-shots at likely targets: Barbra Streisand and “the tinsel town left,” George Soros and Howard Dean (who is once again saddled with the now-mandatory modifier “McGovern-like”). Oh yeah, and you can also buy your copy of Treason there, so you know the site’s a bastion of fair and balanced journalistic integrity.

    * Fun Fact: When I spell-checked this post, Dreamweaver suggested I replace “Altman’s” with “Batman’s”

  • The Great Work Begins

    I can’t seem to muster enough energy to even care about the Reagan mini-series hubbub; carving out a nuanced position is completely beyond me. For largely economic reasons, CBS seems to have caved to partisan political pressure, which is lame and disheartening but neither illegal nor censorship. It’s not even particularly surprising. Come to think of it, I might actually be more offended by the idea of there being a Reagan biopic starring James Brolin than by the fact that I won’t get to see it. I mean, who would want to?

    I am intrigued, though, by the rising tide of commentary that links the mini-series with Angels in America. Frank Rich got the ball rolling with his piece in the Sunday Times. Then, yesterday, Andrew Sullivan posted a response at The New Republic. And now there’s word that Showtime will bump up its broadcast of the Reagan movie to November 30, exactly one week before HBO’s big premiere. In the Post article, Lisa de Moraes explains that Showtime President Robert Greenblatt “denied speculation that [his network] moved up the airdate to Nov. 30 because The Reagans, with all its juicy, audience-attracting controversy, was in grave danger of becoming roadkill when HBO debuted its adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play.” Greenblatt’s motivations are actually irrelevant to me; I’m more interested in the fact that the media has made that leap on its own, connecting the two films in a hotly politicized context.

    All three links are worth a read — I’m especially excited by Rich’s claim that “Angels is the most powerful screen adaptation of a major American play since Elia Kazan’s Streetcar Named Desire more than a half-century ago” — but I’m going to limit my comments to Sullivan’s piece, and, more specifically, to one aspect of it: his strangely ambivalent dismissal of Kushner’s play as “good Stalinist agitprop.” (I’m tempted also to take on his equally bizarre claim that “networks aren’t supposed to be” biased, but I’ll leave that argument to others better equipped and motivated to do so.)

    It is perhaps worth mentioning here at the start that Sullivan and Kushner have, as they say, “a history.” I haven’t followed it all too closely, but it’s been public at least since June ’94, when they appeared together, along with Donna Minkowitz and Bruce Bawer, on the Charlie Rose show to discuss the 25th anniversary of Stonewall. I haven’t seen the episode, but based on the transcript (available in Tony Kushner in Conversation) it appears that they spent a good portion of the evening throwing jabs at one another — Kushner accusing Sullivan of knocking down paper tigers, “one of them is the politics of the Left, as though there’s one politics of the Left”; Sullivan accusing Kushner of being “stuck in the McCarthy period….stuck in the late 1960s.” There was also Kushner’s commencement speech at Vassar, in which he took a none-too-subtle jab at “those newfangled neo-con gay people with their own website and no day job.” I don’t read Sullivan often enough to know if he responded in kind.

    But back to the piece in The New Republic. Sullivan writes:

    Exhibit A in the attempt to turn the human tragedy of AIDS into political agitprop was Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. As such, it appealed and still appeals to the hard left, which is partly why it won a Pulitzer and entirely why Frank Rich of The New York Times single-handedly championed it in the 1990s.

    That Angels is a fiercely political play goes without saying. And, yes, I imagine that its particular politics would be more appealing to those of a leftist bent. But to reduce the play to agitprop — a rhetorical ploy of the laziest variety — demands a grossly simplistic reading of a work that delights in ambiguity. Later, Sullivan seems to acknowledge as much in a back-handed compliment, calling Kushner’s play “a magical realist fantasy — where dreams become enacted, angels appear, and all sorts of metaphors are turned into dramatic imagery.” Even Roy Cohn, who Sullivan (accurately) describes as “an emblem of all the hard left despises,” is treated by Kushner with tremendous grace. Sure, the character Louis describes Cohn as “the pollstar of human evil,” but anyone who has seen or read the play with at least a modicum of maturity and human understanding will surely remember Roy’s death scene — a moment of suffering and humor and mourning and, perhaps most surprising of all, forgiveness. (I can’t wait to see Pacino and Streep together.)

    To be fair, Sullivan’s biggest beef here seems to be with Rich, who I would agree makes some questionable argumentative leaps. But Sullivan makes too many of his own. The historical record, he writes, “is complicated, hemmed in by political and scientific realities that neither Kushner nor Rich want to explore. Why? Because such nuance would get in the way of their anti-Republican hysteria.” He also compares Angels unfavorably to Randy Shilts’s As The Band Played On:

    Shilts’s sin — and the reason that he was vilified as viciously as Kushner was celebrated — is that he actually criticized some gay activists, as well as the Reagan administration, for resisting efforts to counteract the plague early enough. But in the polarized politics of AIDS, such complexities are generally unrewarded.

    Again, Sullivan’s reduction of Angels to simplistic, partisan politicking reveals his embarrassingly simplistic reading of the play and, I might add, some blatant partisanship (and personal anger?) of his own. Like Shilts’s book, Kushner’s play is actually quite critical of the American left, which is precisely why it’s a great play and not just one more Waiting for Lefty. The following paragraphs are the opening of a larger piece that might or might not end up in my dissertation.

    – – –

    Near the end of Millennium Approaches, the first part of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Louis Ironson asks, “Why has democracy succeeded in America?” then proceeds to answer his own question — sort of — rambling for several pages through a breathless and often hilarious (in a flummoxed, Woody Allen kind of way) litany of stereotypically liberal “fetishes” including, but not limited to: freedom, homophobia, human rights, race, anti-Semitism, and “the inescapable battle of politics” (1:89, 92). When his companion, an African-American ex-ex-drag queen named Belize, accuses Louis of spouting “racist bullshit,” Louis wilts, acknowledging that he probably is. “Oh I really hate that!” Belize sighs. “It’s no fun picking on you Louis; you’re so guilty, it’s like throwing darts at a glob of jello, there’s no satisfying hits, just quivering, the darts just blop in and vanish” (1:93).

    It’s a telling moment for Kushner, perhaps the most explicitly political of America’s top-tier playwrights. Set mostly in the mid-1980s, Angels in America is very much concerned with a particular moment in history when, as Louis’s debilitating ambivalence demonstrates, “being Left in this country” was more transgressive and exasperating than it had been since the consensus days of the Eisenhower administration. Reagan’s landslide victory over Mondale; the ideological partnering of the Republican party with the “Moral Majority”; the wholesale cutting of budgets to domestic social programs; the intensification of Cold War rhetoric and foreign policies of containment; and the ineffectiveness of key left-leaning organizations to stem this tide — all contributed to a crisis point in the history of the American Left. Kushner has said of the era:

    the play is set — and I think this is very important — at a time when there’s no such thing [as mass-movement politics] in the United States for generally progressive people. For someone like Belize, there isn’t anything: The Rainbow Coalition has started to waffle and fall apart. And there is nothing in the gay community — there’s the Gay Pride parade, and Gay Men’s Health Crisis getting humiliated at the City Council in Newark every year — 1984-1985 was a horrible, horrible time. It really seemed as if the maniacs had won for good. (Savran 27)

    Throughout Angels and much of his other early work, Kushner responds directly to this crisis with equal parts vitriol and, perhaps more surprisingly, a tempered optimism. In that same interview he asks a critical question of the Left, one that guides his plays and that should likewise guide the formation of any contemporary progressive politics, or so he implies. “So none of these people had anything they could hook into, which is the history of the Left,” Kushner says. “When the moment comes, when the break happens and history can be made, do we step in and make it or do we flub and fail?” (Savran 27).

    – – –

    Ultimately, Angels in America is unable to offer a single, simple answer to Kushner’s own question — or, at least, a single, simple, political answer. Hell, as the curtain closes, Louis and Belize are still arguing, now about Israel and Palestine. But there’s something in the play itself — in its humanism and poetry, its theology and ambiguity, its campy theatricality and epic reach — that does inspire a strange longing (in me, at least) for progress (whatever that means) and for something like collective action, though not of the variety that would likely send Sullivan’s knee-a-jerkin’. Prior’s closing lines are a benediction, with all of the stickiness that word implies:

    You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.
    And I bless you: More Life.
    The Great Work Begins.

    If Sullivan reads Angels in America as a Stalinist tract, then I pity his ideological blindness. He’s missing a hell of a play.

  • Going Digital

    Mike, do you feel that these days you can actually do bolder things on television than you can in film?

    Nichols: I do, yes. It has to do with HBO, it’s as simple as that. We love HBO and we love the freedom that there is on HBO, and the power. And what is that power? It’s economic. You know, we’re run by market forces—the fact that an outfit can make a billion dollars a year just sitting there collecting its subscriptions. It’s an economic basis that affords us this freedom.

    HBO’s economic freedom is just one of the many topics of discussion over at Newsweek, where Mike Nichols, Tony Kushner, and their cast are talking up Angels in America. In preparation for the big premiere, I called my cable provider last week to find out how much it would cost to add just HBO to my basic service package. “You’re new monthly bill will be $61.50,” the surprisingly helpful saleswoman told me. “Or,” she paused, tying her carrot to the stick, “for just a few dollars more, we can upgrade you to digital cable and throw in the full compliment of HBO/Showtime channels, plus an additional tier of your choice.”

    So, of course, I now have digital cable.

  • A Good Hard Rain

    I first read Sam Shepard’s Buried Child five years ago in a graduate readings course in American drama. Last night I was finally able to experience it in performance, which, as is always the case with great drama, is a quite different thing. Actually, I’m hesitant to use the words “great drama” in regard to this particular production, which too often suffered from poor casting — Shelly gave her monologue with that earnest far-off stare usually reserved for Barbra Streisand impersonators and Tilden was too…well…cute. The latter role demands equal parts brokenness, menace, and charisma, but he managed only country bumpkin, which drained his scenes — including that famous finale — of their magic and tension.

    Remember that episode of The X-Files when Mulder and Scully fought the family of hillbilly inbreeds? The episode that should have been creepy and disgusting but was mostly over-the-top camp? The CBT’s production of Buried Child had the same faults. Only twice during the two-and-a-half hour play did the room crack with energy: First during Bradley’s “rape” of Shelly, which is one of Shepard’s finest moments, and again during Bradley’s fight with Vince, which was staged in slow-motion under a strobe light. The remainder of the evening was notably unremarkable.

  • Film and Stage

    In a recent interview with Cate Blanchett, Stuart Husband mentions that the actress has dropped out of an up-coming film adaptation of Patrick Marber’s play, Closer. I would be more disappointed — she’d be great in the role — but for the fact that I didn’t even realize that the film was in the works. It’s going to sport a fine cast, otherwise. Should be interesting. On a slight tangent, I looked up Marber at the IMDb and discovered that another of his plays, Asylum, is also being filmed, starring Ian McKellen.

    Closer will be directed by Mike Nichols, who apparently is going to finish out his career by filming great plays. Two months and counting until I fire up my one-month subscription to HBO in order to watch Nichols’s rendition of Angels in America. Quotes like this have certainly piqued my interest:

    In writing his first screenplay, Kushner shortened his work by roughly 90 minutes and made changes likely to be incorporated when the play is published again.

    “I don’t think that we changed very much in the first part,” Kushner said. ” `Perestroika,’ I knew when I was writing it, was going to be one of those plays that you can rewrite for the rest of your life.” Nichols helped him fix a scene that had never worked onstage. “I don’t think I want to say which one it was, because I don’t want everybody to sort of pay special attention to it,” Kushner said. But Nichols told him the scene violated the play’s inner logic.

    “Tony and Mike found a rapport so quickly,” executive producer Cary Brokaw added. “Mike wanted consciously to be true to the play, and found the more we examined the script, as a true adaptation of the play, that it was incredibly cinematic. It didn’t need fixing. It just worked.”

    This snippet from Meryl Streep ain’t bad either:

    “We’re all lucky to have been in this,” she said. “I’m so glad you’re living and writing and working,” she said to Kushner. “I don’t expect to get anything remotely as ambitious as this piece of work in my life again, so I’m grateful to you.”

    Damn. I’m giddy.

  • The Good Woman of Setzuan

    I’m reading Brecht again. When I first encountered him as an undergrad — It was Galileo, I think — he was a burden and a pretentious bore. Several years later I read Mother Courage in a performance theory seminar, and his seemed to me an interesting, if too rigidly intellectual, project. Now, at 31 and with my political positions in something of a flux, I think I’m finally ready to really read Brecht. (Hopefully at 40 I’ll reread this and laugh at my naivete.)

    The Good Woman of Setzuan (1938-40), written during Brecht’s exile in Scandinavia, tells the story of Shen Te, a young woman forced into prostitution by poverty who is rewarded handsomely after opening her home to three visiting gods. Disproving their contention that no goodness still exists on earth, Shen Te is given a small business by the deities, and from there she struggles to work honestly and to provide for the needy, earning her the moniker, “the Angel of the Slums.” After falling victim to unscrupulous neighbors and a dishonest lover, however, Shen Te is forced to create an alter-ego — that of her business-savy cousin, Mr. Shui Ta. Where Shen Te is trusting, selfless, and naive, Shui Ta is fierce, manipulative, and efficient. As inevitably happens in Brecht’s drama — and, by extension, in our world — the forces of capital and history eventually overwhelm Shen Te, and she is forced to surrender her goodness or starve:

    Since not to eat is to die
    Who can long refuse to be bad?
    As I lay prostrate beneath the weight of good intentions
    Ruin stared me in the face
    It was when I was unjust that I ate good meat

    While browsing this morning, I found a fun review of Good Woman as staged by the fine drama department at my alma mater, Florida State. I say “fun review” because it was so obviously written by a well-intentioned — and absolutely clueless — undergrad. How’s this for a lead?

    The FSU School of Theatre revisits the timeless feud between good and evil in its production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Good Woman of Setzuan.” With a uniquely dazzling set, on-stage chemistry and a moralistic lesson, the play leaves every viewer with something to ponder.

    He or she goes on to say:

    With predominantly outrageous characters, prophetic musical interludes and an amazing abstract mountainous backdrop, balance is occasionally difficult. However, the innocence of the main character, the serious nature of the love story and the open ending leave viewers poised to make logical sense of the production.

    Ignoring for a moment the complete lack of content here (and the misplaced modifier and the wretched abuse of adverbs), I have to take aim at that opening sentence: The chief end of Brecht’s project, in fact, is to strip us (violently, if necessary) of any and all illusions of “timelessness.” Timelessness (like the traditional theatre), he would argue, is a bourgeois daydream — the shiny gloss that covers over the workings and exploitations of capital.

    To free us of those illusions, to expose that machinery, he distances us from the action, never allowing us to identify too closely with the characters or to suspend our disbelief. The Verfremdungseffekt takes a variety of forms: productions of Brecht’s dramas often include projected slides above the stage that directly contradict or comment on the action beneath; characters occasionally address the audience directly; and in Good Woman Shen Te becomes Shui Ta simply by slipping on a mask that, in most productions, is deliberately unrealistic, deliberately theatrical. We’re never allowed to forget that we’re only watching a play.

    Brecht also deflates dramatic tension — though his plays certainly remain tense and tragic — by focusing our attention on those literal transactions that are often elided in traditional story-telling. Money changes hands with tragic consequences. In each exchange someone profits at another’s expense. Shen Te isn’t destroyed by timeless forces of evil or by fate or Providence, but by specific economic systems. I love this scene from the prologue:

    Wong: Everyone knows the province of Kwan is always having floods.
    Second God: Really? How’s that?
    Wong: Why, because they’re so irreligious.
    Second God: Rubbish. It’s because they neglected the dam.

    I wonder how that would play in our current climate.

  • Snippets

    When asked by Michael Cunningham (author of The Hours) about one of my favorite scenes in Angels in America — the moment when the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg delivers the Kaddish for Roy Cohn — Tony Kushner had this to say:

    Forgiveness is a very complicated thing. It certainly became, as I wrote Perestroika, the chief issue because it became a big issue in the world, starting with perestroika, and all of these sort of democratic revolutions that were going on, not just in Eastern Europe, but also in Latin America for instance, where people really had to ask themselves, “Can you let go of the past?” Can you forgive somebody that’s done something really, really terrible to you? It’s undertheorized and underdiscussed in the Left. We don’t really have a morality that encompasses it, because Christian morality, which is a complete forgiveness, seems emotionally inadequate to most people. It’s an act of that kind of forgiveness; it’s something that most people aren’t capable of doing. And it also seems unjust in a way.

    After finally seeing Angels performed last fall, I left the theater thinking, “I’ll be damned. I never realized that these plays are about grace.” I wonder how Kushner would respond to that, particularly if he knew what kind of mystery that word holds for me. I hope that he would be encouraged. Along similar lines, Charlie Rose once asked him about “spirituality in America.” Kushner replied:

    I’m very ambivalent and undecided and confused about it. I’m a genuine agnostic. I don’t know, but I think that as we approach the millennium, it becomes clearer and clearer that there are features of human experience that the Left has traditionally not touched upon, including a sense of the miraculous and a sense of the magical. And as the Left develops in the face of whatever kind of world we’re looking at now, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the spiritual has to be factored in. The spiritual has to be examined in a new way. We don’t know how to do that yet, but we’re working toward that.

    That was in May, 1993. I wonder if they’ve made any progress.

  • Kushner on Bush

    Tony Kushner on President Bush and military intervention in Iraq:

    It’s very hard for me to ever say that I think unilateral military action on the part of United States can be a great thing at this point. The idea of the United States armed forces going in and suppressing and controlling a population of any sort is so fraught with history. . . . The minute we start dropping bombs on anybody, everybody feels very good for five minutes. And there is a fantasy sense that we’re still the number one country on earth because we can go in there and kick this person, and we forget we’re talking about this completely decimated country that was annihilated [a few] years ago and has never rebuilt.
    — from an interview with Craig Lucas on January 20, 1993.

    Yep. 1993. He was talking about that President Bush. I’ve just begun working through Tony Kushner in Conversation, edited by Robert Vorlicky. Here’s another interesting tidbit. Turns out that the Reagan administration wasn’t all bad. Kushner describing a federal grant that helped to fund the writing of Angels in America:

    The application for it was very honest. I said I was going to write a play about gay men and Mormons and Roy Cohn, sent it in to the federal government under Reagan, and thought, this will come back immediately with no money attached. Then they gave us this huge check. . . . It was Washington money with an eagle stamped on the check. So I felt, when I was writing it, that it was taxpayers’ money, and I do think that had some impact on the play’s scope.

    I wonder if Jesse Helms — the homophobic, anti-NEA Helms of old; not the kinder, gentler, post-Bono, pro-AIDS relief Helms — ever found out.

  • Homebody/Kabul

    Instead of beginning my dissertation prospectus, which really should be occupying a larger chunk of my life right now, I’ve discovered all sorts of distractions that can be justified away as “research.” The most recent was Tony Kushner’s play, Homebody/Kabul, which I picked up in hopes that it might be useful when it comes time to write my conclusion — you know, in the spring of 2004. See how it works? By reading a play a year-and-a-half in advance, I avoid feeling guilty for my inexcusable procrastination. The story of my life.

    I’m hesitant to draw any conclusions after only one reading of Homebody/Kabul, except to say that, once again, Kushner has proven that he writes dialog with more magic and beauty and poetry than anyone since Shakespeare. Quite a claim, I know, but I’d defend it against all comers. Only Kushner could weave such a confounding and sublime metaphor from a description of computer networking, spoken by the homebody of the title, a woman disillusioned by loss and her lifeless husband:

    I understand none of it and indeed it’s quite impossible imagining my husband having to do in any real way with processes so . . . speedy, myriad, nervous, miraculous. But that parti-colored cloud of gas there, in that galaxy there so far away, that cloud there so hot and blistered by clustering stars, exhaling protean scads of infinitely irreducible fiery data in the form of energy pulses and streams of slicing, shearing, unseeable light — does that nebula know it nebulates? Most likely not. So my husband.

    87 words from an Act 1, Scene 1 monologue that extends through 21 pages and a full hour of the performance, a monologue that sifts through the 5000 year history of Afghanistan, drawing out the beauty and the barbarity of a nation whose troubles have so recently become enmeshed with our own. Homebody/Kabul began rehearsals at the New York Theatre Workshop in October, 2001. This fact has led so many critics to call the play “eerily prescient” that Kushner’s boyfriend has suggested that he adopt it as a drag persona: Ms. Eara Lee Prescient. It is odd to read the play now, knowing that Kushner’s obsession began years before the rest of us knew what a Taliban was or that such thing as a Northern Alliance even existed. Maybe “cared” is a better word than “knew” for that last sentence.

    Hopefully I’ll have a full response to Homebody/Kabul written some time before Thanksgiving. Anything to keep me from that prospectus.

  • Patrick Marber

    I spent last evening — which, like tonight, was cold and rainy — wrapped up on our living room love seat, reading two fantastic plays by a young British writer named Patrick Marber. My dissertation director recommended them after listening to me ramble on and on about how I was now utterly convinced that Angels in America is actually about grace, whatever that means.

    I began with Howard Katz (2001), the more recent work. It’s the story of a middle-aged talent agent whose life suddenly collapses around him. I’m tempted to describe it as “Death of a Salesman with a happy ending,” but that seems awfully glib. Like Angels, this play forces its characters and its audience to “wrestle with the Almighty” (still my favorite line from Perestroika), and I’m beginning to wonder if this spiritual (if not explicitly Christian) concern can be called a trend. Marber and Kushner are essentially of the same generation. Both should be deeply cynical and ironic, impervious to the barbs of genuine emotion and longing. But here they are, both of them longing for substance. Howard Katz ends with a moment of redemption that, to be honest, doesn’t read particularly well. Successfully staging the scene must require real care, or I imagine that it would slip quickly into melodrama. But the lines themselves are quite beautiful:

    To live.
    I want to live.
    Tell me how to live.

    With Closer (1997) I began to make sense of the frequent comparisons between Marber and Pinter, though the play that most often came to mind was actually Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Closer is likewise built from a cast of four characters, two men, two women, who torment one another with their particular brands of sadism. Like Albee’s masterpiece, Closer creates a brutal, palpable tension by forcing the audience to identify personally with these characters whose actions we often loathe. It’s quite a balancing act. Marber describes it:

    The idea was always to create something that has a formal beauty into which you could shove all this anger and fury. I hoped the dramatic power of the play would rest on that tension between elegant structure — the underlying plan is that you see the first and last meeting of every couple in the play — and inelegant emotion.

  • Angels in Phoenix

    I’ll eventually get around to writing (much) more about this, but I want to mention quickly that, while vacationing in Phoenix, Joanna and I had the chance to see Tony Kushner’s Angels in America at the Herberger Theater. After reading and rereading these plays over the last four years, after writing about them, after, in fact, creating a dissertation topic just as an excuse to spend more time with these characters and with Kushner’s language, I couldn’t believe my luck when I picked up a Sunday edition of the Arizona Republic and discovered that the Actors Theater was staging both parts on consecutive nights. It was awesome (and I really wish that the common use of that word hadn’t stripped it of its power). I was most looking forward to a scene in which the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg appears to help deliver the Kaddish to Roy Cohn. Like most scenes in these plays, its success depends on the actors and director striking a fine balance of tragedy and humor. I ended up in tears, stunned, once again, by a strange and extraordinary encounter with grace.

  • Buried Child (1978)

    By Sam Shepard

    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?

    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.

  • The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971)

    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’.”

  • Angels in America: Millennium Approaches (1992)

    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.

  • Fefu and Her Friends (1977)

    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.

  • Man of Mode (1676)

    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.

  • Nervous Conditions (1988)

    By Tsitsi Dangarembga

    I can’t seem to get an image from Michelle Cliff’s “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire” out of my mind. She tells a story from her school days of classmate who had a grand mal seizure during the morning singing of hymns. “While she flailed on the stone floor,” writes Cliff, “I wondered what the mistresses would do. We sang ‘Faith of Our Father,’ and watched our classmate as her eyes rolled back in her head.” The white mistresses offered only their typical response as aid: “keep singing.” The grotesque hypocrisy of these missionaries leaves me, as a Christian, frustrated and angry. Reading Nervous Conditions only makes me madder.

    Early in the novel, Tambu tells the story of her Uncle Babamukuru’s rise to success. In doing so, she makes her message clear: “endure and obey, for there is no other way.” By twisting the words of the popular Christian hymn, Dangarembga gives the reader a glimpse of the colonized view of faith. Christian love is replaced with obedience, hope is abandoned for endurance, and redemption is more like punishment. In Postcolonial Representations, Francoise Lionnet writes of how the Christian era transformed traditional representations of the body (the Greco-Roman emphasis on health and beauty) to those that emphasize suffering and death (Christ being the ideal representation). “The body,” writes Lionnet, “thereby becomes a text on which pain can be read as a necessary physical step on the road to a moral state, a destiny, or a way of being” (88). Necessary? It repulses me to think so.

    Yet throughout Nervous Conditions Lionnet’s thoughts are exemplified as Tambu, Babamukuru, and the other African characters are dehumanized by the whites. Baba is called a “good boy, cultivatable in the way that land is, to yield harvests that sustain the cultivator” (such a beautifully detestable metaphor). He is forced to take his family to England so that his position might not be given to “another promising young African.” And he is taught to breed “good African children.” Similarly, when Tambu receives the great honor of attending Sacred Heart (the Roman Catholic Church being the one which creates the most virtue), she is quickly relegated to a cramped room with the other Africans. Those professing to be servants of God, charitable workers, treat the Other collectively. There is no Tambu, Nyasha, Baba, or even Zimbabwean. There is only African.

    The other snapshots of religion offered in Nervous Conditions are equally disturbing. Through Tambu we see a child’s image of God. She speaks of being caned on Monday mornings for not attending the previous day’s Sunday School class. She waits in line as she and the other Africans are inspected for missing buttons and dirty socks. She sees her beloved uncle chastise his daughter for the embarrassment she causes him at church. And worst of all, she accepts it.

    Tambu (representative, obviously, of all colonized) is a character fighting to find her place in two worlds. She struggles to reconcile the traditional beliefs of the homestead with the teachings of the missionaries (and their contradictions). Her family says grace to begin a celebration then offers “much clapping of hands” and “praising of the gods for their providence.” When Tambu eats dinner with her aunt and cousin she only knows that their prayer has ended when she hears “Amen.” This white God, it appears, only hears the white language.

    The results, unfortunately for the colonizer and colonized, are miscommunication, confusion, and damage. For Tambu, this means that she mistakes the message of the whites for the message of the Bible. (Actions, they say, speak louder than words.) It’s no wonder that she is unable to comprehend the stories of the Prodigal Son and Mary Magdalene. Undeserved forgiveness is as alien to her as physical resurrection.

    Trinh T. Minh-ha redefines anthropology as “gossiping,”—us talking about them. She criticizes anthropologists for their “prejudices as well as scientifical-professional-scholarly-careerist hypocrisy” and recommends that they(we) write “close to the other.” In my discussion of religion, this means (I think) that it is ridiculous for whites to plan ways of converting the natives (to use a cliché). They(we) should instead examine critically what they believe and live accordingly. It seems that this is what Tambu begins to do at the close of Nervous Conditions. A dramatic change occurs when Baba decides that Jeremiah and Mainini must marry: Tambu disagrees. She struggles with her opinions of Baba and her understanding of sin (“It had to be avoided because it was deadly, I could see it. It was definitely black, we were taught”—wow). She struggles with the notions of witch doctors and marriages. But she is persuaded by her family pride, by the thought of her parents made comic relief, by the absurdity of the idea. In one passage, Tambu examines her beliefs and begins to grow:

    Babamukuru did not know how I had suffered over the question of that wedding. He did not know how my mind had raced and spun and ended up splitting into two disconnected entities that had long, frightening arguments with each other, very vocally, in my head, about what ought to be done, the one half maniacally insisting on going, the other half equally maniacally refusing to consider it. I knew it was not evil to have endured all that terror in order to be sure of my decision, so when Nyasha asked whether I would go, I was able to tell her clamly, ‘No.’ But I accepted that I had forfeited my right to Babamukuru’s charity.