Play #8: Waiting for Godot

"I know creatures are supposed to have no secrets from their authors, but I'm afraid mine for me have little else." Samuel Beckett

To prepare us, here is a funny Beckett story from John Heilpern: "One day he was walking through a London park with a friend. It was a glorious day and Beckett seemed almost uncharacteristically happy. The friend said it was the kind of sunny day that made one glad to be alive. 'I wouldn't go that far', replied Beckett...and that is pretty much what you need to know to understand and appreciate Samuel Beckett!

I first read Godot as I was preparing for grad school in 1995. At the time, I was totally perplexed about what this play was supposed to be about. Reading it again in 2009, it is easier to understand it intellectually and to appreciate it as a great work of art, but ultimately it is not for me.

Vladimir and Estragon, two tramps (Beckett loved Chaplin and especially Buster Keaton) are perpetually waiting for someone called Godot to meet them in a kind of wasteland whose dominating feature is a kind of gnarled old tree, and that's what they do...they wait. If the breath of drama is found in action, the breath of Godot can be found in inaction. The action of the play is almost all misdirection....Didi and Gogo (as Vladimir and Estragon call each other) wait, they question, they seek, they fret, and they wait. Two characters called Pozzo and Lucky appear, Lucky is a kind of slave to Pozzo and Pozzo waits with Didi and Gogo. The time passes (the time would have passed anyway, as one of them says to the other) and in the end, we find out that Mr Godot will not come today, but surely will come tomorrow...and for the tramps, the never ending cycle starts all over.

Absurdism is where we are and as a style, it kind of had its hay day in the 1950's with playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco. I think what made absurdism what it was, and gave it its dramatic power, was a direct result of the time that produced the plays. For the first time in the history of humanity, someone could press a button and destroy, wipe out, obliterate all of humanity. It made for an existential crisis, what was the point of humanity? Why bother? If language could be perverted to support the policies of (pick one) communism, capitalism, racism, genocide etc than there is clearly no meaning in language. Words themselves are meaningless...life is meaningless. You are born, you suffer, you die...the end. That is what Beckett is getting at with Godot.

While I intellectually appreciate the play and I can see how good actors could attack it, I don't think I would be terribly inclined to see it in a theatre. A couple of years ago, I saw a sensational production of Endgame at Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and while I admired the production (the acting, directing and design were all first rate) I could not love the play. As I stated earlier, I have to find some ray of light for me to fully engage in a production or play. I know life sucks, I go to the theatre to find alternatives and perhaps even better, deeper ways of living. To be told "why bother" is disheartening.

As I mentioned in my Look Back in Anger post, Godot is the 2nd of three plays I contend changed forever the English speaking theatre world. Godot had its world premiere in Paris during the 1952-53 theatre season and even though Beckett was Irish, the play was written in French and didn't have its English language premiere until 1955, when Peter Hall directed it at the Arts Theatre in London. Of the English language production, Kenneth Tynan wrote that he cared "little for its enormous success in Europe over the past three years." He did, however and much like Look Back in Anger, ultimately give it his seal of approval. "It forced me to re-examine the rules which have hitherto governed the drama; and, having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough."

In his autobiography, Making an Exhibition of Myself, Peter Hall discusses the original English language production in some detail: "I, and everyone else at the Arts, thought the enterprise was a huge gamble. The text had arrived in my little cupboard of an office several weeks earlier and in the most conventional way possible -- through the post. With it was a letter from Donald Albery, a leading West End manager, asking if I would like to stage it. Attempts to set up a West End production had completely failed. Many luminaries, Gielgud, Richardson, and Guinness among them, had refused to appear in it."

Hall goes on to talk about his reaction to reading the play: "I found it enormously appealing, and written by a master. This was poetic theatre. What do I mean by poetic? Well, it wasn't sequinned with applied adjectives like Christopher Fry, or with dry ironic platitudes like T.S. Eliot. Here was a voice, a rhythm, a shape that was very particular: lyrical, yet colloquial; funny, yet mystical. Though expressed in natural speech, unpretentious and believable, it was much more than natural speech: there was a haunting subtext."

Hall's reporting of the opening night audience is a beautiful indicator that the artists tend to crave the new and the audience tends to crave the familiar: "On the first night, very little went right. After half an hour, there were yawns and mock snores and some barracking. Later on the audience nearly erupted into open hostility but then decided not to bother and settled instead into still, glum boredom. A few people laughed with genuine recognition; and the same few applauded enthusiastically at the end. It was a mixed reception, with the mixture very definitely on the side of failure."

Ultimately the play was saved by the Sunday critics, notably Harold Hobson, and was subsequently produced in America for the first time, in Miami of all places. The American production starred Bert Lahr as Estragon and was billed (oddly) as the "Laugh Sensation of 2 Continents." If the British reaction was mixed, the American was openly hostile (imagine that, Americans being threatened by something that requires thinking). At intermission on opening night, more than 2/3 of the audience had left. Lahr received a letter from someone who walked out: "How can you, Bert Lahr, who has charmed the youth of America as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, appear in this Communistic, atheistic, and existentialist play?"

And so it goes...what is the purpose of Art? What do we want our theatre to do? Is the theatre supposed to be something more than empty calorie entertainment? Does it need to strike a balance? I always refer to the Greek notion of Profit and Delight...yes it needs to be entertaining, but there needs to be more than that. I think the theatre should stimulate the heart and the head and that being challenged with some difficult intellectual concepts can be an ENTERTAINING night out. Of course, I am still searching for the theatre where this kind of work can thrive. Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, Know Theatre and Ensemble Theatre in Cincinnati are three companies that have a rigorous intellectual bent to their very entertaining work. From the outside, they seem to be thriving, or at least succeeding.

So the quest continues. I am off to Texas in the morning and hopefully will have some definitive news soon...stay tuned!

Peace
Rick St. Peter
September 28, 2009

Play #7: Look Back in Anger

"I believe we started out with hope, and hope deferred makes the heart sick, and many hearts are sick at what they see in England now." JOHN OSBORNE, 1959

These next few posts are going to concern 3 plays that changed the English speaking theatre world and all premiered within 18 months of each other...First was Peter Hall's English language premiere production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1955. The second was the world premiere of Look Back in Anger by the new English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in May 1956 and the third was the Berliner Ensemble's first visit to London with Mother Courage in August 1956, two weeks following the death of Brecht. Those are the next three plays we are going to look at on this journey and we will begin with John Osborne.

It is hard now to understand the impact Look Back in Anger must have had when it was first produced. George Devine at the Royal Court apparently didn't care too much for it and was talked in to producing it by Tony Richardson, the original director of the production.

In creating the character of Jimmy Porter, Osborne forever altered the world of English theatre and began to shatter the dominance of the Binkie Beaumont-dominated theatre world of Noel Coward, Terrence Rattigan and others. Simply put, Jimmy Porter is a son-of-a-bitch...he has beyond firm ideas about what he believes in and at one point, he actually says, "You are either with me or against me." (Sounds familiar, no?)

Being an American, reading Look Back in Anger is to truly read a foreign play. 1950's England was still recovering from the decimation of World War II. The country was struggling to redefine itself in the new world and its rigid class system was coming to grips with the changing times. Conservative factions wanted to return to empire, liberal factions were crafting what would become the cradle-to-grave welfare state...it was a country at war with itself and Jimmy Porter breaks through conventions to take on EVERYBODY.

This is from Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright's fantastic book, Changing Stages:
"Look Back in Anger is set at the epicenter of 50's inertia -- an early Sunday evening in a small rented room in a dull Midlands town, with the air thick with boredom and...is it sexual frustration? The protagonist, Jimmy Porter, runs a sweet-stall in the market and is engaged in an attritional war with his wife Alison, trying to goad her into life: 'If only something--something would happen to you, and wake you out of your beauty sleep! If you could have a child and it would die.' (She does get pregnant and she does lose the child.)
He is cruel, violent and iconoclastic (he is also a thinly veiled portrait of Osborne himself, check out John Heilpern's book John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man for a definitive Osborne biography), and he hacks away at his pet aversions with a wild and always beautifully orchestrated rhetoric: the upper classes, the middle classes, the Sunday papers, his wife, his friend Cliff, women, Americans, apathy and absence of feeling. Not exactly misogynistic -- he gives far too much credit to the power of women for that -- but demanding a commitment from them that is absolute."

English class structure is interesting...Alison is solidly middle class, her father is a retired Indian army colonel, and Jimmy is solidly working class...he clearly married above his station, Alison's parents disapproved of the marriage, and he has been taking their disapproval out on Alison ever since. He seems to do everything he possibly can to drag her down to his class level...she becomes pregnant and leaves and Jimmy takes up with her friend Helena, which doesn't work out any better than he relationship with Alison does. Alison eventually loses the baby but returns to Jimmy, Helena and Jimmy's friend and roommate Cliff (with screaming homosexual subtext) leaves, leaving Alison and Jimmy alone in a final scene that is sort of an anti-Doll's House.

What makes this play extraordinary? Simply put, it was a new voice on the British stage...the anger, frustration, bewilderment of Jimmy Porter (and by extension Osborne) was something new. Peter Hall, the original director of Waiting for Godot, thinks Beckett deserves more credit for changing the landscape because he changed form. Look Back in Anger is a conventionally structured 3-act play, like the kind Osborne played in as an actor in regional reps early in his career. But the voice was unmistakable. Tony Richardson, his director, says of Osborne, "He is unique and alone in his ability to put on the stage the quick of himself, his pain, his squalor, his nobility -- terrifyingly alone." This voice appeared at a time when the British theatre was "hermetically sealed off from life" as Arthur Miller had famously remarked. Already in the United States, plays like Death of a Salesman, All My Sons, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real and The Rose Tattoo had premiered. The combination of Binkie Beaumont and the Lord Chamberlain made sure nothing of like measure was being produced by British dramatists at the same period. Osborne changed all of that...he made possible Wesker, Bond, Arden and others and he helped to establish the Royal Court Theatre has the most important theatre for new plays in the world.

I actually hadn't read this one till last week and I am a fan, though I don't know how a production would play today. I would suspect that in the United States, it would be seen with a kind of intellectual bewilderment, but how about in England? Jimmy Porter is a virtuoso role for a young actor and the writing sizzles...I also think I am a fan because I would want to make Kenneth Tynan happy. Tynan, perhaps the greatest theatre critic ever, famously remarked in his review of Look Back, "I doubt if I could love anyone who didn't love Look Back in Anger."

Look Back in Anger is a critically important play because it provided a snapshot of a time and place and captured it perfectly through the eyes of its creator. It is also a major accomplishment because of what it prologued. Look Back in Anger helped usher in a golden age of British theatre, even if the entire "Angry Young Men" label was largely media driven, it still helped capture the mood of its time and provide inspiration for a number of young artists who previously may have never thought about writing plays as a means of their expression. It is a singular achievement and Osborne is certainly a singular individual.

Up next, Waiting for Godot...

Peace
Rick St. Peter
September 20, 2009

Quick Post Script: Can the American theatre in 2009 (0r ever) produce a Look Back in Anger? If every the great American play was going to be written, it seems now that our hopelessly polarized times could produce a galvanizing play. Of course, the theatre in America doesn't have the same place as theatre in England does, and in 2009, even theatre in England is diminished by all of the competition. I am not sure if it is possible for the American theatre to produce a work like Look Back and even if it did, the country is so distracted by the stupidity of our mass media and conglomerate entertainment, would anybody even hear it? Unfortunately I don't think so...

Play #4 (through #6 actually) The Oresteia

Greetings all! Hope everyone had a pleasant and relaxing weekend...it is extraordinary that tomorrow is already Thursday. Sorry for my absence, I had a relaxing weekend but at the same time, I have been getting my ass handed to me by Aeschylus!

The Oresteia is perhaps the oldest extant playscript we have. It is the only trilogy still around...in the Ancient Greek theatre, plays were performed as part of a religious festival, a couple of times a year, and each performance consisted of 3 plays, built around a theme, and followed by a satyr play which basically spoofed the trilogy that came before it...Of all the Greek plays still around, including Sophocles' Oedipus plays, The Oresteia is the only remaining trilogy....

Basically, the story of The Oresteia is the worlds oldest family feud...the Fall of the House of Atreus...

Play One: The Agamemnon

The Greeks await anxiously the word from Troy, it has been 10 long years since the Greek armies departed, determined to recapture Helen and destroy Troy. Suddenly (actually there is a lot of talking first), a signal fire blazes from across the sea! Success...Troy has fallen and the great king (or "Clan-chief" in Tony Harrison's extraordinary tribal adaptation/translation) Agamemnon will be returning to Argos!

However, there is a problem...10 years prior, his army was stuck on the shore, unable to get a favorable breeze to lead his forces to Troy. In order to do so, the Gods made him sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia...which naturally has pissed off his wife Clytemnestra. Perhaps the first villain-ness in dramatic literature, Clytemnestra has been plotting her revenge (and shacking up with Aegisthus) since Agamemnon departed...upon his return, Clytemnestra feigns joy, he steps on the purple carpet, goes into his palace...and is whacked!! Welcome home, Agamemnon!! In addition to this, his trophy from the Trojan War, the poor Cassandra, is also murdered. Has any character had it worse in history than Cassandra? How would you like to have the ability to see the future but never have anyone believe you because Apollo has also made you appear to be completely nuts? So, play ends with Agamemnon dead, Cassandra dead and Clytemnestra and Aegisthus (who has his own issues with Agamemnon: his family, particularly his father and brothers, was essentially destroyed by Atreus, Agamemnon's father) ruling Argos and the citizens, represented by the chorus, in despair.

Play Two: The Choephori (The Libation Bearers)

Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra is home! He stands before his father's woefully distended grave. No honors have been laid out for him, no proper mourning...as he mourns, he cuts off a lock of his hair and places it on Agamemnon's grave. Suddenly, a group of women appear and he moves off to overhear them. The women, led by Electra, are bringing libations to pour over the grave of Agamemnon, a little too late, but I guess better late than never. Electra is clearly reluctant to do anything, as she hates and curses her mother for the murder of her father. Clytemnestra, like Lady Macbeth down the road a ways, is wracked by guilt and nightmares about the murder. She keeps dreaming about giving birth to a serpent that will come for revenge. At the grave, Electra notices Orestes lock of hair, realizes it is just like hers and begins to surmise that her brother has returned, because, clearly, all it takes for recognition in ancient Greece is a lock of hair! Orestes and Electra reunite, they hatch a plan for revenge, and hijinks's ensue...(every synopsis of every play ever written can include the phrase "hijinks's ensue"). Orestes disguises himself and pretends to deliver word to Clytemnestra and Aegisthus that Orestes is in fact dead....he then avenges his father's murder by killing Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. And immediately feels guilty and exits, pursued by the Furies!

Play Three: The Eumenides

The third play in the trilogy (Episode Three if you will) is in effect a trial. So we have a bunch of murders...Agamemnon murdered Iphigenia, for that Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon, for that Orestes murdered Clytemnestra...quite the family tree! Orestes has been pursued by the Furies to the Oracle at Delphi and has sought refuge with Apollo. When we discover Orestes, he is surrounded by sleeping Furies and under the protection of Apollo, who is actually responsible for the Furies falling to sleep. Apollo takes responsibility for having Orestes murder Clytemnestra and urges him to flee to Athens, where he will essentially have a trial before Athena.

The Ghost of Clytemnestra appears before the sleeping Furies and tries to roust them up to avenge her murder...after her exit, the Furies awake and debate Apollo over which is the worst crime: a wife murdering her husband to avenge her daughter or a son murdering his mother to avenge his father...and there is the conundrum of the plays...Orestes arrives in Athens:

Orestes:
Athena, high she-god, I was sent by Apollo. Look on me kindly, I'm cursed and an outcast. Though still a cursed outcast there's no need of more cleansing. My bloodguilt's been blunted enough by my contact with places and people who helped my purgation. All this was decreed by Apollo at Delphi. I've crossed land and sea to your house and your statue. Until the issue's decided, I stay beside you.

The Furies arrive to kill Orestes ("seek seek scour the ground/the mother-killer's got to be found") and are preparing to kill Orestes when Athena arrives, fresh from Troy. A trial begins, with Athena has judge. The Trial of Orestes takes place in the Acropolis and is presided over by Athena, with a jury of 12 Athenians...and Apollo essentially serving as Orestes' defense attorney and the Furies the prosecutors.

The argument of Apollo and Orestes essentially boils down to Clytemnestra had it coming to her simply because she was a woman. She had no right to murder Agamemnon and his death outweighs hers, since he was a guy and all plus he was a hero during the war with Troy...and she was just a woman. (Sorry ladies, it was a patriarchal society, although Apollo does say it would be ok for a woman to kill a man if she is an Amazon!)

Ultimately, we see the first hung jury in the history of the world, Athena as the judge votes to acquit Orestes, he is thrilled and before he returns to Argos pledges his never ending support to Athena and Athens. The Furies are pissed! The third play concludes with a long debate between Athena and the Furies where she convinces them not to pursue revenge on Orestes, but rather stay and make Athens a great city...which they agree to do...THE END!!

Now we have tragedy...everything that comes after, from Sophocles and Euripides to Shakespeare and Ibsen to Brecht and Beckett to August Wilson and Arthur Miller, comes from the roots of these plays...Aeschylus expands the number of characters onstage, thereby allowing for conflict to happen more easily (even though the violence happens offstage) and the rest, as they say, is history.

I love these plays...I expect in our modern day and age they are difficult to do well, I am wondering if this Tony Harrison translation/adaptation is from Peter Hall's 1981 production, which I believe was performed in Greece.

Questions about the plays:

1. Do they need to be performed only be men, as listed in the script? (they originally would have been performed by men for men, since women didn't attend the theatre)
2. Do they need to be performed in masks, or does it work without masks?
3. They are extraordinarily talk-ey...do they move well as theatre? And can you do all three in one sitting in this day and age?

I'd like to tackle them one of these days. My friend Chazz and I have been chatting about one day doing our own version of the Trojan War, pulling from all the myths and creating our own telling of it. I love the Trojan War, I admit I've always hated it when Hector dies at the hands of Achilles but if I have learned anything over the last few years, it is that I am apparently a sucker for lost causes...But unlike, say, Shakespeare's History plays that have been adapted into the War of the Roses and such, I believe the Greek tragedies work on levels beyond even Shakespeare because they are so primal. What makes Harrison's translations so interesting is how primal and even savage they are. This is not the Greece of Pericles the great orator...this is primitive, dangerous, tribal Greece...

It is a hard read but I urge you to check them out....The Oresteia...the birth of tragedy, the development of character and the start of our 2,500 year theatrical tradition.

While we are here, if I could go back in time, I would love to go to one of the Festivals of Dionysus and see an original performance of a Greek tragedy (probably The Trojan Women by Euripides) at the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, I'd like to sit in on a rehearsal and the original production of Hamlet at the Globe and I'd like to see Brecht in rehearsal...

Where would you go? What would you see?

Until next time: "Let the terriers yap, all bark and no bite!/You and I, we'll rule this house, and set it right." Clytemnestra to Aegisthus, final line of The Agamemnon...

Peace
Rick St. Peter
09/09/09

Happy Labor Day Weekend!!

Hope everyone has a great weekend...I will be laboring over Aeschylus's The Oresteia and will be back by Monday...Be safe everyone...

BTW, after my post about Star Trek yesterday, I decided to see it again...took my fabulous wife and lovely children...good time was had by all!!

Until next time, Live Long and Prosper...

Peace
Rick St. Peter
September 4, 2009

20th Century Fantasy Draft

OK, I'm in a foul mood today, so I didn't read a play...I couldn't decide what I wanted to read and I have had one of those days plagued with self-doubt, where you think to yourself, "Am I doing the right thing?" I picked up Rosencrantz and Guildernstern are Dead and couldn't get into it, I picked up Everyman and couldn't get into it so I decided to punt and just goof off...I watched Star Trek: Nemesis for approximately the 2,739,473,947 time, give or take a viewing or two and while it is a terrible film, I really like Tom Hardy in it, I love Patrick Stewart and I think its got the coolest battle scene of any of the Trek films.

And while we are on the subject of Star Trek films, I gotta give a big shout out to Captain Robau of the USS Kelvin. For the first time in the entire Star Trek cannon, the captain of a ship other than the Enterprise (or I guess Voyager and DS9), wasn't a total and complete loser (And even the Enterprise had a loser, they put Cameron from Ferris Bueller in command after Kirk and before Picard for God sakes...I'm surprised he didn't try to call in sick for their shake down cruise and have to be talked into showing up by his first officer Commader Bueller, but I digress). Back to Captain Robau, yes he dies two minutes into the film (before they even roll the damn opening credits), but he goes to his death like a total badass and even though the sensors read his elevated vital signs, indicating he is afraid, he has a complete poker face in dealing with Nero and goes out a hero...(Hope I didn't give anything away there)...

So with Fantasy football drafts in the air, I am in full on mock fantasy drafts about anything and everything...Yes I took Phillip Rivers in the 2nd round of my draft and when he finishes his MVP season, you can all credit me for being a genius...so, here is today's fantasy draft...

The Most Influential Theatre Practitioners of the 20th Century...

What does that mean to you? What does that mean to me? How do we determine influence? Can a critic be involved (say Kenneth Tynan)? How about a theorist? Gordon Craig? Adolphe Appia? Artaud?? What about actors? Playwrights? Artistic Directors?? The field is wide open, you determine what influence means to you...Without further ado, here is my top 10:

1. Konstantine Stanislavski -- Influenced everybody, even those who rejected him...Perhaps my #2 pick (after Shakespeare) of most influential of all time...

2. Bertolt Brecht -- Theorist, playwright, director...Unmistakable influence....

3. Peter Brook -- Director, theorist...Dominates the second half of the 20th century, The Empty Space might be the most influential book of the century...add in his productions like The Dream, Marat/Sade, Paul Scofield Lear, The Mahabharata, his work in Paris...

4. Peter Hall -- The founding of the modern Royal Shakespeare Company helped shape modern repertory theatres in both England and the US...his work in theatre and opera has spanned more than 50 years, he directed the English language premiere of Waiting for Godot, he really shaped the modern Royal National Theatre (just the NT under his leadership) and for me, defined what an Artistic Director should be...

5. George Devine -- Founded the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre and created the template for the development of new works for the rest of the century. Died young and didn't establish a lengthy track record but Look Back in Anger changed everything. You can make a case that you can divide the 20th century into pre-1956 and post 1956...

6. Joseph Papp -- The New York Shakespeare Festival/Public Theatre has probably introduced more people to Shakespeare than any other organization in the world. His notion of the democratic appeal of theatre helped demystify the experience for countless #'s of people. He was also apparently a terrible director...

7. Laurence Olivier -- The actor of the 20th century...everyone measured themselves against him and he also walked away from Hollywood at the height of his film career to take on the establishment of the English National Theatre...add his iconic performances as Hamlet, Henry V, The Entertainer, and countless others, I believe rate him ahead of Geilgud and Richardson as his closest rivals.

8. Margo Jones, Nina Vance, Zelda Fichandler -- Founders and Artistic Directors of Dallas Theatre Center, the Alley Theatre and Arena Stage respectively. The Founding Mothers of the American Regional Theatre movement. They helped bring to life the notion that high quality professional theatre and culture in general need not be confined to a few blocks in midtown Manhattan.

9. Cameron Mackintosh -- Love him or hate him, he perfected the notion of the event megamusical that changed the face of Broadway and the West End forever (for better or worse). Cats, Les Miz, Phantom etc etc etc ad naseum...Without him, there probably never is a Disney Theatricals and perhaps we wouldn't have the opportunity to see Spider Man the Musical on Broadway this season...not all influences are good influences...

10. Antonin Artaud -- French theorist...obviously insane, spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals and more than likely killed himself...The Theatre and It's Double was a HUGE influence on Peter Brook, Grotowski, Mnouchkine, The Living Theatre, The Open Theatre, Richard Schechner and countless other...advocated for the sacred and holy in performance and sought to banish or minimize the written word.

So there you have it...clearly I am a director first as I cannot believe my list of 20th century theatre practitioners does not include a single playwright save for Brecht, who makes it for me as much on theory as for playwrighting. Some of the ones on my short list included: Chekhov, Miller, Shaw, Beckett, Osborne, Kushner, O'Neil and Coward, but alas, none of them made it...

Who's got next??

Peace
Rick St. Peter
September 3, 2009

BTW, Happy 62nd Birthday tomorrow to the greatest father in the history of fathers, Richard St. Peter, Sr...Have a great day, Pops and enjoy your trip to the Outer Banks! I am looking forward to Texas at the end of the month!!!

Play #3: Vaclav Havel's Largo Desolato

With Vaclav Havel, I have to start with Peter Brook writing about Jan Kott: "Here we have a man writing about Shakespeare's attitude to life from direct experience (my emphasis). Kott is undoubtedly the only writer on Elizabethan matters who assumes without question that every one of his readers will at some point or another have been woken by the police in the middle of the night. I am sure that in the many million words already written about Shakespeare -- almost precluding anything new ever being said by anyone any more -- it is still unique for the author discussing the theory of political assassination to assume that a director's explanation of his actors could begin: 'A secret organization is preparing an action...You will go to Z and bring a case of grenades to the house No. 12.'" From the Introduction to Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary

Mr. Havel is an extraordinary man...playwright, essayist, dissident, President first of Czechoslovakia and subsequently the first President of the Czech Republic following the Velvet Revolution. He is a man who risked his life for his art, for his ideals and for his people. He is a stunning profile in courage...

His play, Largo Desolato, gets to the heart of drama about the "great person". In 2001, I directed a production of Marlowe's Edward II, a hauntingly political play, especially in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In my director's notes, I wondered about the dreams of George Bush and Osama Bin Laden, when they closed their eyes at night, what did that still small voice deep inside their souls say to them. Did they listen? Did they ignore? Did those voices help or hinder them in their attempts to shape history?

Largo Desolato, in my view, shows us the inner workings of a person at the crossroads of history, in fact Havel wrote it in 4 days within a year of being released from prison,...the choices made, the competing demands, the threats, the hopes, the fears...all of those things that make us compellingly human. Written in 1985, Havel is on the cusp of great things, but while there, he shows us what it is like to look into the void. It is a thrilling, terrifying mechanistic, cyclical play, like Kott's Grand Mechanism, but also, in the creaking final days of Soviet style Communism, the machine is breaking down...what will happen next?

The story: Professor Leopold Nettles, the "hero" of Largo Desolato, is the author of a book that contains a troublesome paragraph laying him open to arrest on charges of "disturbing the intellectual peace." Pressed by the government to deny what he wrote, Nettles is tortured by internal demons as well as external ones. Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia's foremost playwright, who is in constant conflict with his government, has created a vivid and terrifying portrait of the writer in the totalitarian state that is as real and immediate as today's headlines. (From the English version by Tom Stoppard)

The play is written in 7 short scenes, 3 of which have no dialogue. It is a nightmare of repetition, mechanical actions, and an almost oppressive sense of danger. Professor Nettles is pressured on the one hand by two factory workers, called First Sidney and Second Sidney, to take his theories to the next level, ie to stop being a philosopher and start being active. He is also pressured by two members of, perhaps, the secret police called First Chap and Second Chap, to renounce something he is written. Their banal idea for a return to normalcy is to have him simply say he is not called Leopold Nettles and they will leave him alone. At the same time, his estranged wife/lover/ex-girlfriend Suzana has taken up with his friend Edward, he is kind of with a woman called Lucy, although he doesn't admit it and it enrages her. Finally, a man called Bertram is trying to prod him into action as well, albeit with a series of qualifications.

Scenes are repeated over and over, lines of dialogue are as well...
Examples:

Scene 1
As the music dies away the curtain rises slowly.
Leopold is alone on the stage. He is sitting on the sofa and staring at the front door. After a long pause he gets up and looks through the peep-hole. Then he puts his ear to the door and listens intently. After another long pause the curtain drops suddenly and at the same time the music returns.

Scene 2
As the music dies away the curtain rises slowly.
Leopold is alone on the stage. He is sitting on the sofa and staring at the front door. After a long pause he gets up and looks through the peep-hole. Then he puts his ear to the door and listens intently. After another long pause the curtain drops suddenly and at the same time the music returns.

Scene 5
(Suzana makes a sign to Edward who accompanies her to the kitchen. During the rest of the scene both of them can be seen through the glass-panelled kitchen doors taking out various foodstuffs from the shopping bag, putting them where they belong, and, during all this time either discussing something in a lively way or perhaps quarrelling. Leopold notices that First Sidney's glass is empty and fills it up for him) BTW, Suzana and Edward do this exact same thing in Scene 3 as well...

1st Sidney: Thanks! Cheers!
(First Sidney drinks the whole glass in one go and then burps, satisfied. Leopold refills the glass.)
1st Sidney: Thanks! Cheers!
(First Sidney drinks the whole glass in one go and then burps, satisfied. Leopold refills the glass.)
1st Sidney: Thanks! Cheers!
(First Sidney drinks the whole glass in one go and then burps, satisfied. Leopold refills the glass.)
1st Sidney: Thanks! Cheers!
(First Sidney drinks the whole glass in one go and then burps, satisfied. Leopold refills the glass. First Sidney takes the glass but when he is on the point of drinking it he puts it back on the table.)
1st Sidney: Someone has to be sensible --
(Short pause)
2nd Sidney: We're not holding you up are we?
Leopold: No --
1st Sidney: Are you sure? Because if we are you only have to say so and we'll push off --
L: You are not holding me up -- excuse me --
(Leopold gets up, goes to the place where his medicines are, turns his back to the room so as not to be seen, pulls out his box, quickly takes out a pill, throws it in his mouth and swallows it and puts his box back and returns to his seat. Pause.) Again, the repeat of an action done earlier

2nd S: Have you thought about it yet?
L: About what?
1st S: What we were talking about yesterday -- that it's time for an initiative --
L: Oh yes -- I haven't got round to it yet --
2nd S: Pity. You know, I'm an ordinary bloke, a nobody, but I can spot a few things and I've got my own opinion and nobody can deny me that. And what I think is, there's a lot that could be done -- certainly more than is being done at the moment --
1st S: One just has to get hold of the situation by the --
2nd S: Who else but you is there to get things going again?
(Leopold is starting to get nervous. He looks discreetly at his watch.)
1st S: We're not holding you up are we?
L: No --
2nd S: Are you sure? Because if we are you only have to say so and we'll push off --
L: You're not holding me up. Excuse me --
(Leopold gets up and goes into the bathroom, leaving the door open. There is the sound of running water and Leopold gasping. The sound of the water stops and shortly afterwards Leopold returns to his seat.) Again, the repeat of an action that occurs many times in this scene.

Going back to Peter Brook and Jan Kott, the fundamental difference between the theatre of Eastern Europe and the West is the palpable sense of danger always lurking beneath the surface of their drama. The Eastern Europeans had to use their theatre to talk in code to one another, to avoid the censors and to keep revolutionary ideas alive. Their theatre could literally be about life and death. One of my mentors, the Macedonian director Naum Panovski used to talk about keeping vodka around the theatre to try and get the censors drunk when he was working in Yugoslavia under Tito. If they were drunk enough, it was easier to slip things past them. The theatre in the West is so much more about middle class, middlebrow entertainment. "Hey gang, let's put on a show in a barn." The work becomes a commodity, the artists involved are nothing more than independent contractors and the entire purpose, in our era of celebrity and money, is to get noticed and turn a profit.

Meyerhold was murdered by the Soviets because he refused to compromise his ideas on theatre. He rebelled against Soviet socialist realism and "they" shot him. Is there ANYONE in the US who would be willing to die for their theatrical beliefs? Is their a Vaclav Havel, a Vsevelod Meyerhold, an Athol Fugard living here in this country? Somehow I doubt it, and I am OK with that because it reinforces the idea that we are a free society...do you have to die for your work? No, because no one will sanction the killing! I guess the closest we have come was the controversy at Manhattan Theatre Club over their decision to premiere Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi and the religious lunatics who threatened to blow up the theatre if they did.

Vaclav Havel, like Fugard, like Mandela, is an extraordinary human being who could not read the future and did not have a road map for where he was heading. Largo Desolato gives you a peek into the psyche and a glimpse at the soul, the fear, the hopes, the doubts and the dreams of a transcendent figure in modern world history. For that alone, it is worth the read.

Peace
Rick St. Peter
September 2, 2009

Play #2: David Mamet's Oleanna

What the hell do we do with David Mamet? Some people love him, some people loathe him...for the record, I run hot and cold...I love plays like American Buffalo and Glenngarry Glen Ross and I directed a production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago as my final graduate school project. That production was really the first time I felt like a director, like I had something to offer and I remember it fondly. However, I despise plays like Speed-the-Plow (I saw an up and down production of this play in London at the Old Vic in 2008 with Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum. Spacey was BRILLIANT, Goldblum was Goldblum...I kept waiting for him to say "Must go faster, must go faster", somewhere Sanford Meisner rolls over in his grave) and I will admit I think Oleanna is kinda sorta piece of shit...

One of my basic rules for any sort of dramatic event, be it film, TV, the theatre, what have you, is I gotta give a damn about SOMEBODY for me to care about the events unfolding in front of me. That's not the case in Oleanna, as we have Professor Obtuse and Student Idiot debating some sort of class on something at the University of Dumbass...I bet their basketball team is good though!

Here's a short summary of the story:

A male college professor and his female student sit down to discuss her grades and in a terrifyingly short time become the participants in a modern reprise of the Inquisition. Innocuous remarks suddenly turn damning. Socratic dialogue gives way to heated assault. And the relationship between a somewhat fatuous teacher and his seemingly hapless student (who appears to be a borderline retard in Act 1) turns in to a fiendishly accurate (no it doesn't) X ray of the mechanisms of power, censorship and abuse...and he beats her up at the end, hope I didn't ruin it for you...

I gather this play made a bit of a splash in 1992, when it was first produced against the backdrop of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill soap opera of 1991, but as bad as those two came off in their various dances of death, they at least appeared to be operating somewhat NEAR a human level...Mamet's two characters in Oleanna seem about as human as Jeff Bridges' character in that old flick Starman, or maybe closer to Vincent D'onofrio's bug in Men In Black...I mean, they sort of look human...they kinda of talk human (and I know everyone always talks about Mamet's hyper-realistic, highly stylized language but in Oleanna it doesn't work at all), but they do not approximate any real human traits. Just the stupidity of meeting alone after the first meeting should drown the play in implausibility...

Some examples of these two trying to communicate:

Carol: You don't do that.
John: ...I...?
Carol: You don't do...
John: ...I don't, what...?
Carol: ...for...
John: ...I don't for...
Carol: ...no...
John: ...forget things? Everybody does that.
Carol: No, they don't.
John: They don't...
Carol: No.
John: (Pause) No. Everybody does that.
Carol: Why would they do that...?
John: Because. I don't know. Because it doesn't interest them.
Carol: No.
John: I think so, though. (Pause) I'm sorry I was distracted.
Carol: You don't have to say that to me.
John: You paid me the compliment, or the "obeisance" -- all right-- of coming in here...All right. Carol. I find that I am at a standstill. I find that I...
Carol: ...what...
John: ...one moment. In regard to your...to your...
Carol: Oh, oh. You're buying a new house!
John: No, let's get on with it.
Carol: "get on"? (Pause)

Rick throws his hands up in frustration and makes an Eddie Izzard face!!

So John is up for tenure, he's trying to close on a house and his wife and lawyer keep calling because something is going wrong with the house, he has either the biggest moron in the history of college students or one of the most conniving individuals in the history of dramatic literature (dare we call Carol a Machiavel) sitting right in front of him and they all babble on for 3 (thankfully short) scenes.

So, what's the point of Oleanna...here I turn to one of my favorite critics:

From the BRIALLIANT John Heilpern, in his wonderful collection of reviews perfectly titled How Good Is David Mamet, Anyway?:

In a perverse way, he brings out the worst in us. Perhaps, as I did, you found yourselves wishing to kill the sexually harassed victim in Oleanna. "There you are!" Mr Mamet's admirers said at the time. "You're no better than the average male chauvinist pig." The playwright had therefore made his subversive dramatic point: if you sided with the male hero -- the professor who happened to be innocent --- you were no better than an abuser (or were smugly indifferent about important issues). But Mr Mamet had so loaded the dice against the vicious -- and deranged -- victim of Oleanna that nausea was the only response to her, and to the playwright's heavy-handed manipulation."

That is primarily my complaint with Oleanna is that I am being manipulated as a reader (and, if the film version starring the original cast members William H Macy and the stunningly untalented Rebecca Pidgeon, who singlehandedly disproves all of Mamet's acting theories prove, as a viewer as well). Mamet's characters ARE NOT CHARACTERS in any normal sense of the word. They are simply vessels for him to spout his preposterous ideas about academia...

But, I say again, what the hell do we do with the enigma of David Mamet...? Like Bertolt Brecht, he is part theorist, part director and part playwright...I believe his main treatise on acting, True and False is mostly GIGANTICALLY false, but at the same time, it is clear he dearly loves and admires actors, even if he does not understand or refuses to understand, the process by which actors craft their performances...What about his plays? Will we still be seeing them, studying them in 50 years, 100 years? How does he rate on that mythical list of GREAT AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT...

So I will wrap today's post up with my first ever GREAT AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT FANTASY DRAFT...1 Round draft, 10 picks, you get all of their work, good, bad or indifferent...(for the record, I think you can play fantasy anything, it is one of my passions...my fantasy baseball team currently has a 7 point lead heading into the final month of the season, and if my guys can stay healthy, take it one day at a time and hope for the best, good Lord willing, things will work themselves out, yes wonderful sports cliches, even in my blog)...I ask this question a lot, if we opened it up to all playwrights, Shakespeare is kinda Albert Pulojs and LeBron James all rolled into one right? I mean, who gets picked ahead of Will...so the intriguing question there is always who is the #2 pick in the draft, the Kobe Bryant, Hanley Ramirez pick...for me it's Ibsen, but that's just me...thanks for reading this tangent...

Any, back to THE GREAT AMERICAN PLAYWRIGHT FANTASY DRAFT, Round 1:

1. Arthur Miller
2. Tennessee Williams
3. August Wilson
4. Eugene O'Neill (whom I loathe)

That's the pantheon...those guys are the best of the best in terms of influence, work created, legacy etc.

5. David Mamet
6. Tony Kushner
7. Sam Shepard (whom I loathe too, sorry Sam, I"ll leave you alone if I run into you in a bar again)
8. William Inge
9. Thorton Wilder
10. Wendy Wasserstein

That's my top ten, how about you?

Anyhow, thanks for reading, feel free to disagree with me about Oleanna, I'd love to hear some thoughts and thanks for the feedback from those of you who commented.

BTW, I think this blog is destined to happen. I finally got some money today, so I am getting my car that has been dead since June fixed. I was cleaning it out waiting for the tow truck to come and in my back seat was a copy of Tom Stoppard's translation of Vaclav Havel's Largo Desolato, one of the 127 I gotta read and one of the few I didn't know prior to looking at the list...well, how the hell did that script end up in the backseat of my car that hasn't moved since June? As Mr Henslowe says, in the Stoppard co-scripted Shakespeare in Love, "I don't know, it's a mystery."

So, Vaclav Havel's Largo Desolato is on deck.

Stay tuned, I hope you come back, and if you don't, to quote Mr Mamet, "...fuck..."

Peace
Rick St. Peter
September 1, 2009