Drummer Wanted (review)

Drummer Wanted. Written and directed by Richard Maxwell. Performance Space 122, New York City. 7 December 2001.

It must be enormously fun to act in a Richard Maxwell play. It certainly is fun to watch one. Maxwell provides the language of real life, complete with "uh"s, "yeah"s, and long pauses. He strips away all conventional acting tropes. The actors have no discernable objectives. They hardly have emotions. The actors' job in a Maxwell play is to show up and say the lines. And try not to crack up with the audience at the ridiculousness of a world that looks and sounds eerily like the real one, except for a few important details. I suspect acting for Maxwell is harder than it looks, but Ellen LeCompte and Pete Simpson pull it off with aplomb in Drummer Wanted, Maxwell's latest play that pre-miered at PS 122 in New York City last December.

Drummer Wanted concerns a middle-aged realtor and her son Frank. Frank, a garage-musician without a band, gets knocked off his motorcycle by a slow moving car in a non-spectacular accident. Mother endeavors to nurse him back to physical and psychological health (Frank's depressed in that white suburban angst kind of way) by taking him to a karaoke bar and encouraging him to talk to friends on the phone when they call. The bickering between mother and son is recognizable enough; what's odd is that Maxwell allows this relationship to be the only one in his play. Mothers and sons are everywhere on stage and in literature and in psychoanalysis, but they are always only part of the story. In Drummer Wanted, Mother and Frank are all we get for a dense sixty-five minutes. Dad is long gone; Frank doesn't even have a girlfriend. It is as if these two are the only people in the world. Angela Moore's set design reinforces their aloneness. The small stage at PS 122 is transformed into a frighteningly accurate living room with fake wood paneling, wall-to-wall beige carpet, four chairs with shrink-wrapped cushions, and no doors. The actors use the absolute minimum number of props to tell their story. When the two go for a drive, they sit quietly next to each other against the wall. LeCompte does not even pretend to hold a steering wheel. Maxwell and his actors made no effort to create a world off-stage. When a blaring ambulance went by on the street outside the theatre, it did not seem incongruous—for the first time ever, for me. Drummer Wanted was such a sealed environment that nothing could interrupt it. Maxwell directs our attention to what really goes on between mother and son—and just how weird it is.

Simpson, well over six feet tall, lopes around the living room in a leg brace and hurls himself onto the floor or at his drum set. He obviously wants to go, but cannot go. He screeches, apropos of nothing, "I hate it when people can hear me." LeCompte oscillates between tough love: "I never left you and now you can't leave," and doting: "Why don't you play? You play so beautifully." Fights begin, escalate, and are always diffused by one or the other. They talk in circles, they accomplish nothing. Even though Frank lands a sizeable financial settlement for his injury, nothing changes between him and his mother.

Maxwell's actor coaching has started a small revolution in downtown New York theatre. The actors are so articulate the audience never misses a word. They rarely move and talk at the same time. In his plays, gestures do not overlap. Simpson laughs throughout the play at his own lame jokes. His laugh is pulled out of nowhere and goes nowhere, a brief explosion of sound that immediately dies. Simpson never talks through his giggling. It stands alone. This is life stretched out. It is as if Maxwell looks at life with a camera and takes a...