Language and Meaning in Megan Terry's 1970s "Musicals"

Language and Meaning in Megan Terry's 1970S "Musicals" KATHLEEN GREGORY KLEIN American King's English for Queens is the most clearly articulated of Megan Terry's language plays of the 1970s, explicitly concerned with the ways in which the text and context oflanguage mold thinking, seeing, and believing. In four full-length plays, Tommy Allen Show, Babes in the Bighouse, Brazil Fado and American King's English for Queens - all "musicals" performed at the Omaha Magic Theatre - although ostensibly savaging television, Middle American family life, marriage, sex, or prison, Terry challenges the perceptions molded by language itself and the cliches about language as a vehicle for communication. Whereas words seldom say what they mean, the reverse (that they mean what they say) is often true. What is conveyed between characters onstage, or between them and the audience, is seldom confined by either the connotative or denotative meanings of the words used; and yet these deliberately chosen words and phrases are capable ofcreating meaning for both speaker and auditor. Using the notorious American snipe hunt as a metaphor in American King's English for Queens, Terry identifies the parameters of language-meaning discourse. B~t action and reaction also create a context for meaning which either validates or rejects language's implications. Two features are vital to Terry's context for language: the transformations which illuminate the shifting realities purported to have acknowledged meanings; and the songs which redefine the circumstances of the characters and storyline seriously or mockingly. Unlike the absurdists, Terry does not investigate language to devalue it, nor meaning to abandon it, nor action to replace them both. Instead, all of her challenges testify her reluctance to allow the idea ofmeaninglessness to mask the uses made of language, action, and meaning. From Martin Esslin's early appraisal of the absurdists to Ronald Hayman's 1979 summary of their efforts, critics, playwrights and directors alike have acknowledged that the last thirty years of drama have been primarily, not only Megan Terry's 1970S "Musicals" 575 antiart or antitheatre, but also antilanguage. I They posit the notion that it is impossible to communicate at all, by whatever means attempted; or that language is an unacceptable vehicle for successful communication; or that language communicates what the speaker had not meant; or, at best, that what language can communicate is extremely limited and probably not worth the attempt anyway. The most respected playwrights of our time have leaned toward minimization; some de-emphasize language to convey meaning through action, while others script both language and action in the most limited ways. Beckett's dramatic works quite clearly follow the latter pattern: in Waiting for Godot, language and movement frequently contradict each other, what had come before, or what was clear to the audience; in the later works, bodies are lost in urns or behind curtains, and brief, disconnected phrases (or even sounds and musical notes) replace comprehensible speech. Pinter is committed to the same reconsideration of communication, frequently allowing his characters a torrent of words, often.emphasizing silences as strongly as the language which surrounds them: Pinter thinks of "talk" as covering over silence. In Theatre and Anti-Theatre, Hayman examines how, in the same period, three important directors - Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, and Joseph Chaikin - turned away from language-meaning parallels.2 Separately, these directors evolved practices which accommodated their beliefs that language, being culture specific, could not communicate as successfully as movement, more universal. In short, the absurdists and their successors seem to have perceived language (words, sentence structure, constructions) as meaningful to the speaker and the auditor - though seldom, if ever, having the same meaning. What they seem less willing to grant is the meaning accorded to language by social practice. Where this influence is acknowledged by the absurdists, it is used in ironic ways e .g., greetings and other socially ritualistic exchanges in Godot, Happy Days, The Birthday Party - often recognized by the characters as well as the audience. In the four full-length musicals named above, Terry admits that a speaker does not always say what she or he means, but does mean what she or he says: something is communicated by language. And in a...