Mac Wellman and the Language Poets: Chaos Writing and the General Economy of Language

Spring 2010 69 Mac Wellman and the Language Poets: Chaos Writing and the General Economy of Language Keith Appler Shake the flour can, get the particles. You lift the rod one inch too far, and the core’s crazy, you’re plastered on account of the ceiling. —Mac Wellman’s Cellophane By the time Marjorie Perloff would write the foreword to the 2001 Cellophane: Plays by Mac Wellman, she would note that, in addition to Bertolt Brecht, Samuel Beckett, Sam Shepard, and Harold Pinter, Mac Wellman also “recalls . . . the language poets–BruceAndrews, Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery–who are his contemporaries.”1 Wellman, a prolific experimental playwright, has corresponded with Bernstein at least since 1977,2 and among Wellman’s extensive bicoastal associates is the Language poet Douglas Messerli, founder of Sun and Moon Press of Los Angeles. Wellman, described as a “language” writer by New York Times reviewer Mel Gussow in 1990,3 is identified as a Language poet in 2008 by Helen Shaw in her foreword to Wellman’s third major play collection. Shaw writes that Wellman “has been the deconstructionists’ mountaintop; he has read the very choppy tablets given down by the Black Mountain gang and the Language Poets (he is one). But he also returns to us [in the theatre] with their message.”4 Shaw’s identification of Wellman as a Language poet in no way diminishes his importance in the theatre, although his first plays were radio plays adapted from his poetry, and his dramatic works, always off-beat, suggest his “poetical” preoccupation with producing unconventional and emphatically non-didactic effects through linguistic and theatrical means. His plays have appeared in New York and on the West Coast since the late 1970s, when he was quickly successful in winning grants and awards for his plays, as well as forming important theatre relationships. The one with En Garde Arts director Anne Hamburger led to the site-specific plays Crowbar, at the Victory Theatre on Broadway, and Bad Penny at Bow Bridge, in Central Park. Wellman and composer David Lang collaborated on The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. Collections of Wellman’s plays have been published by major Keith Appler teaches at the University of Macau and writes on plays and institutionality in the 1980s and 1990s. 70 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism academic presses, among them Johns Hopkins University Press and University of Minnesota Press. His prominence as a playwright rose in the mid- to late 1980s with bicoastal productions and important notice in the New York Times and in American Theatre magazine, and publication in Yale’s Theater journal of his first manifesto (“The Theatre of Good Intentions”) attacking middlebrow theatre. The study which follows focuses on two of three plays associated with an experiment in “bad writing,” Cellophane and Terminal Hip, that stand apart in Wellman’s always-experimental drama as his most sustained use of nonsense to produce non-meaningful effects. Less will be said about Three Americanisms, the third play in the bad-writing series, which takes a new direction. However, all three of these plays demonstrate Wellman’s strong affinity with Language poetry, which emerges most clearly in them just as deconstruction and chaos theory are becoming conversant with one another. While the Language poets, who emerged in the late 1970s, are a heterogeneous group,5 they have tended to be politically progressive, theory-driven, and modernist in their self-definition. This modernism registers in Charles Bernstein’s 1992 declaration that “[w]e can act: we are not trapped in the postmodern condition if we are willing to differentiate between works of art that suggest new ways of conceiving our present world and those that seek rather to debunk any possibilities of meaning.”6 At the same time, the Language poets eschew binary and linear thinking, and have absorbed deconstruction in their poetry and their theories. By way of a notion of the deconstructive “general economy” of language, Bernstein and McCaffery agree that forms of expression (letters, words, images, sounds, gestures–language in its materiality) are of a completely different order from the institutions (contents of expression) in which they are situated or the official narratives (forms of content) with which...