What Ever: A Living Novel (review)

Like its characters, who are persistently traveling (by thumb, by air, by rail, by broomstick), Heather Woodbury's What Ever has taken a creative journey. The piece originated as The Heather Woodbury Report: thirty-seven half-hour solo episodes produced over nine months, from September 1994 to May 1995, in an East Village musician's club. Woodbury, called a "one-woman Dickens" by Laurie Anderson, invented, enacted, and intertwined the lives of hundreds of characters in her Report. When itmoved to established venues, like Chicago's Steppenwolf in 1998, the piece was condensed into four consecutive two-hour evenings and retitled What Ever: An American Odyssey in 8 Acts. In Chicago, it was also broadcast in its entirety on WBEZ, allowing spectators to witness one or more evenings at the theatre and hear the rest on the radio. Now the piece has been novelized, its name changed to What Ever: A Living Novel. In this most recent iteration, Woodbury's saga successfully maintains its distinctly oral quality as well as the vibrant form of the serial.

On stage, the virtuousity of Woodbury's achievement is twofold; not only has one mind engendered these hundred characters, but one body enacts them. Sometimes, five or more of her characters are in conversation. Certainly, Woodbury's work has its formal analogue in Jane Wagner and Lily Tomlin's Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. But its content, too, is indebted: the disaffected punk rocker of Signs becomes What Ever'sdisaffected raver, the gutsy bag lady becomes a gutsy Hell's Kitchen whore, the absent father is still the absent father. And like Tomlin or even Anna Deveare Smith, Woodbury is masterful in her realization of a vast repertoire of characters.

In the transformation to novel, however, Woodbury's performative presence is removed; it is left for the reader to interpolate the sound of the now disembodied voices and their myriad dialects. Still, Woodbury has done an outstanding job of creating texture through idiomatic spellings: from Violet Smith, an Upper East Side octogenarian who announces her well-honed formula for surviving disappointment in distinctly blue-blooded tones, to Bushie, a poetically foul-mouthed streetwalker "in a one woman war with the yuppie condo owners of West Forty-fifth Street" (xvi). Skeeter, a young Oregonian raver, responds to a New Yorker's mockery of his dialect with, "Er, tune yer ear, Spaz, did I employ the term 'gnarly' er 'surf some waves'? Unless my tongue-brain coordination is grievously lapsed, I venture tuh state it was yerself that made use of these flaccid terminologies. Perchance you've only skimmed left coast jargon through th' televised scope?" (152). Through her own exquisitely "tuned" ear, Woodbury's prose bursts into Twainian glory, capturing the multifarious American idiom of the twenty-first century.

In his classic 1919 work on the linguistic peculiarities of what he dubbed The American Language,H. L. Mencken wrote, "Let it be admitted, American is not infrequently vulgar; the Americans, too, are vulgar; . . . But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making" (27). It is precisely this idealized vulgarity that Woodbury's characters express. And Woodbury is not unaware of what she's doing, although she articulates the awareness late in the book. One suspects, in fact, that this was a discovery made on the tongue, as she moved through her Odyssey. In chapter six, part six, Skeeter advises Job ("as in: git one") to experiment with his favorite word, "henchmen":

JOB: Yeah. I have tuh figure a time tuh use it.

SKEETER: Thur yuh go.

[231]

Later still, in the final chapter of the final act, the characters, caught in a web of doubled (and mistaken) identities, shift into Elizabethan-tinged pentameter. Woodbury introduces this "stage direction," magnificent in its overreaching: "a much-used and yellowed copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare lies...