Oedipus and Other Impracticalities

At least twenty years have passed since a roundup of a New York theater season (or half season, as the case must be here) could sensibly begin with any sort of towering intellectual reproof or incendiary call to rebellion. I sometimes think of the current cultural moment as having shifted allegiances from Andre Gregory’s character in My Dinner with Andre, impractical, world traveling, in search of wondrous experiences, to Wallace Shawn’s more grounded and commonsensical figure, who listens closely to Gregory for over an hour and then bursts out with a defense of theater made from the more mundane material at hand, life as harried and anxious New Yorkers must live and feel it. These characters were always opposing sides of the same theatrical dream, but affiliations change with age. We’re living today in the era of Shawn, whose artistic spirit is that of pragmatic impracticality, stealth and subterfuge in the face of smug and ubiquitous functionality.

The past two New York seasons each began with a gloriously impractical project in this spirit, capable of reassuring anyone with flagging faith that this medium besieged by film and television can still command an immediate and sensuous power specific to it. Last year the project was More Stately Mansions at New York Theater Workshop, an unfinished Eugene O’Neill text that the Flemish director Ivo van Hove lucidly transformed into a thrilling, ferally physical struggle (partly nude) that blithely bypassed the pretext of the text’s psychological surface. This year it was Oedipus at Classic Stage Company, written and directed by Dare Clubb, which also beautifully demonstrated what theater looks like when it unquestionably needs to be theater. Part of the interest of this four-hour production was that, heady and excessive as it was, it lured numerous excellent actors away from flourishing film and television careers—the twelve-member cast included Frances McDormand, Billy Crudup, Jeffrey Donovan, John de Vries, Kevin Geer, and Carolyn McCormick.

Clubb’s Oedipus is an original play, not a modernization of Sophocles, and it has some problems (chiefly a needlessly explanatory final act that retreats from the liberating realm of discursive fantasy that distinguishes the rest). The sheer ambition behind the project, however, as well as the quality of this production, was extraordinary. Clubb had obviously been through prolonged mental and spiritual conflict, not only with himself but with the whole canon of modern drama. Ibsen, Strindberg, Büchner, Chekhov, Pirandello, Beckett, and Brecht were only the most obvious voices in his densely allusive text, which confronted the knottiest and most unfashionable questions about fate and free will with disarming frontality, canniness, and zeal.

The basic difference between this Oedipus and most other dramatic versions of the myth (including Sophocles’ and Cocteau’s) is that Clubb’s protagonist doesn’t try heroically to elude his horrific fate but rather rushes headlong to embrace it, possessed by the idea that such self-actualization (as we might call it), even if disgraceful to some humans, is the only way to honor himself in the eyes of the gods. Twenty years old and played gently, reflectively, and with marvelously intelligent diffidence by the lanky Crudup, Oedipus becomes a criminal in the name of “divinity” in the first act (killing his adoptive father, Polybus), then embarks on a fantastical, would-be epic journey to the limits of his mind in order to figure out what he really knows—about who he is and, therefore, what he’s destined to do.

A main source of the work’s wonderfully peculiar seriocomedy is that Merope, his adoptive mother, is tormented by an inappropriate, Phaedra-like passion for him, which McDormand acts with unforgettable magisterial nervousness. Ferociously ardent, dangerously overwound, stomping barefoot from place to place as if caged, yet always centered and sonorous, she seems to channel energy from beneath the raw stage boards. Then the action moves to a wholly imaginary plane akin to the distorting-mirror world of Peer Gynt, in which Oedipus, accompanied by his nihilistic, Valerio-like friend Teiresias, moves through scenes that have almost no temporal fixity, each providing a different twisted reflection of him whose implications he fails to heed. Clubb proved to be a shrewd director with a keen sense of how to lighten his chilly and complex talk about fate and the destructive power of words with an atmosphere of grave silliness. This was a rare event, the more so for being an American play not written by Wallace Shawn or Richard Foreman that risked unabashed intellectualism.

Two other marvelous projects differently saturated with utopian impracticality were Impossible Marriage at Roundabout Theater, the first new play by Beth Henley to open in New York in many years, and Marco Polo Sings a Solo, the first production of the Signature Theater’s season of John Guare works—a play written in 1973 and not produced in New York since 1977. Both these productions flew in the face of popular expectations about these established authors, and both were inspiring reminders that, in the right hands, avant-gardist designs are not necessarily muted and blunted but can still be potent and provocative within thoroughly institutional circumstances.

The action of Impossible Marriage takes place in the lush garden of a Savannah country estate where Kandall Kingsley (Lois Smith) is preparing to host the wedding of her gamine of a daughter, Pandora (Gretchen Cleevely). Pandora’s older but scarcely more earthbound sister Floral (Holly Hunter), who is to all appearances nine and a half months pregnant even though she later reveals that her extremely handsome and solicitous husband never makes love to her, has decided that Pandora’s engagement is inappropriate and determines to stop the wedding. Floral has never met the fiancé, a well-known novelist named Edvard Lunt (Christopher McCann) whom she presumes is too old, and much of the humor and poignancy in the play stems from the fact that both she and her mother, whose marriages have been disastrous, assume they are better judges of marriage than flighty and callow Pandora.

Also key to the story is a too easily overlooked minister, who has been away in Nigeria, and Lunt’s angry, maladjusted son from a previous marriage, whom Lunt doesn’t recognize at first (“I never know what to say to children”). The compelling strangeness of the work is partly due to the pairing of these characters into seemingly inappropriate couples and partly a product of the action’s deliberate staginess. Characters enter and immediately state their personal philosophies to others they barely know, or melodramatically confess their actual motivations to those they think are adversaries, eliciting startlingly sensitive responses. Everyone pauses for poses, epigrams, and arch, overrehearsed line readings that ought to annoy but instead create rich questions about collusion and trust. All of this struck me as so original and brave, such a marvelously wacky departure from Henley’s largely realistic past work, that I was indifferent to the numerous bumps in Stephen Wadsworth’s production (whose uneven cast—the delightful Hunter notwithstanding—prevented the humor from finding a consistent ground).

The situation with Guare was similar. For anyone who knew this author only from his more famous works—Six Degrees of Separation, House of Blue Leaves, and the screenplay for Atlantic City—Marco Polo Sings a Solo probably came as something of a shock. Many of the actors in Mel Shapiro’s production certainly looked shocked, probably due to anxiety about the solidity of their roles, but after a while their apparent apprehension blended effectively into the play. Marco Polo is tight enough in its way, and it contains many of Guare’s characteristic themes, but it isn’t a product of the sort of slick professional control, which sometimes borders on glibness, that marks his later style. It seems rather the work of a young man who, uncertain as yet what he thinks of glibness, pushes it to the nth degree in a mad rush of sincerity. It’s as if he wrote this play with feverish imaginative abandon, succumbing to a furious associational binge from which he then managed to step back and shape a powerful and prescient drama that has aged better than any of his other self-consciously goofy plays from the same period.

The action (which defies summary after a point) takes place in the spring of 1999 on an iceberg off the coast of Norway, where the director Stony McBride—played by Bruce Norris with a permanently bemused expression that made him seem like the only fully comfortable cast member—is shooting a film about Marco Polo. Stony has five thousand Chinese extras and a Great Wall carved out of ice at his disposal, but he nevertheless appears as a distracted, ethereal soul with career uncertainties and dreams of space travel—his chief fixation being the astronaut Frank Schaeffer, a national hero currently exploring other planets. Seven other characters also show up on the iceberg—including McBride’s wife, Diane; a virile, egomaniacal politico named Tom Wintermouth, with whom she’s having an affair; and Frank, who returns from space to find his black American wife, Skippy, working as Freydis, the McBrides’ Norwegian maid. Every character turns out to be in the grip of a self-focused obsession symptomatic (we infer) of civilization at the millennial crossroads.

Miraculous surgery allowing a man to impregnate himself, the cure for cancer brandished and then lost, news of a planet where the plants produce multitudes of tiny living replicas of whoever is visiting: mania for individual grandeur has left everyone on this iceberg-world without a sense of firm ground beneath their feet—a dilemma extraordinarily similar to the exaggerated self-actualization of Clubb’s Oedipus. It’s the sheer reckless extravagance of Guare’s action that keeps it from collapsing into platitudes (about, say, technological overreaching, or the “me” generation). His very profligacy of invention made one trust him as a sort of seer. A video projection of a ridiculous Doll House production performed entirely on trampolines, for instance, raised questions about the trivial purposes to which so much miraculous technology has been dedicated in the past generation (recall that video projectors didn’t exist in 1973). And Skippy/Freydis’s flight from a rape by anonymous forces at the White House, followed by her impregnation by colored bolts containing Frank’s semen, recalled public sex scandals from the Kennedys to Clinton and any number of other troubling connections between mass media and the erosion of privacy. For a play written on such a broad canvas during the Nixon administration to speak in such clear tones to the information age is remarkable.

Apropos mass media, the most chewed-on bone among New York theater commentators these days is the presumptive crisis of aging theater audiences supposedly caused by the media’s greater youth appeal (the average age of a Broadway theatergoer is currently forty-one). Indeed, if there is a silver lining to the Disneyfication of Broadway, to the increasingly common use of huge Broadway houses for salary-saving solo shows like John Leguizamo’s Freak, and to the ascendancy of pandering media simulations like Footloose and Stupid Kids, it’s that all of these are modestly successful efforts to attract fresh young faces to the theater. The only “youth drama” I’ve seen recently, however, that truly reaches beyond sentimentalism, shallow idolatry, and voyeurism, looking and listening to kids in a spirit truly open to surprising or disturbing discovery, is Kenneth Lonergan’s This Is Our Youth, directed at Second Stage by Mark Brokaw.

This Is Our Youth is set in 1982 in a grungy studio apartment on the Upper West Side, where twenty-year-old Dennis Ziegler lives at his parents’ expense, deals drugs, watches the tube, and occasionally talks himself into believing he’s preparing for a bright future in business. The practical business consciousness and acquisitiveness of the Reagan era are the play’s implicit political context. One night after midnight, Dennis gets a surprise visit from his friend Warren Straub—a dropout from a college in Ohio that’s never named—who’s just been thrown out by his father. In his fit of pique before leaving, Warren grabbed $15,000 in cash his dad happened to leave lying around, and the play ostensibly revolves around the question of how, or if, he’ll return it after spending some on drugs and an overnight date at the Plaza Hotel.

For all the audience can see, though, the vindictive specter of Warren’s dad, a rich lingerie merchant, is a figment of Dennis’s sensational imagination. Dad doesn’t track Warren down until near the end of the second act, and there’s never much sense of real danger about the money. Lonergan shrewdly uses a faux crisis about money, as well as the entrance of a beautiful and bright but confused teenager named Jessica Goldman, to reveal Dennis and Warren in pathetic, funny, and sometimes admirable detail—and also to bring their friendship to poignant crisis.

Dennis, a smirking, laid-back prince who doesn’t seem sure whether to cheat, beat, or help his so-called friend, spreads himself proprietarily across his big mattress (practically his only furniture), as if the whole world were poised to hear every mean-spirited little pseudophilosophical pearl he lets fly. Skinny, burned-out Warren is a dim-witted klutz who, in the face of Dennis’s bullying, tells dud jokes and wears the permanent scowl of someone just smart enough to understand there’s a lot getting past him. Then, as soon as Jessica arrives, he stops fidgeting and chewing on his sweatshirt strings and proves surprisingly articulate and perceptive. Brokaw has captured the tone and aroma of this milieu of dead-end privilege perfectly—the anxious malaise, the intellect-denying slacker parlance, the looming spiritual emptiness filled (in Dennis’s case) with mercenary bravado born of Jewish anti-Semitism. (“Don’t ever try to out-Jew me, little man. I’m twice the Jew you’ll ever be. I’m like a Jewish god. I’m like—Jewlius Caesar!”) The production felt so fundamentally truthful in the end that even the slightly creaky plot twists (involving a sister of Warren’s who was murdered and the sale of a suitcase full of his childhood memorabilia) came off as touching and inevitable.

Lonergan’s disinterest in the sort of pseudodangerous sexy images of youth that normally serve as the bread and circuses of the media age was his “impracticality.” Margaret Edson’s, in writing Wit (produced at MCC Theater), was much more straightforward: she simply took as her topic a particularly galling instance of functionality in our age—the handling of death by medical institutions. The dramatic appeal of patients dying of explicit causes in hospitals is hardly news, of course. We’ve seen this used as an occasion for sentimental stories about bitterness and reconciliation (Terms of Endearment, Longtime Companion, One True Thing), as a platform for legal and political argument (Whose Life Is It Anyway?, As Is), and (probably most often, on the tube) as a scarcely covert means of glorifying medical institutions and justifying docile submission to them. The clinical specificity we think we crave in the name of realism, though, usually stands in the way of real rumination on mortality—encouraging fascination with, say, arrangements of IV tubes, shades of skin pallor, and details of hair loss over considered thought about what death might have to teach us about our moral and social self-image, or more pointedly, thought about whether we’re really ready to settle for the byte-size place in the universe that technology is mapping out for us.

On the surface, Wit would seem to be part of the problem. This first play by a Georgia elementary school teacher who once worked in a cancer ward deals with a prominent literature professor dying of ovarian cancer. Professor Vivian Bearing’s condition is discovered so late that her only hope is to submit to an experimental, uniquely arduous, eight-month regimen of chemotherapy. Being a tough and deliberative researcher herself—a specialist in the “holy sonnets” of John Donne—she sees merit in the pure acquisition of knowledge and spends much of the action describing her condition and treatment in duly particularized monologues that seem to mirror the culture’s obsession with pathology in lieu of death. The medical apparatus is more dehumanizing than she anticipated—even her own doctors seem more interested in writing a paper on her ovaries than in her recovery or humanity—and her chief weapon of self-defense is wit, her own tempered by Donne’s.

The blatant schematism (and hence functionalism) of this setup promises nothing, nor does the clichéd presentation of a professor as someone whose head and vocabulary are always in the clouds. This lack of promise, however, turns out to be crucial to the author’s point. Wit is a disconcertingly restrained conception whose seeming obviousness is the main source of its strength in the end. The play offers no hint for a long while of the emotional intensity it will generate.

Wearing two hospital gowns and with her head shaved beneath a bright red baseball cap, Kathleen Chalfant as Bearing enters through the audience, wheeling an IV stand like a dog on a leash, and says, “Hi. How are you feeling today?” with marvelous mock geniality. Tough and sinewy yet tenaciously curious and buoyant, she immediately wins affection and respect. (“‘How are you feeling today?’ I am waiting for the moment when someone asks me this question and I am dead.”) At the same time, some spectators may not realize that this affection is based on a paradox: a woman who has long lived mostly inside her fine head, and is further isolated by her disease (the false solicitude of medical workers being the least of it), now reaches for communal contact in the guise of an amiable theatrical narrator commenting on herself.

The whole upbeat spirit of the play depends on maintaining this ticklish contradiction, which Chalfant does with panache. She’s witty but never self-pitying (“What’s left to puke? You may remark that my vocabulary has taken a turn for the Anglo-Saxon”), and she’s adept at addressing the audience confidentially, without falling into tones too chatty for us to accept as the professor’s second self. At times in this production directed by Derek Anson Jones, Chalfant’s narrator seems like the sympathetic teacher Professor Bearing says she never could be (perhaps judging herself too harshly).

In any case, the main reason apart from Chalfant that the play gathers such emotional steam is that Edson has pared the story down to essentials. Bearing receives no visitors until she is past coherent conversation in the penultimate scene. “That won’t be necessary,” she says when her doctor offers to contact someone. We meet her father, her mentor, and her students in flashbacks, but no unfinished business with relatives or friends complicates the present-tense action, and no eleventh-hour love interest threatens to turn it pseudotragic. Bearing eventually accepts some tender ministrations from a kindhearted nurse, but apart from that and her witty remarks to the audience, she is a wholly isolated figure whose every movement, decision, and point of analysis about Donne therefore takes on a figural flavor. To what extent, Edson asks without answering, have we all sacrificed crucial bits of our humanity by accepting insularity and fragmentation (in scholarship and elsewhere) as normal aspects of modern life?

Wit was the least likely candidate among these productions for inclusion in a list of fall high points, precisely because its moral appeal is so explicitly summarizable. Its field of moral inquiry, however—the limits of our faith in clinical accuracy—was so powerful in performance that it ultimately came to seem like a revelatory context for everything else. Its effect put me in mind of the character Jack in Wallace Shawn’s play The Designated Mourner, who feels he has “accompanied [his] life with a sort of endless inner tinkling, an endless noodling or murmuring . . . of reportage and opinions, idiotic arpeggios of self-approbation.” In the midst of anti-intellectual purges and terror, Jack starts telling people that he’s “always really been a lowbrow at heart,” and in the end, his chilling description of the brave new world he has come to represent is one in which “everyone . . . who could read John Donne was now dead.” “I thought I heard John Donne crying into a handkerchief as he fell through the floor—plummeting fast through the earth on his way to Hell,” he says, lighting a pathetically diminuitive flame for the extinguished highbrow clan to which he once belonged. “His name, once said by so many to be ‘immortal,’ would not be remembered, it turned out. The rememberers were gone, except for me, and I was forgetting.”