Rings around America: Wellman and Mee Wax Allegorical

Spring, 2001, Actors Theater of Louisville (ATL) held its twenty-fifth annual Humana Festival. Perhaps it was the un-Armageddon shock of the yawning millennium, perhaps to honor the silver anniversary of the festival of New American Plays, perhaps coincidence, but two of the festival's playwrights took up the adrenaline optimism, circuitous rationalization, denial, potential, and disappointments of America. Mac Wellman's Description Beggared; or, an Allegory of WHITENESS, commissioned by ATL, is a dizzying excavation of the cultural dross trickling down from the upper tax bracket. bobrauschenbergamerica, Charles L. Mee's play, takes artist Robert Rauschenberg's collages as a template for America, with the heartland as its nucleus, radiating out.

Wellman's landscape of the ruling class is improbably white--clothing, hair, snow, skin. The stage is in the round, with a floor painted in concentric rings of white and less white, simultaneously a rug and target for the family reunion atop it. At the edge of the millennium, on the fringes of a Rhode Island swollen to continent-size, the Ring Family has gathered for their portrait. Like a blacklight, Wellman reveals the grotesque pallor of their whiteness, with its implications of unsullied purity and its underlying reality of delusion and erasure.

The Outermost Rings, white-clad barons of a dwindling mechanical flea circus fortune, include the grandmother, two aunts, and an uncle to Louisa, the so-called Ninny, with her peroxide hair, all innocence and discomfort in her designer whites. Something, as usual in a Wellman universe, is dreadfully wrong. On the one hand, the family positions itself squarely at the far end of the twentieth century; on the other, the musicians and photographer hired for the event are dressed in low Victoriana: time itself has unraveled. Aunt Julia is "the Eraser," because her visits are followed by strange disappearances (like the last two letters of her mother's title: she is now Moth). Uncle Frasier won't allow his picture to be taken, having learned from his time with the natives of the Telegu Archipelago, a remote corner of Rhode Island, that photography erases the human soul. Frasier is visited by a Polaroid-taking dwarf and sent to meet his "Disputant," played by the same actress who portrays Louisa. This Disputant, with the legal implications of her title, gives the first hint that the Rings' entitlement is precariously founded, the first hint that the universe may demand a reckoning. She scorns and cross-examines him about his crimes and those of the other Frasier Outermost Rings (he is the fourth). After evading her questions, he confesses to selling his soul (or that of another Frasier) to the "Adversary" (the Devil?) for a wooden nickel and, by concealing his crimes, initiating the legacy of erasure in the family. As he leaves, his Disputant and her assistants chant: "And what will you say to the white zebra?"

Returning to the family house, he indeed meets a zebra, and begins to tell it a story. A snowstorm overwhelms them before he finishes. The final scene finds Moth informing Louisa that Frasier will never return because he could not complete his chronicle. After Moth finishes the narrative about the 1939 Winter War in Finland, she leaves Louisa, who recalls her childhood games--spinning and spinning until she no longer remembered where she started or stopped. She discovered that if she asked questions of other people after these games, they lost the ability to resist her; she could erase their will, and ultimately their entire consciousness. The women return and, without Frasier, the picture can be taken, the finale ("White as Sin") is sung, and the world spins on in its creepy (dis)order.

There are flashes of nonwhite--the red fez on the dwarf, a musician's brassy hair and brown Dickensian dress, the "bad jazz" growing fierce and intrusive on the edges of the family's pale citadel. Where class is staged with color and noise, race is...