Bartleby in Brooklyn: A Review of "Bartleby, A Rereading"

Bartleby in Brooklyn: A Review of “Bartleby, A Rereading” A Group Theory production. Conceived and directed by Ben Vershbow, coproduced and designed with Dorit Avganim. With: Jeremy Beck, Daniel Larlham , and Craig Pattison. Presented April 23-25, 2010 at Triple Canopy, 177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, NY. I have to say that when I was asked to view this staged “re-reading” of “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and to give some after remarks (along with novelist Joseph McElroy and critic Vivian Gornick), the scrivener’s familiar words were the first that came to mind. I have witnessed enough Melville theatricals—mostly of Moby-Dick—to know just how hard it is to put Melville’s language on stage without undermining its power with stumping melodrama and creaky stagecraft. My last experience with an attempt to stage Melville’s classic short story, “Bartleby,” a 1991 reader’s theatre production by wellknown New York professionals, proved to be stultifyingly tedious. Therefore, I didn’t have great expectations for a production by several young “unknowns” in Brooklyn. But from the moment the lights went out, I was transfixed by this funny, haunting, innovative, and very smart interpretation. This was a minimalist “black box” production. An audience of 35 sit close together on three sides of the room. Three actors sit facing each other at a desk table crammed with books and stacks of papers; each has a gooseneck lamp beside him. Behind the actors hangs a floor to ceiling “tapestry” of neatly and consecutively arranged pages of Melville’s text, photocopied from the first-edition version of the tale in Melville’s short story collection, The Piazza Tales. The reading begins in darkness: a voice gives us, word for word, the copyright notice one finds facing the volume’s title page. My immediate thought, out of the darkness, was, “Oh, lord, we are in for a long night.” But my second thought was accompanied by a surge of adrenalin. This seemingly naı̈ve reading of the copyright notice, for god’s sake, signals to all listeners the published-ness of the text. This “Rereading” of “Bartleby”—as the playbill announces it—will be a “Reading” in the most fundamental sense of the word. That is, not only will we be seduced into imagining characters interacting, but also we will be hearing each word of the text as it is printed on the page, including the “paratext” that precedes the tale, which locates the book as a C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 125 J O H N B R Y A N T material object in time and place. This will not be a theatrical adaptation or dramatic “realization” of the story. It will be a rendering of print into voices, in the dark? Daniel Larlham, Craig Pattison, and Jeremy Beck performing in “Bartleby: A Rereading,” a Group Theory production. Immediately, with “I am a rather elderly man,” the lights come on. And we find our three actors reading, one at a time. At this moment, we cannot help understanding that, as these three vocalize “Bartleby” while seated in front of the print tapestry of “Bartleby,” two kinds of performance are entwined. The “reading” is indisputably a performance of Melville’s text, but also on display is the fact that the very “print” they read is itself an enactment of Melville’s inscription, which is itself a performance of the “Bartleby” of Melville’s creative moment. As it turns out, what the program’s producer-director very aptly then calls a “re-reading” is every bit, too, an adaptation, that is, a unique, interpretive rendering of “Bartleby”—even though not a word or scene has been sacrificed. The theatrical challenge of “Bartleby” is that it is a long short story told through a single (and famously complicated, some would say unreliable ) narrator. The lawyer-narrator’s development through his telling of his 126 L E V I A T H A N...