Review of Maudie and Jane at the Living Theater

Aside from jingoistic battle hymns, fairy tale romances and major league sports, one of the central props of the mass media’s impoverished offerings is a poisoned humanism. One can easily picture what the extraordinary play at the Living Theater, Maudie and Jane, would have been if the writer, director and actors had wanted to create a work in this category. (I am noting this only so as to be able to subsequently show how valiantly Maudie and Jane repudiates the reigning pseudo-humanism.)

If the work had been written this way, the magazine executive Jane would have been (eventually) elevated by stumbling into the reclusive, miserable old lady Maudie in the pharmacy. She would have begun to sympathize with the elderly woman, then realized that she (Jane) had repressed her own life-affirming traits, which now begin to flower in the embrace of this downtrodden figure. Jane is reborn, in such a version, and goes back to reform her corporation.

This theme, that of a hardnosed, repressed insider who is taught to “smell the daisies’ by an eccentric outsider has been the subject of innumerable plays and films, from Herb Gardiner’s A Thousand Clowns (the masterpiece of the genre) on to The Dead Poets’ Society to Irma la Douce and The Madwoman of Chaillot.

And it is always a lie. For one, it avoids the reality of social problems by, using the imaginary case we are considering, representing all indigents in one person whose mission is not to further her own life projects so much as to aid a repressed bureaucrat or corporate underling to improve her own existence. And, even aside from this and other alibis contained in such works, the topic has now been so worked to death that a current production can only evoke a response from the audience through Pavlovian means.

But now let’s talk about how the Living Theater handles the subject. And, to start, we can rewrite one of Althusser’s most celebrated lines, substituting for the word “Marxism” in this way: Anarchism is not a humanism.”

Maudie and Jane, which superficially follows the oft-rehearsed plot line of regeneration through slumming, is actually deadset against it. The play’s premise is rather that, if such a friendship between high and low were to arise, it would not solve Jane’s work problems, would not make her a better person outside the singular connection to Maudie, and would not diminish the crushing injustice of society.

The second point is the most important. Jason Robards in A Thousand Clowns or Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society, each playing the eccentric, do not alter their personalities. They are present only as catalysts to inspire the uptight character. In Maudie and Jane, by contrast, the drama is divided between the characters; each of whom is closed off by different doors: Jane by the siege mentality of the corporate office where protecting one’s turf is key; Maudie in reaction to having been betrayed by her husband and mishandled by social agencies. The play’s question is: Can they establish trust, which entails each becoming less defensive and dropping some treasured prejudices.

Moreover – and here’s the greatest rebuke to Hollywood humanism that can be imagined – because the two are from different worlds and speak incompatible languages, they cannot grow close by means of grasping each other’s verbal meanings. They have to approach through the physical, via action.

No matter how sick Maudie is, having a coughing fit or pissing her bed, she still makes Jane tea. And Jane shows her solidarity by her own actions: washing Maudie’s floor, changing the kitty litter, even bathing the older woman in a scene of tremendous visceral force.

And, note, voice-over narration is used to astutely suggest, in line with this theme, the disvalue of words as methods of building contact. Each time Maudie or Jane grow physically closer, one hears a voiceover disavowing the sympathy. Jane is saying, for instance, something like, “What am I doing with this woman? This is the last time I’ll ever spend time with her. I hate her.” Meanwhile, their ties deepen.

As to the actresses, with Judith Malina as Maudie and Monica Hunken as Jane, since it is the physical that primarily draws them closer, each must convey the pair’s (always wary) intimacy through gestures, mincing steps, sounds, head wags. The moves have been so perfectly chosen and played, with such expressive grace, that I (who see a lot of theater) can’t help but say the two women display the consummate displays of acting we are likely to see this generation.

But, to return to the argument, the increasing devotion of the women to each other does not improve Jane’s work life (as it would in a humanist version). Instead of reinvigorating her for the corporate realm, she quits her job.

And it does not improve class relations in Britain. In another flourish that makes against besotted humanism, when Jane finally gets Maudie to leave her flat and visit the park, after observing the birds (as they would in the Hollywood version), the women note the wrecking ball demolishing a building and leading the charge to level Maudie’s neighborhood.

All in all, the work moves at a remarkable level of intensity and headiness, reaching, at points, as at the bathing scene, to the power of a fully realized sacred ritual. By violently breaking with the saccharine conventions of a humanist treatment, the play is able to register new, emergent levels of feeling

But why do I call it (in citing Althusser) and now label it a supreme anarchist work of art? Because it presents one guiding (near blinding) truth of the political movement. That the moment one removes – dares to remove – the authority lines that govern all human relations in capitalism, for instance, the lines that declare the rich Jane can have no concourse with the indigent Maudie, then two people can, unprecedentedly, meet face to face and give birth to gut-wretching hope.

Martin Reckhaus, John Kohan, Jessica Slote, and Sheila Dabney in “The Man who Appear**ed.” photo by chantel cherisse lucier

Gaze and Affect: A Review of “The Man Who Appear**ed.”

By Anitta Santiago

“The Man Who Appear**ed.” a New Science Production now running at the Theater for the New City brings a remarkable innovation on meta-theatricality. The premise is a film adaptation of Clarice Lispector’s short story, “The Man Who Appeared.” Not exactly the Kaufman-esque meta-theatricality of adaptation that turns the camera on the filmmaker to tell a story, the play brings film into the theater to do what film cannot do for itself: it turns the camera on the viewer—literally (but more on that later) to probe how we access a story at all.

The first thing the audience encounters is a wall with three windows, a door, and a screen framed like the windows (set design: Gary Brackett). Throughout the play, actors appear at each opening while the screen shows images, mostly of the action at the center window, so that one is always looking through frames, through the wall, struggling through all the frames to get the whole picture. The screen images are further complicated with overlapping images of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and filmed scenes of the adaptation, putting on display how mediated our experience is.

The actors work through this meta-theatrical, hyper-mediated production seamlessly, each participating in the latticework to produce a crystalline performance. Sheila Dabney plays “the Woman,” Lispector’s main character. John Kohan appears as the “the Man” or Claudio Brito, an old friend and poet from the writer’s past, now a drunk. Martin Reckhaus, Jessica Slote, and Asoka Esuruosa complete the cast as the director, the writer, and the cinematographer, respectively.

There are these wonderful moments with Reckhaus and Esuruosa where the audience is unsure if the “mistakes”—such as a lost feed—belong to the play or are “really” happening, a way to make that meta-theatrical questioning of the “real” really present in the technological absence. One could go into a Zizekian contemplation here, but I won’t. The distinctions between the real and artificial, always complex in the meta-theatrical are, in any event, here more complicated.

On the one hand, the actors playing actors explore the artificiality of performance. In the most repeated scene, the Woman encourages the Man to cry. “Off camera,” we have seen the Writer give the Man tips on how to cry, delivering his line “And here I am, drinking coffee and crying.” We have heard these lines delivered and immediately recovered from after the Director shouts “Cut!” and while these are humorous, self-conscious meta-theatrical moments, they are made more bewildering by the fact that we feel the lines more and more as they are repeated.

In another scene, Dabney walks through the door delivering a monologue, with the cinematographer filming and repeating every line she says. The repetition of the words with Esuruosa’s subtle inflections gives them a new import, so that they do not seem to belong solely to the Woman. The words take on a life of their own, telling, as it were, their own story. Every time the Writer repeats the lines “it’s a terrible impotence not knowing how to help,” they ring of deeper sadness and impotence, as though the words themselves confess that confessing impotence does not alleviate the impotence.

Similarly, the “mania for offering people coffee and Coca-Cola” gets repeated in a meta-theatrical wink in a scene between the Man and the Woman “off camera.” The Woman offers and serves the Man Coca-Cola, not as Lispector’s character, but as herself, and says of herself “I’m very simple. There’s nothing complicated about me”—blurring the lines between actor and character, and winking to the audience that there is something indeed very complicated about her, about all the characters/actors, about the status of person in general.

It is the repetition and recycling of lines among characters that seems to move the story forward. Repetition becomes the greatest deliverer of the lines, a character unto itself, not as a single entity, but as the entire cast and action and scene combined.

Dabney’s stellar performance is the unquestionable centripetal force that holds the gamut together. In one of the most moving scenes of the play, the Woman sits at the center window and, as the Man moves about in the background repeating in variations “you’re beautiful,” her eyes gradually well with tears. The Director calls ‘Cut!’ The Woman wipes her tears and the scene is rearranged, but the heart-wrenching feeling they produce in the spectator, or at least in this spectator, remains, and is real.

We try throughout the play to get a look at the whole picture, through frames and winks and feigned crying and real tears. “Look” and “wink” and “tears” are all optical words, and there is a powerful description of a game the writer plays with a cashier at a store, looking in her eyes to discern the person. We are told that the effort is futile, that the eyes are blind, that people are statues.

One of the central questions this play makes us ponder is how do we access a person’s story, how do we access another person? There are moments when the actors at the windows are doing nothing but looking at the audience. Generally, we come to a play prepared to look. We do not come prepared to be looked at. In one scene, the cast gathers around the camera, turned on the audience, approaching the audience, with the audience, then, appearing on the screen. This turns the gaze, the familiar trope in film criticism, back on the audience. As with the Woman’s tears, the reality of affect is in the audience.

In a play where the story is delivered through repetition and recycling, one cannot locate a narrative progression. It is not how the plot moves that is the focus here, but how the audience is moved. Theater can turn the camera on the viewer because the viewer is present. It can look at the viewer as the viewer looks at it and, with the innovation of the camera in theater, the viewers can see themselves looking. In this mutual gaze made possible by the theater, we access the person, because the person is you. This play accesses you and you are moved. This viewer was certainly moved.

“The Man Who Appear**ed.” Playing at the Theater for the New City.

Produced by Gary Brackett

“…a complex, witty interplay of reality and illusion….The setup leading
to this conclusion occurs in the first, breathtaking scene.”

Sheila Dabney and John Kohan perform “with riveting power. It takes one’s breath away….staples you to your seat with the raw honesty of the emotion.”

“The set is stunning.”

“It’s like being inside a poem.”

FOUR MORE PERFORMANCES of “The Man Who Appear**ed.” a new production from
the creative team of Gary Brackett, Martin Reckhaus, and Jessica Slote

Theater for the New City, 155 First Ave (between 9th and 10th Sts.)
March 6 through March 9 Tickets $15
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 3pm

LIMITED SEATING. Make your reservations now. Call 212 254-1109 or buy your tickets
online: http://www.theaterforthenewcity.net/appeared.htm

Review of The Man Who Appear**ed
(playing at the Theater for the New City, Thursday through Sunday, Feb. 28 to March 9, 2008)

Putting pretentious claims aside, I don’t think there has ever been a literary Cubist. Gertrude Stein is the writer most often denominated one, but this was more because she was in the same milieu, indeed, helped support the milieu in Paris, shared by Picasso, Braque and others in the school, than because she adopted a similar stance in prose.
I bring this up because a new play, The Man Who Appear**ed, by Gary Brackett, Martin Reckhaus and Jessica Slote, does recapture the essence of that art movement: its energetic shuffling around of a pulverized reality.
To follow the interpretation of art critic John Berger, the Cubists’ re-viewing of café tables, people and guitars had nothing to do with seeing their surroundings as many-sided and fluidly assembled (although this is the reading the art is normally given). For Berger, the crucial fact is that this art movement arose in a period (1908-1911) when a heavy tide of socialist and anarchist protests, uprisings and propaganda flowed through society, casting doubt on the longevity of the reigning capitalism. Ergo, Cubist painting showed a scene that was unstable because of the future. The painters thought it was possible business civilization was on the verge of disintegration, and that it would be replaced by council communism or cooperative anarchism. Nothing in the present, they thought, was anything but an outline, since its anchor points were about to give way.
Brackett/Reckhaus/Slote have applied a parallel Cubist view to a straightforward short story by Brazilian writer Clarisse Lispector (possibly because they share with the Cubists a sense of the fragility of contemporary social arrangements). They have applied it with this difference: Where the painters presented an individual object as a set made up of itself seen from different perspectives and in varied relations to other objects, all layered and collaged together, The Man achieves a similar effect by taking a single event — the chance meeting of old friends (one of whom, the woman, has become a successful writer, and the other, the man, a derelict) — and makes this the plot of a film being made. From this vantage, individual moments between the characters can be done more than once (to get them right), put in a rearranged sequence (since films are generally shot out of chronological order) and discussed by the actors (masks down) as they consider different ways of portrayal.
Such a basis for the unfolding tale makes for a complex, witty interplay of reality and illusion. In the role of a friend (Slote) tells the woman (Sheila Dabney) she should have acted differently in her encounter with the man (John Kohan). Later Slote (out of role) advises her fellow actor, Kohan, on a different way he might play his role in relation to Dabney. Thus, Slote’s two parts (playing an actress and that actress in part) humorously intertwine.
But to be entranced by these interlocking levels would be to miss the deeper-lying, more painful truths at the heart of the play.
If in Cubism the whole object world is shattered to show its possibly temporary existence, these writers suggest that human connections in our time are so hollow and shallow that they can only contain passion and validity if they are re-imagined (taken apart analytically, that is, shattered) and re-lived.
The setup leading to this conclusion occurs in the first, breathtaking scene. The audience is not facing a stage but a wall in which there are two small windows, one larger one, a door and a screen for projections. Dabney comes through the audience, goes in the door, and takes a chair, back to us, inside the bigger window. She is on a riser. Below her we see an empty space and, further upstage, a row of chairs. Although this is not the case, at this juncture, it seems as if we are about to view a drama over her shoulder. So, the feeling, right off the bat, is spooky, uncanny, suggesting the spectators will experience the whole play at second remove.
To repeat, then, the play’s point, that nowadays rich emotional ties can only be created through very thick mediations, is established here. It’s an idea that can be taken either negatively (underlining the insufficiency of our humanity) or positively (that this way forward can lead to a new level of experience). In any case, three scenes of magnificent power graphically show what so far might seem a rather abstract concept.

1. Dabney and Kohan sit closely together (in character) as she tries to convince him to regenerate himself. He looks listless and diffident while her face is filled with regret, compassion and concern. Here’s the surprise. Kohan faces the audience through the window. Dabney is totally turned away, facing the film’s camerawoman Asoka Esoruosa. Dabney’s face is seen projected on the wall screen, etched with feeling but flattened, mediated.
2. Slote with a seen-it-all, deadpan voice tells Kohan how she thinks he should play a part of the dialogue. Suddenly, she goes into character, his character, and her voice and face ignite with heart-wrenching unhappiness. Reenactment complete, she goes back to Buster Keaton.
3. In a tour de force à deux, Dabney and Kohan act out the scene where the derelict breaks down under the touch of his ex-friend’s solace. They do the scene with riveting power. It takes one’s breath away.

The director is not satisfied. Play it again. Astoundingly, with a reinterpretation of gestures, the second run-through is even more electrifying.
Again, not satisfied. Act it again. The third, and last, version staples you to your seat with the raw honesty of the emotion.
Yet, unsettling enough, this sequence hints that people only reach the emotional truth of their situations through repetition (something not very viable in daily life) and, moreover, more startlingly, a person seems more likely to sound her or his own depths in playing a (contrived) role not in everyday interactions.
I should say, by the way, about this pitiless director, masterly acted by Reckhaus, that he is the only person on stage who seems carried away and convincing in everything he says – that is, he never adopts the deadpan stance. But, here’s the rub. His words are almost never heard. He is talking under others or whispering instructions, so his feelings only appear in his gestures and on his expressive face.
Perhaps, I’ve already said in so many words that the set is off-putting but stunning; the lighting and screen insets well done, and the acting on-key, nuanced and strong. After all, only acting of such trenchancy could balance the intellectual complexity of this rethinking of the Cubist figuration.

“Shakespeare’s Villains: A Master Class in Evil” — Steven Berkoff’s new one-man show at The Public Theater this month — gives us more than we bargain for. The idea itself has merit: a preeminent classical actor in a one-man revue of Shakespeare’s great villains. Rather than the traditional one play, one villain — we get eight. Berkoff tears his way through the best antagonists the Bard has to offer. The list includes Iago, Richard III, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth (simultaneously), Coriolanus and even Hamlet (”What, Hamlet a villain? How can this be? He’s blonde! He’s Kenneth Branagh!”). It’s a fast-forward version of Shakespeare 101 with the teacher you always dreamed of, but probably never got.

Berkoff mixes bold physical performance with an off-the-cuff lecture style. He introduces a character, gives a brief review of motives and previous interpretations, then plunges in. Yet his rich performances and cunning insights are only a piece of it. We get something even more powerful and unsettling than top-notch stage villainy. We get Shylock.

Let me back up. Berkoff begins by telling us that villainy springs from”the absence of love or compassion.” A villain is a villain because there is something fundamentally human missing. They are lacking”the milk of human kindness.” Shakespeare’s villains take us in and win us over by sharing this emptiness. They seduce us with it. We see our personal alienations magnified in their own, and subconsciously, vicariously, relish as they take vengeance upon the world.

This identification with evil is titillating. And Berkoff’s acting skills are unsurpassed. But this is the evil of the stage; it safely resides within the bounds of fiction. It is only theater; still make-believe. Still safe.

Until Shylock appears.

“Shakespeare wrote Shylock as this filthy creature in this encrusted cap, egg sandwich in the back pocket, old coat stiff with spit. He doesn’t have the coat cleaned because he’d just be spat on the next day, and what was the point? You’d just be wasting money,” Berkoff declares. With that his back hunches, his lips curl up over his gums and saliva begins to dribble down his chin. He spits out Shylock’s words with a mixture of vehemence and ingratiating fear. This is not the noble and wronged member of a persecuted minority; this is atavistic, half man-half animal, Caliban.

Berkoff plays the Shylock of the Elizabethan stage. Outside of Nazi Germany, this bogeyman has rarely, if ever, been seen in the twentieth century. It is the embodiment of the medieval myth of the Jew, which is what Shakespeare took his inspiration from. What he wrote is not the result of contact with the Jews of his time. In all likelihood, Shakespeare never met a Jew in his life. They were expelled from England in 1290, and not readmitted till Cromwell’s revolution. English society went over three centuries without any contact with them. In this time, it was easy for the myths to take deep root.

And the myths were horrid: The Jews were mysterious, scheming and greedy. Their religion prescribed violent ritual sacrifices of Christian children. They were the delegates of Satan. They stole and hoarded money. They were the agents of enemy countries. The list goes on and on. At the root of this myth was their otherness. While Christianity rapidly spread through Europe, the Jews held fast to their old ways of life. To ensure Christianity took a strong hold, its leaders strengthened their ranks by demonizing those who differed.

Of course anyone who reads the play sees that Shakespeare created more than just a caricature. If anything, he is working against it. Shylock is human. However evil his intentions and actions are, and however unfairly the play treats him, he still generates empathy. This is what makes him dangerous.

The famous Shakespeare critic Harold Bloom wrote”One would have to be deaf, blind and dumb not to recognize that Shakespeare’s grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venic e is nevertheless a profoundly anti-Semitic work.” Shylock has lived on through the centuries because he was both grand and equivocal. If he and the play had been merely anti-Semitic, they would be a blurry memory. But he is a horrible, mythical stereotype made human. Given life and breath by the greatest poet of the English language. There’s no avoiding the fact that Shakespeare’s influence was not always benevolent.

And so, at the end of a century that has sought to infuse the stage with political correctness, we are presented with Berkoff’s racist stereotype. What does he hope to accomplish with it? His Shylock is vital because it sheds light on the play’s terrible legacy. Bloom was not alone when he observed that Merchant was”more of an incitement to anti-semitism than The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” This forgery of Jewish doctrine — written in czarist Russia and used to justify the infamous pogroms of the time — was later adopted (along with Merchant) as gospel by the Third Reich.

Watching Berkoff writhe and scheme and spit is like watching a window to the past. Through it we see the history of Shylock. We see his influence, and the effect is chilling. Unlike the other villains Berkoff portrays, Shylock exists in the real world. His shadow falls far across our past and spills into the present. Its blackness doesn’t fade, even after the lights come up.

February 19, 2007

 

“The invention of the airplane (was) a mortal blow to the unconscious.”

 

So we are repeatedly reminded in this aviation-themed installment of Richard Foreman’s whimsical assault.

 

Well kiddies…

 

If the unconscious is in fact dead, Mr. Foreman, the wise old curmudgeon in the clock tower of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church, has come to blow the breath of life back into it!

 

In his second go-round with his controversial medium du moment, the motion picture (last year’s “Zomboid” was Foreman’s first foray into the forbidden field), Foreman has Frankenstein-ed together a Jungian wake-up call of epic proportions. “Are there any young children in the audience, tonight?”, booms the voice of our hypnotic host.

 

For the sake of London Spears’ hopelessly doomed Generation Z², let’s bloody-well hope so!

 

The set, encompassing close to half of the theater’s humble square footage — and then partially extending further still into the seating section itself, is a mind-bending blend of newspaper-covered walls, slender black flower-stuffed vases, plastic white doves, a boxing ring, and an array of airborne mini-planes, highlighted by the stage’s centerpiece - a large, brown action-aircraft, with spinning propellers and all, crammed with a bevy of saucer-eyed baby dolls. All this is mixed in with Foreman’s trademark alphabet soup, a barrage of seemingly randomized letters filling out the gaps in the visual clutter.

 

“Can I buy a vowel?”, inquires my vaguely disorientated companion, as we get cozy in our none-too-cozy seats.

 

The players, consisting primarily of a foursome of red, white and black-clad young luminaries of the unconscious, awkwardly traverse the dreamlike playground without ever breaking their hauntingly stone-blank gazes. As is customary in a Foreman production, the actors don’t so much “pander to the audience, trying to manipulate them” (Foreman’s own words), but rather exist as a part of the greater work — a sort of mad German surrealist painting sprung to life.

 

The four do a fair share of running around, pointing things out, and feigning death with the utmost grace, as well as bringing in fun, new props such as sets of giant, red scissors and powder-blue, Klan-like hoods into the soup.

 

A fifth player, decked out in a svelte, WWII-era aviator outfit, serves as the only character that gives off the tiniest hint of life on earth as we know it. He pops in and out of the fray, stumbling uncertainly, like a disjointed ghost caught inside of some nightmarish purgatory.

 

The two large video screens showcase an actual gang of insane asylum residents, shot in a fully-operational mad house in Lisbon, Portugal. The inmates convey a chilling parallel to the live action, clawing layers of newspaper from their faces, repeating various Foremaniacal wisdoms, and often simply staring sternly into the camera.

 

The film portion of the production was shot as part of the “Bridge Project”, an international art initiative founded by Foreman three years ago together with his long time collaborator Sophie Haviland.

 

“This evening’s performance is the most accurate copy I am able to make, of a strange theatrical event I viewed approximately one year ago… when, I was forcibly seized and transported by a flying saucer to the alien planet Ax-e-tron.”

 

So proclaim the program notes of Mr. Foreman’s latest piece of theatrical mind fuck. Well, as it turns out, Ax-e-tron (not to be confused with Axetberg, New Jersey), apparently has an extraordinarily like-minded aesthetic and point of view to its unwilling abductee. And, it’s a good thing too, because this latest assault on technological advancement and the “Information Age” is one for the ages.

 

If the invention of the airplane was a mortal blow to the unconscious, than the invention of “Wake Up, Mr. Sleepy!” aims a mortal blow to that wily lil’ invention.

 

Take that, airplane!

 

 

      “Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!”

      By Richard Foreman

      Ontological Theater

      131 East 10th Street, NY, NY

      212-352-3101

      Now through April 1