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When I first finished Bleed Rail I hated it. Even now, thinking about it, I don’t like it very much. I will apologize in advance, for I have to admit to only reading it, and not studying it the way I usually study a play–so, I will go back and give it more attention and this entry may be subject to modification. Regardless, this fact certainly plays a part in my opinion of this piece and will certainly lead to some interesting speculation (by that I mean ‘ignorant’) on some parts of or themes in the play.

However, even in reflection I find some things to admire, and I will probably focus more of my attention on those, as my mother always told me that if I didn’t have anything nice to say then–hopefully I can keep with this motto.

I will say that Mickey Birnbaum has created an atmosphere that is terrible. It is as pervasive and depressing and disgusting and hideous a creation as I have ever encountered. The level accuracy portraying these pointless lives and the dreariness of their material surroundings and the general sense of ennui and emptiness is overwhelming. For that alone the playwright is due great credit: he has created a pungent atmosphere that permeates everything and makes it stink like a carcass.

I found the two main characters (Ryan and Keith), if I can call them that, flat and two dimensional. That was upsetting. I found them less interesting than two of the supporting characters (Jewel and Jim the Hanger). In fact, based on the conclusion, I found that Ryan was the protagonist and discovered as well that I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in him or his heroic final act. The reversal of the bleed rail and the re-creation of the cows was touching and I found that a very interesting idea; possibly the most resilient image of the whole piece. The conversation and expression of the two main characters was sad and pathetic and while I know that is the effect that Mickey was going for I almost found it too much–that is, even though it was intentional, it almost trivialized the whole thing for me.

Again, the biggest thing about the play experience is seeing the play versus reading the play; which should be no surprise really, considering that is how plays are intended to be experienced. This really held up for me as I read Bleed Rail, as I didn’t think until after reading it, how Mickey had the set designed to be the slaughterhouse. That is, seeing that whole play take place inside a slaughterhouse with red-stained walls, etc, the ominous metallic and mechanical nature of it, that would loom depressingly–heavily, over the whole of the action on the stage. More so than what is conveyed on the page by the words and descriptions of actions alone.

But back to what I did find admirable: (and I can hardly find the appropriate words to describe it) the sense of modern desolation, emptiness; the T.S. Eliot-like nature of the thing:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

The lives of these people are as meaningless as wind in dry grass and nothing can save them. Period. The example of the unbearable meaninglessness that most drives the point home for me is the exchange between Keith and Ryan at the opening where suddenly the conversation shifts from a ‘beef bowl’ to ‘Did your dad die yet?’ The futility of a life discarded this way amongst the greasy atmosphere of a fast food joint is truly misanthropic. Unfortunately, I think I can see the playwright’s misanthropical nature at work here more than that of the characters. The character of Keith, who delivers the terrible line, is, to me, somewhat of a stereotype. When he is talking I can almost hear Randal from the movie . I’m not quite convinced that Ryan’s act in Iraq was enough. (In fact, his placement and death in the war seems too contrived and I must wonder if the playwright bailed and found an ‘easy’ conclusion…or one, at least, that worked.) The image that works and would make the lives of the characters meaningful is the reversal of the bleed rail. That is a strong image. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work in the ‘real’ world (that is, you can’t reverse the rail that way), and I don’t think the characters are strong enough to change the world to make something similar to the rail reversal happen. I know there is the parallel drawn between the reversal of the bleed rail and the sacrifice that Ryan makes and his refusal to be a ‘walker’ in the afterlife; but for me it is not enough to save any of the characters from the vicious portrait that Mickey draws. I think his cynicism is too great.

I found the DVD ending contrived. Worse. It is very obvious exposition. It is way too long. It is not interesting. I wish it would go away forever. Have you ever been to a party where it is sort of late and everyone is a bit drunk and perhaps tired and someone turns the t.v. on and suddenly everyone is drunk and tired and watching t.v. and all of a sudden you become conscious of the fact that you’re at a party (where you in theory socialize with people) but now you’re all slack-jawed staring at this stupid box with light coming out of it? That is what that scene reminds me of. If I was in the theatre, the last thing I would want to do is watch actors watching t.v. Especially for what is crucial exposition to the play. I don’t care if it is a part of the mise-en-scene that Mickey is going for to draw our attention to these utterly meaningless lives (our own?).

I found the stilted conversations, the ones that the playwright goes to such pains to discuss at the beginning in the ‘Note on language,’ to be contrived; stupid; boring; and annoying. I had to translate what these morons were saying and I didn’t even give a shit about what they had to say in the first place. I think that is a bad combination for a playwright to stuff onto an audience: make them work to understand something they could care less about. And again, I don’t feel that the play is justified or saved in any way by the fact that the playwright was intentionally doing this. Further, in his notes on ‘Setting’ I took issue with the ‘iconic Midwestern town of heavy industry and strip malls. Plenty of nothing to do.’ Either the fact that I found the atmosphere of the play so horrifying speaks volumes to the fact that I recognized it and am just a sore sport when it comes to acknowledging the accuracy of the shot; or this is a truly condescending, shitty thing to say. For instance, the portrait that Mickey paints in this play is not specific enough to characterize one region of the country. That is, this play could just as easily be happening in Los Angeles as in Chicago or Cleveland. I’m sure there are slaughterhouses out west, and I know there are stupid people watching big t.v.s in dumpy little apartments. Scores of them. I think the Setting note would be better if it just said, ‘Somewhere in America,’ or worse, ‘Anywhere in America,” or worse still, “Right next door to you.”

I think there are some strong points to this play: again, the atmosphere, the stage setting and the way it would hang over the whole piece, and the strong three-dimensional nature of two of the characters, as well as the final vision of the reversal of the bleed rail. Otherwise, I am not too jazzed about this play and what I believe to be some major and fatal tears in its fabric. I think if Mickey took the characters of Jewel and Jim the Hanger and made a play–well, that would be something worth seeing!

Again, the biggest thing about the play experience is seeing the play versus reading the play; which should be no surprise really, considering that is how plays are intended to be experienced. This really held up for me as I read Bleed Rail, as I didn’t think until after reading it, how Mickey had the set designed to be the slaughterhouse. That is, seeing that whole play take place inside a slaughterhouse with red-stained walls, etc, the ominous metallic and mechanical nature of it, that would loom depressingly–heavily, over the whole of the action on the stage.

This wasn’t the case at the Play House. Alas, Sarah Ruhl’s set was there in the splendor and excruciating detail of which I, as a young playwright, can only dream: the white interior and furnishings tastefully displayed; the balcony, etc. I hadn’t been in the Play House for two or three years so I forgot how it looked and, since that time, have been in so many odd places for plays that I was never really aware of the gross luxury of that theatre space. Of the evening, that was one of the things that most impressed upon me: the opulence of the stage and the theatre environs. I have been continuing to read a book on the History of the Theatre in what spare time I have, so I was very interested in the stage itself: I don’t know that it’s a proscenium stage, but it is set up to look that way–with the distribution of curtains around the sides and the low-hanging curtain across the top. The curtains worked to frame the space, but I don’t recall a physical arch. Alas, another example of my Sherlock Holmesian deductive reasoning failing–I look but fail to see,’ as Holmes would say. One thing that did stand out to me was the acoustics, which were not very good. I had to cast my mind about and remember if that is always a problem with theatres of this design, or just the Drury space. The acoustics required a very artificial manner in the speaking of the actors just in order for them to be heard. There was also that ‘theatre persona’ visible: the sort of swagger that stage actors have when they coyly address the audience as a ‘knowing’ confidant, but with that burstingly loud voice that one would never use in an aside. The Great Lake Theatre downtown suffers from the same problem. In there to see A Midsummer Night’s DreamA I was appalled at how terrible the sound was. To add Shakespeare to the mix only made things dreadful. The Drury was nowhere near as bad acoustically as the Palace, or whatever theatre that is in Playhouse Square. I was also interested in the depth of the stage. Even with The Clean House, the set was deep. I wondered how deep it could go. I thought of the great Italian stage designers who first brought perspective to the stage sets: deep perspective–mountain scenes in the background with little parts in motion to give the illusion of animals or carts or whatever moving along…

The visual elements of the space itself give way to the thing that struck me the most about The Clean House: namely, how all the elements of the play, in action, created multiple levels of meaning that existed at multiple times, to which the audience had access at any given moment. The layering occurs in both physical space and in cognitive space–in the physical activities occurring on stage, and in the requirement of the audience keeping track of storyline, plot, etc. For instance, meaning was created by what characters said, and what they did, of course, but it was also created through the objects that characters used: apples, ropes, trees, large dust mops; their memories or acts of imagination (Matilde seeing her parents) and through the use of text captioning, as well as the playful inclusion of different locales: Alaska and the oceanfront. So, while Virginia and Matilde talk at stage right, Charles enters at left in a snow suit, carrying the accoutrements of a polar explorer. At once there are different times present on stage and different locales–one can almost descend into a Bakhtinian analysis of all the dialectics and discourses of time and space in this play–and yet, the audience is perfectly, pleasantly, happy to take all of this into the mind and let it drift and bauble about. In fact, it is, I think, this play of time, space, and the many different ways of presenting it on stage that make The Clean House so successful and such a delight. The audience must work, and Ruhl keeps things (meaning) bouncing back and forth and one thing happening in one place inflects upon the other and Ruhl is not shy about stating it on stage–to being metatheatrical in her drawing attention to these intersections; perhaps the best being when Lane is imaging her husband and Ana together and Matilde walks in. In the good old fashioned theatre, we as the audience would see this, but expect that the characters on the stage would overlook it. Not so. Matilde flatly asks, ‘Who are they?’ and the audience, at least in the performance I attended, was unhinged with joy at that allowance by Ruhl. It would be as if everyone in Hamlet could see the Ghost and that ghost went about the play being put out all the time and everyone else, losing interest in his depression, just ignored him–or worse, got sick of his moaning altogether and told him to bugger off. (There’s a stout idea for a comedy.) There is something very childlike in the theatrics by Ruhl that allows for this release of joy. It is very like the play of children who just say, ‘let’s pretend this is Alaska,’ and suddenly, boom, it is and everyone will be cold in that area. That is what, I think, theatre should be and what she is accomplishing.

Not that Ruhl of course is alone in this–this metatheatre. Some might say that she is reaping the benefits of the Off Off Broadway groups from the 60s that worked out of churches and basements to recreate what theatre should be–open, not forced into the well-made structures that stifled and restricted what theatre can be: restricting, for instance, my own imagination about theatre such that all my life I’ve conceived of play only in the formula of what is well-made and structured well and Aristotlean by design.

I enjoyed this play very much, as did Kirsten. She stated it was one of the best plays that she has ever seen–and said it with a conviction that I believe. The production values were high and much credit is due the Play House for it. It seemed as strong to me, in terms of production, timing, execution, design, etc, as many Noel Coward productions I have seen at the Shaw Festival–and had a bursting energy and happiness exceed only by two other plays I’ve ever seen (both at Shaw): Three Men on a Horse and You Can’t Take It with You; the latter winning hands down because they actually let honest-to-god fireworks off on stage. There is a magical realism to the play that enhances the joy and sorrow of it, and some real humanness. I am not utterly convinced though that what I saw was a humanness or an imitation of humanness and not a genuine depth of feeling; I’m still trying to put my finger on that. At points the play seemed like a farcical Indie movie; like Il Postino or The Milagro Beanfield War. But The Clean House is a comedy, a realization driven home to me at how much of the laughter in the audience came at moments that were not, to me, comic–or if so, blackly so–such as Virginia’s morbidity at the outset. In the end, though, I found, as Kirsten stated, the whole of it to be believable and empathetic–especially in light of some things, such as Charles and Ana coming to ‘visit’ Lane, and the discussion of the bashert, where one in real life might be tempted to just say, ‘You know what? Get the &$%# out of my house.’ That is, it required no willing suspension of disbelief.