Went and saw Middletown by Will Eno last night at Dobama. It was a strange show. First, given the nature of the play (life in a small town) and Second, the varied cast of characters and events (being somewhat eccentric, etc), and Finally, the epic sweep of the thematic content (life, death, love, the universe, our place in it, etc.) there are obvious parallels to Our Town by Thorton Wilder.

The play is engaging, for the most part, and the first act is filled with a strangeness that is difficult to describe: things, events, characters, and ideas (statements) are juxtaposed with other things, events, characters, and ideas and the clashing of the two creates a dissonance that is abrupt and sometimes very comic. The statements from characters and language used is equally abrupt and strange and it is clear that Eno is playing as much with words and how they mean and just the raw sounds of words, as he’s playing with big ideas. If you, dear reader, are like me, occasionally you’ll say a word and the word will sound so strange in your ears that you’ll repeat it again and again until the word itself loses meaning and just becomes this guttural sound that is disconnected entirely from anything. Some of this is at play in Middletown. This notion of the strangeness of words and their association with concrete things in the world is one of the arguments, often, for learning to speak a second language or even a third, because learning another language is learning to see the world in a different way, for instance, the Spanish language associates all nouns with gender. So the moon is “la luna” a female object. The sun “el sol” is a male object. And virtually everything has this gendered nature. This causes one, I think, to experience the world differently. For an example of the dissonance and clashing I mentioned above, early in the play, I’ll go with the librarian example (having been one myself and being always interested in the stereotypes of the profession), one of the “main characters” Mary (Carly Germany) goes into the library to request a library card. This request is met positively by the Librarian (Laura Starnik) who says, “Good for you dear. A lot of people figure, ‘Why bother? I’m just going to die, anyway.’”

What makes for strangeness and good fun does not, however, make for good “deep” connections with characters. This sort of strangeness and light-hearted non-committal to characters in any meaningful way results in a very surfacy attachment and interest in them, and, as with may Eno plays, there is a tendency to just sit and think and try and keep up with his use of language and the strangeness of his ideas. I saw Thom Pain at Dobama several years back, and it was the same thing. Except there you have an exceptionally intimate encounter with one man who is baring his soul, or trying anyway, and periodically covering it over with neurotic defense mechanisms to keep you away from his soul. It is a passive agressive experience of the highest order and equally fascinating to listen to and contemplate as fast as you can. What works well in Thom Pain, though, does not work as well in Middletown. With Middletown there genuinely feels, at times, as if there is an earnestness to the attempt to reveal something beautiful and terrible and deeply real about the human condition, and I would say that on a few occasions this succeeds. But for the most part it does not, simply because there is so much of the Thom Pain cynicism and comic clashing happening. There are moving moments with the Police Officer (Jason Markouc) and the Mechanic (Fabio Polanco) when they reveal their inner demons and troubles to the Librarian–who has known them since they were little boys (again, small town angle); but most of it gets lost amidst the easy laughs and verbal gymnastics that are Eno’s trademark. Like his play Tragedy: a tragedy, there is something smug about the sorrow, something removed and distant–sort of a “I know you’ll think this is moving, but I don’t, in fact, I’m more entertained by your thinking this is moving than in really moving you.” It’s like psychologist sitting behind a one-way mirror to observe the suffering and distress of another person, but not really empathizing with it or feeling it himself–perhaps even joking about it.

I do like Eno’s work as he is truly a remarkable thinker and his use of language is stunning; and Middletown is no exception. There were points in the play where I felt that longing and epic reach of Our Town–that sense of individual isolation, even in the midst of others–that makes Our Town so powerful. But, as Mike Geither and Chris Johnston noted, whom I went out with after the show, there is a deep earnest sincerity in Wilder and a genuine love of people and their weaknesses that comes through in Our Town that does not come through in Middletown. The only question is, what is Eno’s intent? Maybe he doesn’t want you to connect at all. Maybe he wants the audience, which the play engages frequently, to be removed–a la Brecht–to not identify with or emotionally connect with the characters. The only question that remains then, is “to what end”? Eno could be saying something about the disconnected nature of our modern society, compared with Wilder’s society. Given his outstanding thrashing and skewering of the local news media in Tragedy: a tragedy, that just might be the case.

The set for this play at Dobama was fantastic, so hats off to Laura Carlson. And the cast was fantastic for this production as well, including Robert Hawkes, Tom Woodward, Emily Demko, Mark Mayo (who was performing after surgery, no less), Maryann Elder and my former MNO classmate, Dianne Boduszek.

The Realistic Jones

Why realistic Joneses? Perhaps the sidelong look at our neighbor has turned more to issues of plain old health and sanity rather than that of material wealth? Perhaps Eno is touching on the reality that many of us are floundering around in the same pool and that any aspirational measure of superiority—-or fear of inferiority-—has long given way to something much more frightening.

Both sets of male characters have a mysterious disease that causes pain, affects their vision, and undermines their memory. Dementia? Something else… But as memory is suspect, this affects virtually every aspect of each of the two male characters, making them impossible to trust. The blindness that each experiences, while certainly medically disconcerting, also points, metaphorically, to a troubling set of character issues—-certainly Oedipus would have a thing or two to say about the nature of blindness.

The characters, all around, are worth comparing because Eno uses two sets of couples—each in a similar set of circumstances (but at different ages). This sets up comparisons of gender relationships, age relationships, generational attitudes, as well as cross comparisons between how the couples work internally. The men, for instance, are predictably resistant to speaking about how they feel or what they feel, but mask it in different ways: the older male Jones—-Bob (Joel Hammer), resists talking at all about his feelings, fears, etc., mostly by gruff barking, harrumphing, or deflecting defensively—pushing any emotional engagement right back at his wife—-Jennifer (Tracee Patterson); the younger male Jones—-John (Chris Richards), resists talking about his feelings, fears, etc., by engaging in verbal puns, non sequiturs, and rhetorical question that, often as not, are barbed jabs at whomever else is around: a method that works remarkably well with his wife/girlfriend/significant other—-Pony (Rachel Zake), who is oblivious to nearly everything going on around her.

The characters are representations and commentaries on our current cultural condition. As funny as they may often be, it is a bit depressing. Pony, certainly, is cause for consternation. If her hold on reality and competence were to be judged by ten strands of hair, I’d say that nine of the strands were snapped already. Pony is flighty, airy, inconstant, and largely indifferent—-especially to anyone with a disease or health condition—-whom she’d prefer to avoid entirely. In short, Pony is very much a child. John, her SO, is overly confident and opinionated, though he immediately admits that his opinion are based on nothing and many not even be correct. It is my assumption then that Eno is pointing to something very frightening about our society: inattentive, unconcerned with truth, uncommitted, etc. And yet, despite these flaws, the pair of characters is human, emotionally vulnerable, and clearly hurting—-thus deserving of compassion.

Bob is battling his own mortality and reckoning with a disease progression that he cannot control and one that is not predictable. It is one thing to suffer from a disease whose progression is clear, with markers by which you can judge your own health or lack thereof. But when the disease is unpredictable, whose symptoms affect memory and, thus, personality, the effect is to shake one’s sense of self. Bob is angry, an anger that he levels on his wife, Jennifer. He is also defensive, and unwilling to even discuss his thoughts, fears, and emotions with his wife. On the whole, Bob is inconsiderate, cranky, and often just mean. He’s lucky, however, in the love of Jennifer, who is filled with empathy, and willing to tolerate much. Strangely, Bob finds his softer side with Pony, as well has interest in speaking about this thoughts, fears, and emotions, a fact that leads to an affair with Pony. It is likely Pony’s complete indifference that leads Bob to this attraction. The surreptitious relationship between Bob and Pony is not surprising, in that these two characters are the most self-involved and seemingly indifferent.

John suffers from the same malady as Bob, with the same set of unpredictable symptoms, however, in Pony, John has a “spouse” that is not empathetic at all. In fact, it is clear that John hasn’t even bothered to tell Pony what is happening to him, for fear that she will run away. Pony evinces no courage. Strangely, or perhaps predictably, this set of character flaws in Pony and Bob lead John and Jennifer to each other. Though they do not have a physical affair, one can argue that they do have an emotional affair. It is clear that John receives what he needs from Jennifer: compassion and empathy, and Jennifer receives from John what she does not get from Bob: a man who talks about his thoughts, fears, and emotions.

Eno does a masterful job revealing the more intimate nature of each of these characters by forcing each character, and the audience, to peel back (or hack off) the crusty exteriors to find the soft underside. The fact that Eno uses a small town on the edge of a mountain as his setting, as well as night encounters with plenty of star gazing, points explicitly to the “higher” nature of this play’s consideration. Often the play has that aspect that one can only get when staring up at the stars: a wistful sense of one’s smallness, an expansive sense of history, a confrontation with one’s mortality, a sense of God or the infinite. The external setting often leads to shocking statements in the midst of banal small talk.

I’ve seen two plays by Eno at Dobama: Thom Pain (Based on Nothing), and Middletown-—Eno’s response to Thorton Wilder’s Our Town. I’ve read others, including Tragedy: A Tragedy in New Downtown Now: An Anthology Of New Theater From Downtown New York. In each play Eno is obsessed with the tenuous nature of meaning inherent in our language and how we understand or misunderstand others and the world around us, and the things happening within us: thoughts, emotions, etc. All of this is rife in The Realistic Joneses. Virtually every statement by John, for instance, is undermined in the next statement, sometimes within the same sentence. An example, when the couples are parting ways at the end of scene one, might shed a bit of light, when John says: “This was fun. I mean, not fun, but definitely some other word.”

Some other word. That might be the best description of this play, or any of Eno’s plays. The quote might be, “I’m telling you something important, something vitally important; but not really important, maybe trivial, in fact. I’m not sure.” Thom Pain is one hour and ten minutes of savagery that is similar to this: a brutal search for meaning, for something real, that may or may not quite come to be. It’s as if Eno’s characters are frantically searching through a sand drift for something lost, but they can’t quite remember what it was, and maybe he or she finds something else.