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I’m pretty excited about the upcoming production at convergence-continuum. A few years ago I went over to see Act a Lady by Jordan Harrison which was an hilarious romp. So, this next piece by Harrison is to be anticipated, too. However, this one is not a funny romp. In fact, it is the exact opposite: dark, brooding, and sinister.

Finn in the Underworld at convergence-continuum

Clyde Simon, the artistic director for convergence, is pretty careful in laying out the season–placing comedic hits like Charles Mee’s Big Love right in the midst of summer to catch that breezy, sunny disposition that keeps us all optimistic, happy, and alive; but coming right back as the weather changes over to windy, overcast, and cooling to stoke our more fearful and depressed autumnal dispositions. Finn in the Underworld is the perfect direction, as Lucy Bredeson-Smith (who plays Gwen in the play) points out, for Halloween.

I recently sat down and interviewed the cast and director of the upcoming production, so I went to Playscripts and read much of the play that they have freely available online: http://www.playscripts.com/play.php3?playid=1542. Then, when I got to The Liminis, as I waited while they all ran tech, I finished up the play with the scripts that were laying about on the set. I was not disappointed.

It was initially a strange sensation, reading the play. I am used to finding books through Google Books, reading happily along, and then encountering pages missing from the middle of the book–Google’s meagre concession to copyright concerns. This extraction of pages leads to a choppy reading experience. So, as I read Finn in the Underworld I was suddenly greeted by jumps in the script that sent me looking for page numbers to make sure that pages weren’t missing…that Playscripts hadn’t done the same thing. They hadn’t. Harrison’s script plays with jumps in time and it caught me off guard.

The jumps in time are what most attracts me to the play. It is fascinating to see an encounter at 7:35 pm only to (later on) pick up the thread of what happened earlier at 2:00 in the afternoon. The jumping fills in the details on events in strange ways, creating connections that go different directions in time and create a curiously timeless, eerie feeling…as if one were, I don’t know, in Hades? I was very much reminded of Fefu and Her Friends by Fornes which creates a similar feeling through the four mobile scenes in the mid-section of the play. There is something strangely vibrant about seeing scenes out of order and then connecting pieces of information from one place back to another. Harrison’s play handles this very competently and it creates a spine-tingling experience.

Harrison has described his play as a ‘psychosexual gothic horror story,’ which is an apt description, as there are elements of all of this in the play. Gothic stories, especially stories with horror elements, remind me of Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights–the mad woman in the attic or ghosts on the moors. But the elements are present here, too: a dark house, an unexplained death, a family mystery that spans generations, and, very like the tales by the Bronte sisters, a jagged-love that is doomed from the start. Appropriately, Harrison quotes Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House at the outset of his play: “An evil old house, the kind some people call “haunted”, is like an undiscovered country waiting to be explored.”

For those of you who want a surprise, go and see this play! It will deliver. For those of you who want to see the play, but don’t mind having your surprise compromised, spoilers follow.

Warning: Spoiler Alert — What follows reveals plot, story, and will ruin your fun.

The quote from Hill House is more than just support for the Gothic horror feel of the piece. Other than the way Harrison plays with time and play structure, the one event that threw me the most was the revelation that Carver Bishop was already dead: thus putting the ghost element squarely at the center of the horror story. But, this is not nearly enough. Harrison, like Jackson, continues, with a house that is itself alive and that wishes to consume all of those within its walls, to keep the men and women forever, tucked inside of some unearthly plane of semi-existence.

This plane is where the second act of Harrison’s play occurs, and very like the Hades mentioned briefly above, the action that transpires is very Greek in its notion of the Underworld: very Greek because the river Lethe, which flows through Hades, erases the memories of the dead who drink from it. As with those poor dead folk in Hades, so it is with all the characters in the play who are consumed by the house–and as it no doubt is for those consumed by family grief or a tragic history–memory becomes questionable, personal history is drowned or left in a murky twilight, and logic begins to run in circles. For me, this last part of Harrison’s play is the most disturbing. It is oppressive, suffocating, and claustrophobic–and it is by no means an accident that it transpires within the confines of bomb shelter.

This play runs through October 17 at convergence and I can hardly wait to see it.

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 [amazon_link id=”B002ZCXTM2″ target=”_blank” ]T.S. Eliot[/amazon_link]-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!