weebelly.com

“I am in constant pain.  I don’t want to give into it.  If I do, I’m afraid I will never recover…It’s not physical, and it’s not sorrow.  It’s very strange Emma, I can’t describe it, and it’s very frightening.”

So begins one of the central articulations by Fefu of her condition, and the central meaning of the play [amazon_link id=”155554052X” target=”_blank” ]Fefu and Her Friends[/amazon_link] by [amazon_link id=”0933826834″ target=”_blank” ]Maria Irene Fornes[/amazon_link].  In three prominent scenes, Fornes reveals the unspoken angst that is destroying the women at this 1935 New England gathering.

From Cleveland Public Theatre's production.

In a play that I’ve heard described as no play at all it is often difficult to put your finger on the precise malady that is afflicting all the women, as Fefu says, “I can’t describe it.”  Fortunately for us, there are two characters who can describe it.  These two characters make up the other two prominent scenes that reveal the angst.  The first of these remaining two scenes complements the “On the Lawn” scene from which I’ve quoted above, this is the “In the Bedroom” where Julia, a woman suffering from psychosomatic paralysis, tells us what is afflicting her:

“They clubbed me. They broke my head. They broke my will. They broke my hands. They tore my eyes out.  They took my voice away.”

And on she goes.  Julia discusses the role of the “judges” and the “guardians” in her hallucinatory rant.  The judges and guardians make up the “they” that is a constant refrain throughout this scene, per the above.  What is most important perhaps is the revelation by Julia that “They are after her too.”  The her being Fefu.

The third of the prominent scenes that strikes at the central meaning of this play–as if any one thing could–is the speech by Emma in Part Three. Emma is a woman with a strong and powerful presence in the play that is strengthened by the fact that so many of the women are unsure of themselves; whereas Emma is certainly not.  At a rehearsal for some future presentation (the purpose of which we are not entirely sure) Emma quotes from the prologue of Emma Sheridan Fry’s 1917 book [amazon_link id=”1459070917″ target=”_blank” ]Educational Dramatics[/amazon_link].  For the prologue to a book about the importance of acting and dramatizing education, this has to rank among the most metaphysical of prologues ever.  The gist of the piece is that we have lost touch with the outside world–the world outside our heads and outside our own meager ego-oriented lives–and the will and spirit within us that makes us want to embrace this world.  “The Environment knocks at the gateway of the senses,” Emma begins.  “We do not answer.”  But we need to answer.  Why? Because outside of our heads and our meager perception of the world “life universal surges” and “life universal” holds for us the promise that “all is ours…that whatever anyone has ever known, or may ever know, we will call and claim.”  That in each of us is a light, a strong and powerful light, that shines out all we can achieve, and glory in the brilliance of our own strength and power and the joy of our creation and life.  And yet, we are reluctant.  We hunker down and hide.  We do nothing. Why do we not fulfill our potential?  Emma has an answer for that, too.

“Society restricts us, school straight jackets us, civilization submerges us, privation wrings us, luxury feather beds us.  The Divine Urge is checked.  The Winged Horse balks on the road, and we, discouraged, defeated, dismount and burrow into ourselves.  The gates are closed and Divine Urge is imprisoned at Center.  Thus we are taken by indifference that is death.”

In this quote can be found the key to the oft-quoted phrase from Christ, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." (Matthew 19:24) The meaning here is not a repudiation of wealth just because…  It has to do with the things that accompany wealth: “luxury feather beds us.”  The essence is that it is extraordinarily difficult to be spiritual when the body is so well comforted.  In the world of worship, the soul must yearn and it is impossible for the soul to yearn when the body is pleasured, i.e. distracted.  Emma expands the list of things that can kill the Divine Urge, but each has a role.  It certainly is fun to quote both Christ and Pink Floyd in the same paragraph, as I am reminded too "Another Brick in the Wall" from [amazon_link id=”B004ZNAXX2″ target=”_blank” ] The Wall[/amazon_link]:

We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thoughts controlled
No dark sarcasm in the class room
Teachers leave them kids alone
(yells) hey teachers leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

Fornes is suggesting the same thing.  Or rather, Pink Floyd is suggesting the same thing as Fornes (as she came first!), and in fact The Wall is a good musical/filmic counterpart to what this play is describing: the creation of a wall around the women, a wall that undermines them, defeats them, breaks them down, tells them they are inferior.

For Julia, the end has already been achieved.  She is broken.  Her strength is sapped as is her will to live.  The process is just beginning for Fefu.  Her nameless pain is the start.  Julia speaks of what the judges and guardians do, but this perhaps is too abstract, too strange a thing to get one’s head around, so, very like the teachers in the Pink Floyd song, Fornes provides us with explicit examples:

SUE: At the end of the first semester they called her in because she had been out with 28 men and they thought that was awful.  And the worst thing was that after that, she thought there was something wrong with her.

CINDY: (Jokingly) She was a nymphomaniac, that’s all.

SUE: She was not.  She was just very beautiful so all the boys wanted to go out with her. And if a boy asked her to go have a cup of coffee she’d sign out and write in the name of the boy.  None of us did of course.  All she did was go for coffee or go to a movie.  She was really very innocent.

EMMA: And Gloria Schuman? She wrote a psychology paper the faculty decided she didn’t write and they called her in to try to make her admit she hadn’t written it. She insisted she wrote it and they sent her to a psychiatrist also.

JULIA: Everybody ended going to the psychiatrist.

EMMA: After a few visits the psychiatrist said: Don’t you think you know me well enough now that you can tell me the truth about the paper? He almost drove her crazy.  They just couldn’t believe she was so smart.

So, again, here we see the judges and the guardians in action.  Standing above the young women, passing judgment, guarding their conscience and their intellect, regulating them; ensuring that the Divine Urge is never realized.

The gist of [amazon_link id=”155554052X” target=”_blank” ]Fefu and Her Friends[/amazon_link] is contained in the three prominent scenes above (prominent because they contain the three strongest characters of the play who pronounce the largest ideas of the play).  Emma warns the women that they must “seek the laws governing real life forces, that coming into their own, they may create, develop, and reconstruct.”  Create, develop, and reconstruct what?  Society?  The Culture?  The way they relate to each other, and to men?  All of these are legitimate answers and represent what must be reconstructed.  For Julia it is too late, as demonstrated by the final scene in the play.  It may be too late for Fefu as well, who wraps herself in the bravado of masculinity to cover over her fear of redefining herself.

I’ll come back later and consider other things: themes, images, that strange shit with the gun, the animal, and Julia, etc.

So much for silly giddiness.

At the 3 hour mark of the final rehearsal last night we came to a long speech. Very long. Brutally long. It is the moment of possession for my main character: possession of a great spiritual energy bursting from the woods; and a moment in which the main character finally possesses himself for the first time: instead of being punched around like a beach ball. Did I mention that the speech in this moment is long? And after three painful hours of watching even mild speeches get a blistering cold reading that consisted of shredded and swallowed and then choked out lines–well, I nearly fainted in the face of my own long tirade.

Aside: Let me just take a moment to say that the director, Clyde Simon, and all of the actors: Geoffrey and Stuart Hoffman and Tom and Evan Kondilas are doing absolutely fabulously and I would not in any way disparage them.

Panic

There were two distinct moments when I wanted to cut lines. No, not just cut them; I wanted to just rip them out and throw them on the floor and then stomp on them. I didn’t want anyone to hear them: least of all me. There was a genuine moment of terror in which I contemplated calling the whole thing off; and then there was a briefly-swift moment where I wanted to vomit. Other than this, the rehearsal went quite well.

It was grueling. During the first rehearsal, which lasted four hours and covered a dry reading and the blocking of the first part of the play, I laughed. It was very pleasant; alright, hilarious at points. I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Last night, however, it was the last part of the play and it took 4.5 hours to get through it. I felt like we all were trudging. It was vapid, tedious, and terrible. God, I only hope it was the time of day; or the weather; something…anything…other than what I fear it was most of all.

The Dreams of the Nighttime will have Vanished by Dawn

Today, I’m a little bit more introspective and upbeat. I feel that it will most certainly move fast. I remind myself that the length of time on both occasions was the blocking, the enactment, the re-enactment, the reading and re-reading and so on. The go and stop and the ‘do-it-again.’ This, of course, won’t happen during the reading. And then I recalled, ‘hey, this is the point of a reading.’ I gave pause. I took a beat. This isn’t a production. This isn’t even the final version of the play. It is rough. It is supposed to be rough. Lighten up, tight ass. Slowly, now. Slowly. Unclench them. Ease up.

I was preparing for the night of, today. I had to send a bio to the marketing person. I had to pick out a “moderator” who would lead the post show talk: a no-brainer for me–Mike Geither. I thought about where I could pick up a Viking helmet with the fake braids under it and maybe even a breast plate with two big breasts–and how all those Slim Jims would go over. (You think I’m kidding, don’t you?) Then I shopped around the web looking to swipe post-staged-reading questions from others who have gone through this. I found a couple solid sites that talked about it. But the best, perhaps, was DAM*Writer, who on January 15th of this year wrote:

As anyone who’s even glanced at this blog now and again knows, I have a real love/hate relationship with staged readings. The rehearsal process and the readings themselves can reveal all sorts of wonderful/horrible things that don’t always make themselves known in the space between my ears when I’m sitting alone in my office, tapping away or even reading out loud. Since plays are meant to be experienced by audiences, it can be very helpful to get a sneak peek at the effects of one’s work on people experiencing it for the first time.

On the other hand, a staged reading is a misleading, watered-down presentation of any but the most traditional of dialogue-heavy, standard-narrative, linear-storyline plays. The further you go out on the experimental branch, the less likely it becomes that a staged reading is going to support the work, its intentions, its style and the author’s voice.

Hear, hear… and my play is out a bit on the experimental branch. It’s not full out whacked, or extreme expressionism, but it sure has elements that are like that and is heavy on the visual elements of theatre–not good for a reading. Clyde though is taking a damn fine crack at it. As I mentioned in an earlier post, he’s done not only a fine job, but I’ve worried that the person reading the stage directions (Stuart Hoffman) will be mistaken for a character.

Sigh

Oh well. I console myself by knowing that it will all be said and done by Wednesday at 10:00pm. I will have my answers, though not for the sake of a live audience. As David mentions on his site, it is unlikely that you can rely on what the audience has to say…although, they might point out one thing or other that surprises you. But, as Mike Geither said to me earlier on the phone:

You’re the one closest to the work and you know it best. You can’t rely on the audience to tell you what to do. The feedback isn’t even for you, really, it’s to let the audience think that they have some input in the process; but mostly, it’s for the theatre…

Presumably to demonstrate that they’re the kind of theatre that does these sorts of things. Okay. Right on. It is nonetheless helpful to hear the thing read aloud. To see it staged, however modestly. To get a sense of its rhythm (or lack there of). To know what works and what doesn’t. To hear the audience laugh, or moan, or yawn, or swear, or ask, aloud, WTF is this and who gave me this ticket anyhow?

We’ll see. I have a tendency to overreact and jump to conclusions, overly harsh conclusions. If you would, cross your fingers with me, then say the following: “middle biddle fumble and ding” three times really fast.

Or not.