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The play [amazon_link id=”0879102055″ target=”_blank” ]Chicago[/amazon_link], while not assigned to the class is one that I thought I would talk about and review, as I am still on a serious [amazon_link id=”0553346113″ target=”_blank” ]Sam Shepard[/amazon_link] kick and this play has influenced my consideration of the play I’m writing right now.

There are many aspects of this play that draw my attention, but to go from the most influential to the least is probably the best process. By far the most interesting came from an essay I read on Shepard and the play in which Shepard himself, in an interview, says:

Instead of the idea of a whole ‘character’ with logical motives behind his behavior which the actor submerges himself into, he should consider instead a fractured whole with bits and pieces of character flying off the central theme. In other words, more in terms of collage construction or jazz improvisation.

Up to this point, I have written plays in which I have gone to great pains to exhume the entirety of each character from the buried depths of my mind in order to examine his or her actions, choices, reactions, and behavior. This approach to plays creates a certain sort of play. At the very least, one that lacks spontaneity or a sense that anything is possible. Or, perhaps, my techniques for creating characters have never gone far enough, and this notion of exploring a fractured whole is something I should examine far more often. That is, focus small and go deep; rather than focusing wide and going shallow.

The play [amazon_link id=”0879102055″ target=”_blank” ]Chicago[/amazon_link] opens strangely, with a policeman coming from behind a closed curtain, beating the curtain, and then walking up the center aisle and beating a chair at the back of the house 3 times. This is followed by the Gettysburg Address being read until the curtains and lights come up revealing the character Stu sitting in a bathtub up center on an otherwise empty stage. I have yet to find any adequate explanation for this, and can only suggest that it came from some exercise similar to those we have done in class. The cop I guess I could make an argument about: he moves off the stage, so he blends the world of the audience and the stage in a sort of metatheatrical way. He beats the chair at the back to focus the audience to the whole theatre as opposed to the stage area. He represents a force of authority in society so that may intimidate some people or make them more self-aware. The use of the Gettysburg Address is altogether different. I have tried having it read as I imagined the play moving. I have tried reading it myself while thinking the play moving; all to sort of time it out and see if any words or phrases align with any particular event on or off stage. I have looked at themes in the address to see if they are relevant. All for naught. The most that I can come up with is that it is a major speech in US history and everyone is familiar with it. So, perhaps it has something to do with re-enforcing shared experience or sort of countering the policeman and alienating people while at the same time providing them with shared experience. Who knows? The play itself seems to deal with two issues: 1) avoidance of uncomfortable discussions or topics; 2) overweening introspection or self-involvement and breaking out of it–I think; depending on how you read the ending. Regardless, both of these experiences should be common to an audience and very like the beginning material: the policeman and the address, should parallel both the alienation and the shared experience felt by the main character Stu.

At the open, Stu is babbling in a bathtub:

And ya’ look all around through the town fer yer dog. Your dog Brown. He’s yellow but ya’ call him Brown anyhow.’

That is to say, he’s playing a sort of word game with himself. You find out soon that his soon-to-be ex-lover (Joy is about to leave Stu for a job in another city) is in the ‘apartment’ as she calls to him from off stage to come and eat biscuits. So, though he’s present with someone else, he’s babbling to himself. Through an essay by Lynda Hart, and the study of the play, it is clear that Sheppard is showing a character (Stu) who is so internally focused and self-involved that his ability or inclination to communicate is seriously impaired. Soon after this opening, Joy throws a towel to Stu, who is in the tub in his jeans and sneakers, and Stu throws the towel over his head and begins acting like an old woman. Based on what Hart says, it is clear that Stu will only talk directly to Joy about how he’s feeling through this old woman character. Further, even when he does speak to her, what he says is couched in obscure references that are overtly hostile and perhaps misogynistic in nature. That is, as Hart points out, Stu is giving voice to his repressed emotions toward Joy through the character of the old woman. Joy soon enters the tub, causing Stu to shout You can’t get in here!’ further doing justice to Hart’s theory that the tub is the limited pervue of Stu’s consciousness.

The whole play is filled with a sort of game playing that reflects and expands on other similar styles in early Shepard plays: Cowboys #2 for instance, where the two cowboys each take turns walking down stage and entering a new persona–until those personas bleed over into their ‘real’ characters. In fact, I find myself very drawn to Shepard due to what I am more and more convinced as being his allowance of the subconscious to enter plays through imagistic characters: characters in unexpected clothing, with unexpected props, with unique styles of expression and action–the young man dressed as a cheerleader in The Unseen Hand for instance, who delivers a high-strung monologue defending the hometown he loves–and unbelievable tics of personality.

As the game playing continues, we see the contents of the games and the verbal desultory bleed out into the action of the other characters on the stage–very like Cowboys #2 mentioned briefly above. Here, though, as Hart points out, the bleeding of images represents the fantasy world of Stu invading or encompassing the real world that Joy occupies. That is, we are seeing that Stu is less capable of dealing with the reality as it is, and more interested in filling it with his own wishes and desires.

I used [amazon_link id=”0879102055″ target=”_blank” ]Chicago[/amazon_link] as a guide for me in the following way. I went through the play and carefully marked transitions: either French scenes or changes in subject of Stu’s rants, or any time a game stopped or a new game began. Based on this, I traced images and themes that appeared early and followed the strands as they drove through to the conclusion, noting any changes in use or morphing of meaning. By doing this, I hoped to gain some insight into 1) what Shepard was saying; 2) how Shepard constructed the play, that is, united Stu’s seemingly unrelated rants by common or shared themes or images. This process, and Hart’s article, were invaluable in making this experience worthwhile. As Hart notes, there is no readily accessible conflict in this play. That is, there is no traditional ‘squaring off’ between people. So, to understand the tension (that is felt) and to understand what that tension is about and what it means, you have to clue in on Stu and how his interior comes out throughout the piece. The only clue you are given as to the tension in the play is a phone call that Joy receives where she says: ‘Yes. I got the job. Yes, it’s final,’ and that she’s leaving, ‘The sooner the better;’ as well as fragments of offstage conversation. All else is implied by the action: for instance, the four friends who come over throughout the play to see Joy off all bringing suitcases. All else in the play is delivered by Stu.

Themes/Images in the play (somewhat in order of appearance, but not entirely)

The play shuffles through a sort of stream of consciousness tangential to the concerns that Stu has: first denial (babbling); then the transformation of Stu into the old woman and the accompanying warning to Joy that she will be eaten; then Stu talks with the fish and tells them to go away that they will be eaten and finally that they are hung up, as are the fisherman trying to catch them; Stu next imagines Joy’s trip on the train, which devolves from adventurous to fairly disgusting, ending with one of Joy’s friends saying ‘good morning’ to Stu, who acts as if he has spent a night on the train; morning finds sun on the water and the prospect of happiness, but again Stu becomes the old woman, this time chastising Joy and her friends in a fantasy that quickly devolves into boatloads of sailors coming ashore and screwing everything they can find until a new society is created–a society that ends in violence and a return to the sea (the unconscious); eventually Joy comes on in a red dress pulling a wagon filled with suitcases–she is leaving or has left and becomes a figment in Stu’s imagination as Joy’s friends wave and celebrate and then begin fishing off the stage; Stu’s last terrible imagining sees the water drifting out and leaving him swollen and stuck in the night, stinking and burning milk-like water and a loss of orientation; finally, Stu is out of the tub and running and breathing ‘fine/good air,’ hopefully a new independence, but it is not entirely certain.

I like the freedom of the piece and the other pieces by Shepard that I have read, and the willingness that Shepard has to explore areas of his own mind and the characters that represent them: his willingness to allow images and themes to float up and move the play in any direction that may be dictated by the unconscious, not so much by the conscious mind. The play ends in uncertainty, though with less constriction than the way it started (i.e. in a tub), and I believe positively; though it is open for consideration–that is, it is not a definite ending, which to my mind equates with contrived. That is, Shepard made no attempt to wrap it up neatly for the audience.

The physical nature of the play is important, too. That is, the props or actions that are distinct: the policeman at the beginning; the [amazon_link id=”1439188963″ target=”_blank” ]Gettysburg Address[/amazon_link] over the PA; the bathtub; the biscuits; using the towel as hair to create an old woman; the telephone and offstage conversations; the use of fishing poles to signal the bleeding of the interior of Stu into his exterior reality; the suitcases; the friends who show up: women dressed in fur coats with black sunglasses; the men in suits with black sunglasses–that is, the representative nature of their foreignness to Stu, even their menacing nature; the wagon and red dress; the fishing off the stage; the breathing exercise. All of theses elements combine to create a very real, grounded experience and are integral to the spoken elements: giving reality to the subjective interior of Stu.

This exercise or approach has sent me back to my play to excavate and examine my own images and themes, their use and (hopefully) evolution. I anticipate that this will help me tie segments generated at different times and in different moods together in a more comprehensive way. To examine where I’ve been and where I’m going and hopefully pull a solid play out of what has been a very useful, helpful, and deeply meaningful process for me this semester.

References:

Hart, Lynda. ‘The Play’s the Thing’: Metaphorical Stages.’ Sam Shepard’s [amazon_link id=”0313253730″ target=”_blank” ]Sam Shepard’s Metaphorical Stages: (Contributions in Drama and Theatre Studies)[/amazon_link], Number 22. Westport: Greenwood, 1987.32-36.

Shepard, Sam. [amazon_link id=”0879102047″ target=”_blank” ]The Unseen Hand and Other Plays[/amazon_link]. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

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 [amazon_link id=”B001M3T7KI” target=”_blank” ]A Midsummer Night’s Dream[/amazon_link]A 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 [amazon_link id=”1559362669″ target=”_blank” ]The Clean House[/amazon_link], 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 [amazon_link id=”1559362669″ target=”_blank” ]The Clean House[/amazon_link]: 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 [amazon_link id=”029271534X” target=”_blank” ]Bakhtinian[/amazon_link] 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 [amazon_link id=”B002RKRGEE” target=”_blank” ]Hamlet[/amazon_link] 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 [amazon_link id=”0472061666″ target=”_blank” ]Aristotlean[/amazon_link] 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 [amazon_link id=”0307474879″ target=”_blank” ]Noel Coward[/amazon_link] productions I have seen at the [amazon_link id=”0195446119″ target=”_blank” ]Shaw Festival[/amazon_link]–and had a bursting energy and happiness exceed only by two other plays I’ve ever seen (both at Shaw): [amazon_link id=”6302593344″ target=”_blank” ]Three Men on a Horse[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”B001GLX6TY” target=”_blank” ]You Can’t Take It with You[/amazon_link]; 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 [amazon_link id=”6305291403″ target=”_blank” ]Il Postino[/amazon_link] or [amazon_link id=”0805063749″ target=”_blank” ]The Milagro Beanfield War[/amazon_link]. 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.