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I’ve just finished reading the article in American Theatre this month regarding [amazon_link id=”1598530038″ target=”_blank” ]Thorton Wilder’s)[/amazon_link] famous play.

The author of the article, Lori Ann Laster, begins the journey in her pre-teens inside her middle school gymnasium, with the broad statement: “Like many Americans…” I guess, I’m not in that group. I don’t know whether to feel gypped or not. I also don’t know why my all-American hometown, which it was—Fredericktown, Ohio—home of the FFA Jacket—failed to deliver on this one. I think I do feel gypped. Regardless, I digress into another small instance of my all-too-familiar penchant for simmering injustice. That is to say, I didn’t see the play in my pre-teens. In fact, I had no encounter with the play at all until 2007 at Cleveland Public Theatre—actually, that isn’t wholly true—my teacher and mentor, Mike Geither, virtually insisted to one class that we watch Spalding Gray in the video version, which I now have (but haven’t watched—maybe I’ll do that tonight)—but that really doesn’t count as that’s only hearing about the play, not experiencing it.

In reviewing my blog, I find that I did no review of that 2007 performance, which really shocks me. The performance was rated the “most lyrical staging” of 2007 by Scene and was, in fact, really stark and terrific for a host of reasons. Chris Seibert played the part of Emily Webb with a deep earnestness that I’ll not soon forget—and which sent me spiraling back to those terrible days of urgent adolescent yearning that were emotionally and, in certain places, physically painful. George Gibbs, played by Len Lieber, did an equally fantastic job in his earnest portrayal.

In reflecting on the piece I’ve had to dig about on he web. I found the one positive review above and then one negative review in the Free Times by James Damico, who must have some personal dislike of Bobgan as his review is so sharply hysterical. There must be some deep impulse to love [amazon_link id=”1598530038″ target=”_blank” ]Thorton Wilder’s)[/amazon_link] purely and some desire to be touched on his quivering breast by Wilder’s “superior intellect.” I, for one, was able to see beyond such shallowness as the casting and into the emotion of the piece and production; else Damico just likes create a certain high-pitched hysteria, as he clearly likes boasting and ego flashing: demonstrated by his cheap sarcasm obnoxiously brought to the fore by his unnecessary recitation of musical fodder regarding a hypothetical staging by Cleveland Orchestra of Pomp and Circumstance. As well, it’s clear; he couldn’t resist the inappropriateness of stirring in disgusting suggestions of pedophilia. In fact, it’s amazing how much sexual repression I’ve picked up on in so short a review as that by Mr. Damico; perhaps this observation points to the source of the high-pitched hysteria? It’s also nice and lovely to get Mr. Damico’s authentic praxis on how [amazon_link id=”0060535253″ target=”_blank” ]Our Town[/amazon_link] should be staged, complete with a recitation of pages 24-25 of his Our Town Staging Guide, 2nd Edition, on the “specific gravity” of the Stage Manager: because, God-knows both the “genuine and would-be” theater critic is the true knower of all things playwriting, play-building, and play-producing—(as demonstrated, no doubt, by the number of directing awards on his desk).

I since have found another negative review, though less prurient.

There was much physical movement in the production at CPT that included the use of chairs and ladders and a bare set. The movement of chairs, to my mind, was exceptional in that the movement very nearly effected what I would suggest as “camera angles” on the stage: one moment Emily was at stage right and George was at stage left, a quick few movements and all was reversed. For a “theater in the round” as was sort of instantiated at CPT for this play, I thought the “camera angles” were extraordinary and the movement gave a vitality to the piece. It also, for me, was in keeping with Bobgan and Seibert’s use of stools in their production of Caucasian Chalk Circle for STEP. I later learned, of course, that the starkness of the set, the chairs, and even the ladders were a part of Wilder’s directions. And, of course, learned that this was perhaps the crowning achievement of the piece—or one of them, certainly at the time it was written.

As the American Theatre article discusses, the stage in mid- to late-Thirties was “stuck” in trenchant “realism”—massive sets, the well-made play. As Laster writes:

A bare stage, no props, the use of mime, breaking the fourth wall, dismantling the unities of time and place—these were radically innovative devices that astounded audiences at the time when kitchen-sink realism dominated the serious stage, and boulevard comedies and melodrama proliferated…It was by removing the diversion of realistic clutter and tapping into the imagination of audiences that Wilder strove to make what was on the stage reflect the verities of life: “Our claim, our hope, our despair are in the mind—not in things, not in scenery.” 25

The CPT production shocked and stunned me, but more to the point perhaps, I was stunned by Wilder. I am still amazed at the effect of all the component parts put together in three acts led to that transcendence. The New York Times in 1938 wrote, “under the leisurely monotone of the production there is a fragment of immortal truth,” which still came through in 2007, demonstrating the power that Wilder cast up through his piece.

The article in American Theatre goes on to discuss the productions of Our Town at four theatres in the U.S. this year, and some in the past, including the variety of methods being used in the staging to re-create the production for modern audiences—all of which, of course, would be repellant to Mr. Damico, violating pages 1-5 of his Our Town Staging Guide, 2nd Edition, on the “purity of production values” and “reverence for superior intellects.” Of course, the use of bunraku-style puppets at Two River Theater Company would send Damico stark-raving mad and he’d no doubt rush the stage in a frothy-mouthed ecstasy screaming something about the trauma done to the “timeless nature of small-town existence” by the use of puppetry.

Laster ends her discussion of [amazon_link id=”0060535253″ target=”_blank” ]Our Town[/amazon_link] by drawing our attention to when it was written and what was happening in the world, and notes that a certain resurgence of the piece may be due to a similar impulse in our own time—a yearning for a simpler, more pure time in our American past—that small Grover’s Corners in our idyllic dream of America. Although the great grandson of Wilder is quoted speculating that [amazon_link id=”0060535253″ target=”_blank” ]Our Town[/amazon_link] is staged every night somewhere in America. How accurate that speculation is difficult to gauge.

An interesting commentary by Mike Harden in the Metro section of the Columbus Dispatch which I saw this weekend while visiting my parents drew another possibility, as one message of [amazon_link id=”0060535253″ target=”_blank” ]Our Town[/amazon_link], certainly one drawn from Emily Webb’s visitation of her family after she had shuffled off her mortal coil, is to live life in the present, to not allow pettiness and selfish focus to cause you to overlook the wonderful life you have in front of you right now. A certain, strong, Buddhist metaphysics indeed.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, at least in passing, the similarity between Our Town and [amazon_link id=”1602837422″ target=”_blank” ]Under Milk Wood[/amazon_link] by Dylan Thomas, both plays that draw as their subject the life of a town and its inhabitants. Perhaps sometime I’ll discuss this one a bit more as Geither turned me on to it and I found Thomas’ piece equally as compelling as Wilder’s.

Naomi Wallace’s article, which I began reviewing in my last post, continues with an enumeration of ways to transgress when writing. She outlines six, specifically:

1. Ways of Seeing — she points to John Berger’s book.

Interestingly, I have several copies of John Berger’s book. When I worked for AmeriCorps in 1994 one of the VISTAs with whom I worked managed to get Penguin Books to donate tens of thousands of its overstocked books to the program. We filled the shelves of the ABLE program and had many duplicates to take for ourselves. I have looked at it several times, but always assumed it was an “art” book. Guess I should go dig it out.

2. Write against YOUR traditional ways of seeing.
   

   I’ll have to read it to gain the perspective necessary to fully understand what Wallace is talking about here; but I have no doubt about it’s validity. I was amazed by the immediate progress I made when I changed the MANNER in which I approached playwriting. I can’t imagine how beneficial approaching the matter from a different way of SEEING will be.

3. Study how language is used to oppress

From the various forms of literary criticism that I’ve read, I’ve certainly come to understand the validity of claims regarding how language conveys power relationships and affects self-perception. When researching my play about midwives I looked into misogyny in medicine and power relationships in the medical world; it should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent time in a hospital that language is one of the key mechanisms that medical professionals use to control interactions: from the mechanistic view of the body to the manner in which they use “medical-ese” to keep patients at arms length (nephrology–kidney; oncology–cancer, etc.). I still find the way Wallace loads this item with her communist polemic distasteful, but hey, to each her own. Regardless, language is certainly something that should be important to playwrights, and how one group uses it against another is key to many aspects of play creation.

4. Disrupt cliches and the “cluttered mind”

I always strive to do this. Cliches are THE key indicator that you are not original…unless, of course, you’re writing an entire play using cliches, which I have thought of doing.

5. Explore other writers

Probably the single most valuable aspect of the MFA program I’m in. Just the sheer exposure to other writers and other “ways of seeing.”

6. Research thoroughly what you’re writing about

I always am thorough in my research. In fact, I am afraid that my calling may be to just do research and not to write at all. In each major work that I have done–two big plays and a children’s book–I’ve spent, collectively, six years researching: gathering, reading, analyzing, following citations, working the interlibrary loan machine…

Wallace goes on, after this, to express her “highest aspiration” as a writer: which is to “re-imagine ourselves and our communities” which I think is very noble, indeed. And despite my disagreement with the language in which Wallace often couches her propositions, I do very much agree with her on this point–as well as her “6 Ways to Transgress.”

The next thing that Wallace considers is of great import to me, I’m glad to see it is for her, too. Of course, I am forced to admit that Wallace’s language in her plays and her often stunning stage images leaves my constructs to shame–but with Geither’s help and my re-constructed view of playwriting and the stage I have began to cultivate powerful stage images of my own. Regardless, the item of concern here is the question of “dryness” and “sex” that she puts.

The question of “dryness” refers to “writing devoid of passion and complexity and entertainment”–that is, the fear that if you write plays that are political they will be “dry” and uninteresting. This certainly should be a concern, but I would state that it ALWAYS should be a concern REGARDLESS of the subject matter. If characters in a play are viewed humanely and honestly and one utilizes imagination in the staging and dimensionality of the work and one exercises the “standard” toolkit of playwriting techniques: such as timing and tension, etc., then a play should NOT be “dry.” Wallace goes on to expand the dryness to encompass a subject matter that is just plain boring (again, as viewed by students). But Wallace ably fends off this question by simply pointing to the blood press that is history–that is, one throws apples into a press to get cider; history throws people into a press to get blood, consequence, and the problems of the future.

The question of “sex” is what Wallace re-phrases as a question of intimacy. And again, Wallace ably defends that both economics and politics are sexy, especially when couched in the terms of their consequence on the smallest of lives throughout all time: for instance, the prejudice of a pope makes four generations of Jews live in a ghetto. The consequences on the lives of all those people is pretty intimate. Here Wallace quotes Terry Eagleton who somewhere wrote that “our economic world is about ‘the plundering of the body of its sensuous wealth'” and again, she couches the argument in terms of capitalism, etc. But, in this case I agree–in that our lives are spent pursuing a course other than that which we would were it possible for us to live without selling 40+ of our human hours every week: our body hours, our dreaming hours, our life hours. Now that I have children I realize more acutely what the sale of my time–my life–means.

Here, Wallace begins to make some of her more powerful and beautifully worded appeals. For instance, “What could be more intimate and personal than the history of our bodies and their relationship to the world?” or:

History itself is a study in intimacy, or our lack of it, with others. What else is history and politics but the struggle of people to define who they are and what they can and cannot do?

But still, I think the statements that she makes apply to a certain type of writing, a certain type of play. What has been referred to by others, with some amount of distaste, as “social plays” or plays about “issues”: Ibsen, Miller, Wilson, etc. But when I think of the early plays of Sam Shepard, I am less inclined to agree that these elements apply. But one certainly could argue for them in his later family trilogy plays, and so on. They play out less on the national political level than at the metapolitical level of the family or the interpersonal/personal level of the self and its relation to family members. If anything, of course, Shepard’s plays approach the idea of masculinity in our culture: its manifestation, consequences, and meaning. But, as Wallace states, “we are involved in the job of drama,” each of us.

I am relieved that on page 102 Wallace writes that she is “not calling for a condescending theatre or a ‘preaching to the converted’ theatre but a welcoming, vigorous, inquisitive and brutal theatre…to challenge normative ways of seeing, to get uncomfortable, to get unsafe, to get unsure.” For really, there is nothing worse than a condescending political theatre. It becomes very like the current national campaign for president.

In the end, true to form, and true to good writing, Wallace leaves us with as many questions as possible answers. Some of the questions that I felt particularly drawn to were those that Wallace posited for playwrights–what she refers to as a “how” state of mind:

“How did it come to this? How am I diminished by my own ignorance? How have I been silenced in ways that I am not aware of?” These are good questions, and while I know Wallace points us toward a full human condition, I am still disappointed that the questions (and her pointing) are couched in the lesser language of a blatant political philosophy that I would say, diminishes the discussion.