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Went to the Opera Cleveland production of La Voix Humaine and Pagliacci last Thursday night. 

Pagliacci collage from Opera Cleveland

The first piece was very difficult to sit through.  I read about later and learned that it was an avant garde piece and is considered a wonderful analysis of one human being’s isolation, etc, and highly prized as it is one of the only solo opera pieces for women.  I told my wife that it was as near a conception of hell as I have ever had. If I wrote a play like La Voix Humaine, not only would it not be staged, but people who read it would most likely slap me in the head.  La Voix Humanie (music by Francis Poulenc to a libretto by Jean Cocteau) has a rather novel concept: a woman (Elle — Robin Follman) whose lover is dumping her has just suicided herself with a bunch of pills and is on the phone with him.  The phone is a party line and the call is continually interrupted and disconnected. You might be able to sustain this for :10 to :15 minutes. The opera piece was one hour.  One hour of a one-sided conversation. One hour of the most mundane and tiresome conversational points.  Cocteau should have been slapped in the head.  I don’t care that they label this thing as a Dadaist experiment or whatever; it was unpleasant.  And, to some extent, I think Cocteau might have known that and was forcing Madame Berthe Bovy, for whom it is said he wrote it, to endure the piece. Regardless, even if its intent was to exhaust everyone involved in the piece it surpassed that moving into a new realm of violence against an audience. There are several shifts in the piece, for instance, first she is very off-hand with her lover, sort of like: ‘well, while you were out of town I went out with my friends and partied, etc.’; this shifts later when she admits that she lied and was at home the whole time by the phone waiting for his phone call (which never came).  Later she admits how desperate she is for him and then hears jazz music in the background, thus realizing he’s out on the town and is most likely disinterested in her (as was I at that point).  I feel somewhat cruel and unfeeling, as I have been in her position before (long ago) with regard to love, but strangely did not have much sympathy for her; in fact, I found the whole thing quite annoying.  A larger problem, perhaps, with the experience for me was the fact that 1) the lines were sung (duh! Opera) and 2) they were in French, which of course meant I spent my time reading it.

After La Voix Humaine, Pagliacci was a godsend.  Hear Caruso sing Vesti La Giubba Thank God for multiple characters, a plot, and some action! I never felt so relieved.  The irony is not lost on me, given my recent predilection for plotless plays. I can see where the modern musical has its origin. Having looked at Brecht a bit I saw many interesting things going on. For instance, at the outset there is a dumbshow and tragedy (in black) confronts comedy (in white).  Also, the character of Tonio (Michael Chioldi) comes out and directly addresses the audience reminding them that the clowns are real people and feel just like the audience does. So, in this short prologue you have the premise of the piece outlined and are instructed that these are actors playing parts. The premise of the piece is that Canio (Gregory Carroll) is the head of a troupe of clowns who go from town to town entertaining in villages.  It is a commedia dell’arte troupe complete with Harlequin, etc. Canio’s wife, Nedda (Robin Follman), is cheating on him with a man (Silvio — Eric Dubin) in the village that they come to entertain. The payoff for this plot is fulfilled by using the play within the play: the subject matter of the play within the play is identical to the main problem of the play itself: i.e. the cuckolding of Pagliacci and the cuckolding of Canio (the character who plays Pagliacci–which means ‘clown’).  So, these two events mirror each other, but the most excellent part is when Pagliacci is confronting his wife Colombina about her cuckolding him and you suddenly realize that it’s not the clowns at play anymore, but Canio has broken his character and is really confronting Nedda.  This is compounded by the audience being present to watch the commedia dell’arte farce and their reaction to Canio’s performance–which, of course, is no performance. Silvio is equally confused as he doesn’t know, due to the subject matter of the play within the play, whether to intervene and stop Canio/Pagliacci from killing Nedda/Colombina.  Very like Hamlet, Canio gets the reaction that he wants. That is, as Canio begins to kill Nedda, Silvio is flushed out of hiding and forced to confront Canio.  But it is too late, as Canio has knifed Nedda and follows up by knifing Silvio. Canio then announces, ‘the play is finished’. The whole nature of the play within the play mirroring the ‘reality’ in the play’s world was highly engaging to me as an audience member, but then the method by which the two were made to work against one another was fantastic. It formed a dialog between the two whose irony was only apparent to the real audience in the theater, not the ‘fake’ audience on the stage. The contrasts though were forced to be drawn: the two scenarios, the clowns with the ‘real’ character counterparts, and of course, the two audiences sitting face to face: one unaware and ‘entertained’ the other fully aware and thrilled and horrified all at once. The operatic moments also work very much like Brechtian songs, making the audience aware that this is no “reality” and that you are seeing a performance. The dialog that is created between the notion of what is a performance and what is real is also created, as there are many characters whose action mirror those of the characters in the play-within-the-play. This coupled with the admonition by Tonio at the outset that clowns feel too forces a consideration about the nature of performance and what is real and what is ‘staged’.

Given the known troubles that Opera Cleveland is having, one thing that surprised me was the set and effects, the large number of people (chorus), etc.  I just wondered if it wouldn’t be possible to have productions that were stripped down completely and used some other methods for effects.  With this play there are probably 4-5 characters really needed, not the dozens that were present.  Obviously, the orchestra is necessary and I’m sure that is a significant expense.  It is just interesting to ponder the costs and differences between running a theater company and an opera company and the factors that enter into the various models.

One thing that disappointed me, of course, is that I’m very used to being in theaters like convergence-continuum where you are, happily, only feet from any actor at any given moment.  For $30 I was way the hell back from the stage and under a balcony to boot.  The proscenium was pronounced and the fourth wall was present–though occasionally broken, by Tonio’s direct address, for example.

I very much enjoyed the experience, being a fan of some musicals (I know, I know…) it is no surprise (i.e. Les Miserables, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Producers). The music was well-played (as far as I know) and conducted (Dean Williamson); the performances well directed (Bernard Uzan) and I thought the voices were very fine.  I will definitely make a point of going back again, if Opera Cleveland is around…

I attended a fantastic Dramatist’s Guild symposium on Saturday, September 20th, at Cleveland Public Theatre.  The symposium was about Censorship in the Theatre and was arranged and coordinated by Faye Sholiton who deserves a tremendous amount of recognition and thanks for her effort in coordinating this event.  The staff of Cleveland Public Theatre are also to be much, much thanked and congratulated for this event which was not only well-attended but of significant importance.

The “headline” guest was Ozen Yula.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ozen Yula, he is a playwright from Turkey whose play was not only shut down in Istanbul; but it is entirely likely that he will be the unfortunate recipient of a death threat in his home country.  For clarification, a death threat in Yula’s part of the world is not the same as the run-of-the-mill death threat one might receive in the United States.  In the US you receive a few phone calls, voicemail messages, etc., from some impotent rage-filled couch potatoes who have nothing better to do but stew around in the mess they call their life while attempting to control other people.  In Turkey, on the other hand, your photograph appears in a fundamentalist newspaper where you are listed as being a very bad person and then a few weeks later you turn up dead and your killer is never caught.

Now, Ozen Yula did conceive of and create a fairly provocative play–by some people’s standards: Lick But Don’t Swallow.  The premise is sort of like a distorted It’s a Wonderful Life or perhaps Two of a Kind if you like John Travolta, Olivia Newton John, and screwball comedies; but I digress: an angel is sent back to Earth for 24 hours during which she must save one person.  The catch? The angel is sent back as a porn star.  (Well, no one said it would be easy…)  So, the whole of the play is a male and female porn star, a camera man, and a director.  As the porn stars fuck in various positions, she blathers on about a host of issues: from famine and hunger to violence, etc.  It is clear that Yula has a droll sense of humor and is not a little irreverent.  It is quite ironic in that, given the subject matter and the handling of the content, I don’t know that this play would have a particularly great staying power in the marketplace, funny as it is.  However, now that someone want to ban the play and possibly kill the playwright (Assassination is the extreme form of censorship–George Bernard Shaw), the play will take on a degree of interest and value that it may never have had.  Like so many things, as soon as someone wants to cover it everyone in the world wants to see what is going to be covered.

So, the play was set to go up in Istanbul, Turkey (at the Kumbaraci 50 theater in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul according to Tony Brown) and due to threats, etc., the theater notified the police and asked for some protection.  At this point, the theater was shut down (even though it had just been built) due to concerns about its compliance with fire codes.  As Yula explained, this may have been coded language to remind everyone of the Sivas Massacre in 1993: where 37 intellectuals, artists, and hotel employees were burned to death by a similar breed of fundamentalist nits that continue to infest the globe in 2010.  Yula is scheduled to return to Turkey later this month and God bless him and keep him from the deranged mob that he’s bound eventually to encounter.  This is censorship in its most overt form.

Yula was surprisingly philosophic and calm about the whole thing, saying that his intent is to “hold up a mirror” to his society/culture and hopes to “help through literature” so that the poor (economically) and brainwashed masses in Istanbul can “see their lives”.  This is now his ethic of playwriting.  Yula is clearly intent on doing the same thing here as his play Don’t Call Me Fat is up at Cleveland Public Theatre right now, and addresses the American obsession with eating, obesity, weight loss, and fame–themes that Yula identified in our society by watching television!

There are all sorts of forms of censorship, but the most disturbing sort follows on the heels of the sort described above–the violent type that Yula faces–and this most disturbing type is Self-Censorship.  This form received a great amount of attention during the day as it is the kind that most people face: for a variety of reasons.  The violence that accompanies some sorts of censorship are aimed squarely at the notion of making people shut their mouths and not to say anything in the first place.  As some of us playwrights went off to lunch we joked with each other saying things like, “I want you to just shut your mouth, as my having to censor you requires too much effort” and “the sooner you learn to censor yourself the easier it will be for me.”  Ha ha ha.  But that, of course, is the idea.  The whole of censorship and control aims at ensuring that thinking is controlled and regulated.  Once thoughts get outside of the head, then there is great effort involved in stomping out the ideas that have escaped.  Other forms of censorship include indirect means.  For instance, in 1996 in Mecklenburg County (North Carolina) the Charlotte Repertory Theater was assaulted for putting up a production of Angels in America.  A local religious nit there (we have them in America too, they just kill less frequently now than they used to) objected to the gay themes and no doubt the overtly liberal bias evinced by Kushner’s politics. Because there was no method of overtly closing the production due to these themes, the nit and the Republican mayor decided to go after the production for having nudity in it.  They were unsuccessful at stopping the production, however the Mecklenburg County Commissioners later retaliated by stripping all arts funding from arts organizations in the county ($2.5 million) and continued to retaliate until summarily voted out of office in 1996. Local playwright Eric Coble wrote a play about the events surrounding this insanity entitled Southern Rapture. Other silly forms (but no less frightening in their implications) include such things as changing the advertising for the Vagina Monolgues to the “Hoo-Haa Monologues” as clearly some American’s have no capacity to think about human sexuality or the human body in any manner beyond the level of a second grader.

Other items of note.  During the opening discussion with Ozen Yula, Tony Brown moderated the interview and later a panel, which included Michael Mauldin, Head of the Dramatic Arts Program at Cleveland State University.  Gary Garrison, Executive Director of Creative Affairs for the Dramatists Guild of America talked a bit about how the DGA handles censorship issues.  Later in the afternoon, Raymond Bobgan, Executive Artistic Director for Cleveland Public Theatre gave an update on the Gordon Square Arts District planning/activities.  Later, later in the afternoon there was a panel discussion which included David Faux, Director of Business Affairs at the Dramatists Guild; Ari Roth, Artistic Director of Theater J; and Betty Shamieh, a playwright whose plays have been highly successful in Europe and translated into many languages, but have not been staged in the US, as she sees it, because of their representation of Palestinian families and issues of concern to Arab-Americans.

On the whole, this was an invigorating and exhausting day, and much glory and honor is due to those who arranged for it to happen.