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Designated Mourner @ CPT

[amazon_link id=”1608460967″ target=”_blank” ]Wallace Shawn[/amazon_link] may be more familiar to you as an actor than as a playwright. His appearance in films such as [amazon_link id=”0792846109″ target=”_blank” ]Manhattan[/amazon_link][amazon_link id=”B001WLMOLE” target=”_blank” ]My Dinner with Andre[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”B000TJBNHG” target=”_blank” ]The Princess Bride[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”B0001V6ZJI” target=”_blank” ]Prick Up Your Ears[/amazon_link], and [amazon_link id=”B0054QTWJK” target=”_blank” ]Vanya On 42^nd Street[/amazon_link], as well as more popular television forms such as [amazon_link id=”B0006N2EZA” target=”_blank” ]Murphy Brown[/amazon_link] and [amazon_link id=”B000TGURZ8″ target=”_blank” ]Ally McBeal[/amazon_link] make him an almost ubiquitous character actor on the screen.

Unless you’re a hardcore theatre buff, his work as a playwright is likely less known to you. Plays by Shawn include The Hospital Play, [amazon_link id=”0802151035″ target=”_blank” ]Aunt Dan and Lemon[/amazon_link], [amazon_link id=”080214070X” target=”_blank” ]The Fever[/amazon_link], and of course [amazon_link id=”1559363622″ target=”_blank” ]The Designated Mourner[/amazon_link].

In his book [amazon_link id=”1566395178″ target=”_blank” ]Writing Wrongs[/amazon_link], W. D. King describes Shawn in terms of an A and B personality. The primary personality, the A personality, is the intellectual, the playwright, the self-described liberal prince (son of [amazon_link id=”B001O2SCKI” target=”_blank” ]The New Yorker[/amazon_link] editor [amazon_link id=”1582431108″ target=”_blank” ]William Shawn[/amazon_link]): striving to be an artist and striving to right society’s wrongs. The secondary personality, the B personality, is the actor, the persona that most of society recognizes: the angry little balding man with the funny face and high-pitched voice. But don’t confuse the two: in his plays the little balding man with the funny face is gone, replaced by a complex voice that is not afraid to fix the view of an audience on things which are most uncomfortable to look at.

In his play [amazon_link id=”0802151035″ target=”_blank” ]Aunt Dan and Lemon[/amazon_link], Shawn’s main character, Lenora (Lemon), opens the play by praising Nazis and proceeds to reflect on her life and upbringing, closing the play by again praising Nazi efficiency and asking the audience to thank the killers. Shawn writes:

“A perfectly decent person can turn into a monster perfectly easily–the difference between a perfectly decent person and a monster is just a few thoughts. The perfectly decent person who follows a certain chain of reasoning, ever so slightly and subtly incorrect, becomes a perfect monster at the end of the chain.”

The irony for the audience is that at the end of the play one is supposed to give applause. But how do you applaud Nazi efficiency and a request to thank the killers? Shawn loves to fix an audience on the end of a pin, and this is only one example.

Perhaps a more notable example is [amazon_link id=”080214070X” target=”_blank” ]The Fever[/amazon_link], a play told by an unknown narrator who is sick in a foreign country. The play is a brutal self-flagellation that some suggest is a case of liberal guilt, but is nonetheless a ruthless indictment of our inability or lack of desire to help the impoverished and miserable of the world. Shawn intended the play to be “performed in homes and apartments, for groups of ten or twelve,” and has admitted his interest in seeing the audience react as much as anything. This last piece of information is significant, as it demonstrates Shawn’s desire to change the theater fundamentally. In the case described, the audience has become the “thing” to watch, not the reverse.

In fact, the most notable aspect of Shawn’s work is the seeming lack of structure or, at least, lack of well-drawn plot. Shawn himself has said, “It’s laughable, in a way, that someone who has no sense of character or plot would become a playwright.” His plays are, in a way, excavations of character, psychology, and motivation: why does person X become person X? Or, to use the words of Howard in [amazon_link id=”1559363622″ target=”_blank” ]The Designated Mourner[/amazon_link], “Wouldn’t it be more valuable to try to understand various things?”for example, to understand what circumstances in the world or in a person’s life might lead them to behave the way Martin behaved?”

In [amazon_link id=”1559363223″ target=”_blank” ]Our Late Night[/amazon_link], a couple’s relationship is excavated and analyzed as the two lie in bed on the edge of wakefulness and sleep. In [amazon_link id=”B001WLMOLE” target=”_blank” ]My Dinner with Andre[/amazon_link], both characters analyze their motivations for seeking, or not seeking, spiritual and creative awakening”the character Andre examining in excruciating detail his life experience. In Aunt Dan and Lemon, the character Lemon opens the play saying that she admires Nazis for their “refreshing” lack of hypocrisy”and Shawn wants to show you how she’s come to that admiration. In The Fever, the narrator torments himself seeking the solution to how he should act in the world and why he doesn’t. In [amazon_link id=”1559363622″ target=”_blank” ]The Designated Mourner[/amazon_link] the character Jack disassociates himself with his wife and father-in-law, managing to avoid a political execution, and we witness his transformation and disassociation in excruciating detail.

Shawn’s plays often border on the edge of the abstract, that is, they nearly become expressionist pieces that can focus solely on the image of something or of creating the image of something to impress upon your mind a certain sensation. [amazon_link id=”1559363622″ target=”_blank” ]The Designated Mourner[/amazon_link] is no exception. Don’t be fooled early on by the conversational tone of the piece, the virtual nonchalance of the way characters address you. Shawn’s plays are largely conversational, involving lengthy monologues delivered by characters to you as audience: you as hearer becoming, in effect, a confidant for the character. Shawn places you in the position of sifting through the actions, motivations, and statements of a character to discover the moral righteousness or unrighteousness of the action, motivation, or statement: that is, Shawn places you in a position of judgment.

As Shawn himself notes, “Most of the people who go to the theatre are simply looking for a certain kind of soothing experience that will take their mind off their troubles. So if that’s why a person has come to the theatre, I feel like an idiot grabbing him by the throat and trying to get him to worry about the things that are bothering me. My style as a human being is to indulge people who need to escape. Yet I insist on confronting them as a playwright. It’s quite embarrassing, it’s quite unpleasant, it’s quite awkward.”

In [amazon_link id=”1559363622″ target=”_blank” ]The Designated Mourner[/amazon_link] Shawn posits a future that may be, a future where the intellectual, the philosopher, the person concerned with more profoundly human things is driven out of existence: a future, perhaps, of purely animal joys and experiences. Shawn takes aim at a society strangely familiar, one in which high standards have disappeared, morality is vanishing, ethics and good taste are buried. As if this weren’t enough, you get to watch the main character, Jack, dismantle himself, change himself, to be less like the hunted, and more like the mob. As the character Judy remarks, “Human motivation is not complex, or it’s complex only in the same sense that the motivation of a fly is complex. In other words, if you try to swat a fly, it moves out of the way. And humans are the same. They step aside when they sense something coming, about to hit them in the face.”

In [amazon_link id=”1559363622″ target=”_blank” ]The Designated Mourner[/amazon_link] Shawn opens up a frightening landscape so that you may peer into it as though it were a crystal ball. I hope you’re ready for him to grab your throat.

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.