Diary for Dr. Huston

Modern Drama in Text & Performance

Pirandello's Henry IV

I don't particularly care for this play. Oh, there are some fun ideas, and so on, but it just doesn't seem to play for me. Much of that may be the fact that it's a translation -- goodness knows I've had trouble making Latin or German come out sounding natural in an English equivalent. "Translationese" seems a plague of the theatre, particularly for less common languages like Norwegian (poor Ibsen!).

It may also be that Henry IV is too intellectual for my tastes: it's a very "talky" play, and Henry's lapse into sanity in front of his valets seems somewhat contrived. Or I may have trouble "seeing" it: so many characters running around pull ing on one another -- four very similar servants in the first scene alone! -- makes the blocking and situation much harder to visualize. Or, perhaps, that it's a very remote play: with Sam Shepard, we may not know about life as a redneck hick, but we know of modern, accessible people somewhat like that. Here we're thrown headlong into the eleventh century, into unfamiliar history of unfamiliar events (I remember Frederick Barbarossa from about that time in Germany, I think (even though he never enters the play -- a previous ruler?), but not Henry IV, and certainly not Mathilda, the hordes of bishops, clerics, courtiers, etc.). The play disturbs me -- but then, maybe it's supposed to do that.

Today we talked about "getting lost in the part" in connection with Henry's madness. That's happened to me before. In Baker's As You Like It in 1989, under Alan David, I played Touchstone the clown, a part near and dear to his heart and, soon, to mine. I count much of what I know, think, and feel about theatre from that show. In any case, the blocking flexed about a great deal, both because of Alan's directing style and the problems of maneuvering around a mob of foresters along with all the principals. In the final wedding scene (the worst of the bunch!), in about the final week of rehearsals, Alan was frantically moving people around and out of the way to free up sightlines. One of his changes involved shunting Touchstone away from his court friends and into Audrey's crowd of bumpkins.

We had been building Touchstone up as very much a creature of the court, over-civilized and -civil (just look at the Seven Degrees of the Lie!), and I realized this exile to the country clodpoles would be a dire blow to him. And, the scary part, was, it became so to me! I spent all the evening after rehearsal in a blue funk, and all the next day's practice too, passion and humor both flagging before a profound depression. Alan at last asked what was wrong, and it was so odd to tell him -- for it wasn't I who was depressed, but Touchstone! I was out of control, or rather Touchstone was -- rather like when you get a muscle twitch, and you can feel your arm moving, but you know it's not you moving it. A frightening, unsettling occurence. I was happy when we arrived at a blocking compromise, and this rebellious portion of my personality stopped bugging me.

"A beggar at the door" -- I keep being reminded of Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," "To Marguerite," all those other poems about isolation. (Arnold is really one of the only Victorian poets I can stand. I wonder why that is?) There's a wonderful melancholy in the theme of essential human separation. I recall a science fiction story I read years ago ("A Song for Lya," by George R.R. Martin), built around Matthew Arnold's poems, about two telepathic lovers and the fact that even they discovered they were ultimately unknowable. Here, of course, Pirandello amplifies the theme: you can never ultimately know yourself, or even who you were in the past -- "the picture is me, a long time ago, but who am I now?" I've come to like this play a lot more than when we started out -- I think seeing the acted scene and all the discussion have helped a great deal.

Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author

The same trouble again, with translationese. Abstract philosophy freely flowing, and hard to pin down into natualistic dialect. Or do Italians really talk this way? Or is it just one of "Pirandello's works, where nobody understands anything, and where the actor plays the fool with us all?" Today in class the point came up that Pirandello is trying to write a play to express the inability to communicate! Still, it ends up as a fairly straightforward play -- nothing like, I'm sure, some of the work we're reading later in the semester (Godot?).

Interesting, though, how writing a play about plays dates him: we don't have prompter's boxes any more, and the whole organizational scheme for the imaginary theater seems a bit out of touch -- for nowadays, yes, but not for then. It's much more rare to have a working curtain now, too, since breaks are usually marked with blackouts. In many cases, Pirandello is toying with the conventions of a theatre which no longer exists; which I suppose gives him that extra post-modernist twinkle.

Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Back in high school, when I first read this play (and before I became seriously involved in producing plays instead of merely reading them) I positively adored it. Now, for some reason, I find it somewhat tiresome. Maybe I've just seen the same tricks used better elsewhere -- Pinter pauses, Stoppard's endless and frustrating games in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Oh, there's still the host of possible or potential allusions I think we all hash out in introductory English classes -- what does "Godot" mean? What is the core meaning of Lucky's speech? -- but dramatically (which is perhaps where my new awareness lies), it just seems horribly stilted. And the essential incompleteness of the work -- Stoppard and Pinter, while still being mysterious, let you eventually feel you've got something of a hold on things. Beckett's insistence on dangling possible solutions in front of you, letting you just start to glimpse them, and then yanking them away, is positively annoying.

I've read some other Beckett this semester -- Happy Days and Endgame -- and really find them better done. Yes, Happy Days is very odd, and difficult to play too (how do you act when you're buried in sand up to your neck? The odd situation of stage directions only for the eyes...!), but it seems to make more SENSE -- we feel a certain admiration for this woman, maintaining her cheerfulness based on whatever she has to hand. I don't feel that with Godot -- it's just an empty philosophical shell, fine sentiments but not much real drama. Look at Beckett's answer to "what is the play about?" -- "If I knew, I would have said." Regrettably, it seems to be a well-written, literary, work about nothing: the most frustrating discovery of all.

Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Now here we have a much more accessible version of Beckett's tale. It's certainly funnier, at least, which will get an audience through the parts they don't understand. The trouble with Beckett, and also with modern-day avante-garde theatre artists like Robert Wilson, is that they write or direct very intellectually interesting pieces of work, which are marvellous fun to talk about, analyze, discuss, and pick apart after the fact, but tend to alienate the audience during the performance itself. And that, to me, is not theatre -- you're making it well nigh impossible to establish that actor-audience bond, and you've moved beyond theatre and into something more resembling performance art. Interesting, yes, literary, yes, but ultimately missing something.

R&Ghas its amusing inanities too. Terry Hurley's Rosencrantz got all wound up during one performance in his joke "A Christian, a Moslem and a Jew chanced to meet in a closed carriage...." (p. 736 in Clurman's collection). Twice he had to stop, mutter "that's not right!" and start again. The audience loved it, but I can't quite see the same thing happening with Godot. I'm sure the gadfly Socrates found the same thing: philosophy must be tempered by some humor for most people to swallow it.

Of course, I approached R&G from an odd perspective when I first became deeply involved with it: I played King Claudius for the Rice Players production. Deanna Cooke (who played Gertrude) and I spent several hours reading Hamlet, seeing videotapes, finding where in Shakespeare's original Stoppard's extracts appeared. For us, the antics on stage really were peripheral maneuverings in a larger political game -- the one we were playing in our characters' off-stage lives. I wonder if Stoppard every played Rosencrantz or Guildenstern in a Shakespeare production?

Aha. A quick check in File on Stoppard (one of those invaluable Methuen compilations of quotes from reviews, interviews, and criticism) reveals that Stoppard's agent, Kenneth Ewing, mentioned in 1963 the notion that the English king the two envoys travel to at the time might have been King Lear. R&G at the Court of King Lear developed, via a one-act stage, into its current form. And there is a bit of Lear in the two poor courtiers, isn't there? Stripped of identity and direction, albeit on a much more comfortable heath? And, blind, they stumble right into the deaths they should have foreseen, were they watching the players as we do.

What a film! The bare stage, while fine in a theater, would never work in the cinema -- the opening gray desolation works very well indeed, along with trackless forests and the byzantine corridors of Elsinore. The floating pages throughout are a bit odd -- but perhaps our characters are just, literally, "following a script"? They even get buried in the pages at one point: much as the original characters are buried in the mass of script that makes up the rest of Hamlet. Good to see Claudius with his large flagon (bowing to the traditional Hamlet portrayal of him as a drunkard), and his courtiers as a menacing mass -- shades of the bureacrats in Information Retrieval in Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil (which, ah!, File on Stoppard indicates he helped write!).

The scientific experiments are a cute touch -- especially their consistent failure on the second try! Special effects amplifications on the basic coin-toss? Lots of bars in this film, which will, no doubt, gratify Dr. Huston (grin!) -- Guildenstern is barred off from Polonius as he discusses Hamlet's letter with Claudius, and in several other cases, bars keep the two out of the action of the play (or, rather, of Hamlet!) Of course, bars also turns R&G into a pair of constant eavesdroppers, which is exactly what Claudius has asked that they be, and what Stoppard, too, requires of his hapless pawns.

Pinter's The Homecoming

Ah. Pinter's prose is always a joy to read, or hear -- I saw the Stages Repertory Theatre production of Betrayal earlier this year. The Homecoming, though, is a much more disturbing play than his others I've read -- Betrayal, The Birthday Party, and The Room. I think it may be the more overt violence and twisted sex (intimations of violent pimping), and also just that this seems Pinter's sickest family yet. I like the play, it just makes me uncomfortable -- certainly Birthday Party has violence, but that's performed by two mysterious strangers, not by family members as here.

I enjoyed the performance in class (though it was a bit static for my tastes), and I think I agree that it's an anti-human play, not anti-woman. Ruth is certainly the strongest character, once she decides to play by the men's rules. But I'm sure that, to play the men adequately, you need an idea of what sort of woman Jessie was. Very like Ruth, I would suspect: it would take someone strong and sensuous to hold this riotous lot in check.

I wonder how much we miss of Pinter's plays because we aren't English? I read John Osborne's Look Back in Anger this semester, which becomes much clearer when you understand some of the social background and the changes in the 1950's that prompted the play. Did anything in the English 1960's prompt Pinter's play? Women's liberation? The effect of a Labour government on the economy? No handy references here, as for Stoppard. Hopefully I'll have the chance to research it sometime.

The film is really scary too -- I have two pages of notes, lots of it on the frightening aspects. Lots of odd little details: the ferocious sound of Sam biting into his apple, Max's veil of smoke from the cigar he holds instead of smokes, Joey's slurred speech (my notes call him "a gorilla with sideburns" -- he even uses his spoon awkwardly at supper!), the camera angle on Lenny and Teddy's meeting, when we see the whole scene from behind Lenny's tight, twitching fist. The lighting, too, is forbidding: lots of shadows, silhouettes and back-lighting, and the stark, dead colors of the set-pieces. The ending is odd: Teddy in his pure white overcoat, Lenny in a dark leather one, Teddy in warm yellow light, the others in cold blue. Yet Teddy, with his arrogant snot intonation and facile attempts at maneuvering Ruth, is assuredly not the "good guy." I'm not sure what to make of the contrast, unless it's Pinter's way of thumbing his nose at the whole black-hat/white-hat business, throwing countless English majors into a tizzy.

Something I hadn't noticed in just reading the play: there's a lot of spine imagery in this play -- a wife is the "backbone of the family," "I'll rip your spine out," "cough and your back collapses." Does this relate to the missing wall on set -- "the structure wasn't affected"? Pinter seems concerned with structure here -- power relationships, business alliances, the sort of things you can build on.

Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

I saw the Alley production of this play in 1989 (?), before I'd ever read it, and enjoyed it thoroughly. Now it's good to get the chance to read and discuss it in class. I do wish I'd had the opportunity to read the play before ever seeing it, though: all too often when I've seen a play first, it's much harder to come up with original insights -- all I see is the original production unfolding in my mind, so I'm a passive spectator instead of an analyst. If I read first, blocking a performance in my head, it's much easier to get at the meat of a play and then confirm or change my opinion based on watching performances.

What I've found most interesting is the change in my sympathies between the Alley production and the Burton-Taylor film. In the Alley production I sympathized most with George, and applauded him winning out over his ferocious wife. (Though Velma Sanford seems to imply it's because the actress didn't capture Martha adequately. That may be, but I wasn't an adequate judge at the time). In the film I certainly felt for both characters, but certainly found a profound sadness for Martha at the death of her "child," and a wish that the dream need not have become so twisted. Perhaps this is an example of Elizabeth Taylor's talent, but I also like to think that Albee has written a finely balanced play where our sympathies can easily slide to either, or both, characters.

So that's what George Segal looks like! I've often wondered: he starred in the American premiere of Alan Ayckbourn's play Henceforward... (one of my favorites) at the Alley (before I knew about the Alley, regrettably), where he played opposite Donna Yeager. An interesting Nick, much more mild-seeming than the way I've usually envisioned him or seen him played.

I still wish they hadn't taken advantage of the film medium to zip the whole party out to the all-night diner, though. It's a creepy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern feel -- these people all alone there, playing out odd games which become absolutely vital to them, with no-one at all around, not a soul, until the climactic strangling attempt, when versimilitude insists that a night manager arrive for at least a line. Ugh. Far better to keep the play confined, cloistered, in a single house -- a hot-house atmosphere where tales, rivalries, and intrigues can grow and fester.

O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night

What fun getting to act at last! And an interesting change of co-workers, too -- very scarce theatrical experience there, to the point that I was teaching how to avoid covering yourself while we worked out blocking. One of the features of theatre which continually amazes me is the subtle complexity of even seemingly simple stage movements -- moving upstage realistically without turning your back to the audience, performing counter-crosses, using the upstage arm for gestures, "sharing" a scene with a partner versus "giving" and "taking" a scene -- a whole host of terminology, concepts, and routines which have come to be second nature for me, but which acting and English classes keep reminding me are actually learned tricks of the trade.

I feel for Tyrone and Jamie. We are all actors, and we have had our failures in life -- several of Jamie's lines during his harangue of Edmund bring up rather painful memories and associations for me. The stoic acceptance, the "acting" that swings into use for day-to-day life as well as stage work, can be a grinding imprisonment of underlying grief and panic. I wonder if Albee's George ever acted in New Carthage campus productions?

The differences between the two films are amazing: the more languidly paced 1959 Hepburn version and the taut, fast 1987 film with Jack Lemmon. The Hepburn version suffers from some cuts and Bowdlerization (I noticed lots of "Christ!" exclamations changed into the milder "God!" -- amazing that the film was more conservative than the theater!), and I thought at first that I wouldn't like the Tyrone (what was his name?), though I ended up finding him really quite suited to the part of a rugged old late-nineteenth-century Shakespearean actor. And the blocking is clever: Edmund's agonized "dope fiend" accusation flung from the depths of his mother's embrace, Jamie's "Black Hole of Calcutta" accusation flung out the porch door to where he knows his father is hiding. And, of course, the marvellous lighting we all goggled over.

But for the Lemmon version, I found myself liking many of the ideas but hating the execution. The break-neck speed was nice for the arguments -- but it never changes: there are never any slower breathing spaces to let the audience rest before the next emotional assault. Bethel Leslie's emotionless delivery has obvious intentions, but her undifferentiated strings of sentences and lack of line definition soon becomes heartbreakingly boring. Leslie never shows any of the tenderness Hepburn exhibits, so instead of a trapped addict she becomes a vindictive shrew. But the arguments sparkle! -- constant interruptions, overlaying, interpolations, lend them energy, and the anticipations show these are old and oft-played discussions. I did notice several cases of paraphrasing, though, which made me worry some about the attention to detail of the production (but, then, how easy is it to argue with Jack Lemmon?).

Something I'd never noticed before watching the film: Jamie crows to Edmund "you are my Frankenstein!" The play takes place a scant fifty years or so after that Gothic novel was published -- was there already the creator-monster confusion we're all resigned to by this point? Or does Jamie not know his literature as well as Edmund? Or is it an error on O'Neill's part?

Miller's Death of a Salesman

Salesman feels very similar to Long Day's Journey: both are plays about unhealthy families racked by the pain of family secrets. I know a lot of actors (and people in general) trapped in Willy's predicament, trying to sell themselves instead of their product or capabilities -- "Who am I" or "What have I done" instead of "What can I do." James Tyrone seems well off, but he fears for money almost as much as the genuinely strapped Willy Loman. But Willy, not his wife Linda, is the addict: addicted to dreams and groundless optimism, an abuser of substancelessness. He needs his fixes of artifical self-esteem almost as much as Mary, and suffers mood swings about as violent. Uncomfortable personal resonances here, too -- it took me a long time to be reconciled to "I'm just what I am, that's all!"

A wonderful movie, of course. Countless character touches to Willy: his picture of the beloved red Chevrolet, rolling a tire in the alley during the "simonizing" memory, peeking at Charlie's cards while he looks at the new ceiling, aggressively laying his hat on Howard's desk. The set remains a cohesive construct while still achieving the airy quality Miller asks for, and the light and set changes segue perfectly between the current day and Willy's memories. I particularly liked it when Willy stood in the dark, stuffy hallway, looking into the bright, airy kitchen of his memory. And Hoffman was perfect in Willy's scene with Howard: too loud, too close, too overbearing and demanding with his boss to have any hope of staying on with the firm.

Guare's The House of Blue Leaves

Acting again. Arty is a difficult role! I really felt for him after that, bouncing between the demands of two women, caring for them both but unable to completely satisfy either. There's a sad caring even in the pills he pours down Banana's throat -- the same sad love that will let him strangle her in the end. Twinges of irritation drive Arty towards Bunny ("The Pope is coming here?"), but he always comes back. I wonder if he would have been truly able to see Banana's commitment all the way through. I suspect not. But who knows what continued pressure from Bunny could have wreaked? ("I've saved you," claims Billy....) Passionate mood swings, exciting and exhausting to play. Still, he does waffle in his affections, and that as much as anything has probably contributed to Bananas' madness. I found the love for Bananas mixed with a perverse independence -- "I can do whatever I want to" -- which allows him to carry on an affair practically under his wife's nose once he decides she's figured it out.

Talking to the audience is fun too. It reminds me of the first play I ever directed, "The Great Nebula in Orion" by Lanford Wilson. Some similarities to Guare there -- natural one-sided conversations with the audience, easy-going explication, confidential opinions about the other characters delivered as personal asides. I think it's an enormously effective tactic for breaking down the actor-audience barrier, convincing the audience to empathize more with the character and participate more fully in the drama.

Trashy Neon as Kubrickesque "2001" Monoliths! I love it! (Even "Thus Spake Zarathustra"). The motif has become so hackneyed even Sesame Street has parodied it. 2001's Monolith bootstrapped human sentience and civilization, enabling men to achieve their dreams (viz. the first bone club whirling in the air, becoming an orbiting space station). But the neon in Queens only stifles dreams. You probably can't even see the stars because of all the tall buildings, smog and light pollution. After the numbing cold of the opening morning, California must seem like a dream (even if we know they have smog too).

It's obvious Bunny is going places in this film: Artie's apartment is a gray, drab place (he probably bought the furniture used from the folks who inhabited Homecoming, Long Days' Journey, or Salesman!), a sharp contrast to the pink-clad Bunny. Her drive and color mark her out as someone who will leave Queens by the end of the play -- and leave Artie behind. Artie's desire is touching -- he strokes the phone during his phone call to Billy -- but he doesn't have the ruthless streak that pushes Bunny to her escape.

Shepard's Buried Child

What an odd play. I've enjoyed a lot of Shepard's work (True West is one of my favorites), but at times he gets really surreal. I enjoyed the Magritte comparison in class: realistic-looking, naturalistic pictures of things that can't possibly happen. Shepard writes wonderful dialogue, though, and his characters have wonderful eccentricities: the play would be fun to act in or watch. I've heard wonderful tales about the Players production in the early- to mid-80's.

Come to think of it, the odd thing about Shepard is that you can tell how his characters feel, but you can't tell what they're doing. Where in the world do the corn and carrots come from? What's going on between Halie and Father Dewis? Wonderful moments and speeches, but it's merry hell to fit them into any kind of a coherent plot. Perhaps I need to get a Methuen book on Shepard....