Beckett made breezy
A ticket agent tries to sell Beckett’s Happy Days as a light-hearted romp. Check it out — it’s a scream.
Beckett’s discontents
Saw the Joseph Chaikin production of Happy Days at the Cherry Lane on Saturday. I can’t find a review to link you to (I’m sure the Times has it, but they’ll charge us), so here’s some background before I unload my thoughts: The play opens with a woman, Winnie, stuck torso-down in an earthen mound. Strident bell tones awaken Winnie to a new day in which her sole distractions are the contents of a handbag (toiletries and a gun) and a parasol. From time to time her presumed husband makes a brief appearance, though he keeps to the back of the mound, just out of Winnie’s sight. This being a Beckett play, little ostensibly happens. But the lead character’s determined carrying on with what mundane activities are available to her contrasts poignantly with the hopelessness of her circumstances. “She’s stuck in a hill of mud, and she’s never going to get out,” I reminded myself while watching, knowing from having read the play that she never uses the gun in her bag. Not a clear recipe for riveting theater, but Beckett via director Chaikin so successfully conjures an atmosphere of impending void that Winnie’s every act (analyzing the print on her toothbrush, attempting to elicit conversation from her indifferent husband, holding up her parasol) constitutes a struggle, and this was compelling to watch. It helps as well that Beckett was a master poet, using Joycean thought-fragments to bring immediacy and intrigue to Winnie’s speech. I left the theater agreeing with the common assessment of Beckett as the 20th century’s greatest dramatist. No one can sustain a single visual metaphor over an hour and a half as hypnotically as Beckett still does.
I also couldn’t help thinking that the Age of Beckett is, if not over, on its last legs. Beckett’s worldview subscribes to existentialism’s most pessimistic conclusions. His plays reflect the non-conviction that not only is there no meaning to existence beyond what people bring to it, but that any effort to create meaning is essentially futile. Winnie may keep the gun at bay, but nothing she does in the course of her “day” makes for a persuasively worthwhile alternative. Beckett’s frequent humor is usually mined from the utter pointlessness of his characters’ actions. It’s in all his major plays. In Waiting for Godot, there’s Didi trying on a bunch of equally crummy bowler hats. In Endgame, there’s blind Hamm ordering his servant to stand up a three-legged toy dog. In Happy Days, there’s Winnie and the aforementioned parasol. Each of these bits is followed by uncomfortable silence, as if to enforce the point that it may all be one big joke, but the only alternative is death and void. The point is exasperatingly circular. Life is absurd, but let’s carry on with our trivia, because the only other choice is death, which would deprive us of our absurd lives.
An artistic vision of this scope simply will not do for an age whose most defining image remains the attack on the Trade Towers. That moment crystallized not merely the possibility of sudden annihilation, but of human beings’ potential to greet it with heroic renewal. That ought to have been the lesson Beckett and other major writers took from the Second World War. There was plenty of evidence on its behalf, such as the emergence of a thriving Jewish state from the ashes of the Holocaust. But Beckett and his literary kin chose instead to brood. Beckett himself is said to have been an extremely generous person, but his view of humanity seems with retrospect petty in its dogged futilitarianism. Our age demands and deserves better.
Brave, new, needy
The “Brave New World” series of 9/11-linked plays is a positive thing, I think (I’m referring to the marathon of new play readings going on at Town Hall in the City). There are enough obscure playwrights on the schedule to make me think that the event amounts to more than celebrity preening, even though the organization didn’t accept unsolicited scripts and there are a lot of big guns involved. At any rate, all ticket receipts are going to charity. But I do have a quibble. In the website’s mission statement is the following phrase:
We believe that an artistic response is essential towards understanding not only the repercussions of terrorism on our most intimate relationships, but also the reasons for a type of warfare that is grinding away at the foundations of cultures around the world.
We artistic people feel an intense need to matter. And, being sensitive types, traumatic events may well nag us more than most people. So the desire to play an active role in the response to 9/11 is understandable. Perhaps it even leads to good art, in some cases. But that doesn’t make us essential in coming to terms with terrorism. The open dialogue of a free society, the formulation of a decisive national policy, and compassionate service on behalf of those personally afflicted are and have been the indispensable follow-up to what happened a year ago from tomorrow. Art can help with the healing — and I’m hoping the music at Central Park tomorrow night helps me — but it’s still optional. Provocative, enlightening, comforting — those are all good things to be. Why do we have to be essential?
Sometimes I hear voices
There’s a chance to hear a playwright who knows the power of the spoken word this month. My friend Marc Chun is having his play Match (billed as Heard, Not Scene with another, short play) done at the Red Room downtown. Marc, unlike me, has a real job and spends most of his waking hours pursuing causes having nothing to do with the theater. Yet he makes time to write splendidly crafted pieces that rely entirely on actors and speech for their effect. Match’s structure isn’t quite as original as the buzz suggests: To bring a bunch of seemingly unrelated narratives to a thematic head isn’t unexplored territory – it’s a subgenre, really. Marc passes the benchmark for this type of play by successfully casting a spell, creating an early sense that a revelation is in store and making us desire it through empathically drawn characters.
It’s prime Off-Off Broadway, delivering a bang on a next-to-zip budget, and it’s refreshing to see a production do this with confidence in its resources, i.e. skillful storytelling and a lyrical sensibility. The Miss Saigon helicopter joke on the production postcard is a little bit moot, since gimmicks of that proportion are so obviously beyond the reach of a company performing in the Red Room. But it’s nice to see something in the fringe circuit that isn’t so desperate for attention that it needs a tag like “Imploding psyche of 27-year-old office assistant meets redemption in a burlesque meditation involving ninjas, mushrooms, and Alan Ginsberg.” Handcart groupies (both of you) will be gratified to see alum Steven Gridley directing, alum Erin Treadway performing, and Handcart workhorse James Mack playing frightened confusion in a role he was born for. The play’s at 8 PM Monday and Tuesday (September only), at the Red Room on East 4th.
Inaugural blog
Hello. And welcome to the first of frequent postings on this weblog. My name is Scott Reynolds, Artistic Director of the three-year-old theater outfit known as Handcart Ensemble. As you may have gathered from a look at our site, our company is about two things where theater is concerned:
- Imaginative staging
- Rich use of the written/spoken word
Beside the obvious factor of live performance, we believe these two elements are what make theater distinct as an art form, and that without them it risks being made irrelevant by film and TV. That’s not to say that watching Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci carp about their jobs in a bedroom is boring, but a small, flat screen will serve this instance of dramatic mundanity almost as well as a stage.
And I emphasize “almost.” Two great actors like Falco and Tucci will surely be more thrilling in live performance than on the tube. But not enough to make theater — and the $35-200 paid for an uncomfortable seat — seem indispensable.
Whatever purpose stringent realism on the stage ever served has been abundantly met by other media. All media is illusion, but the theater is more obviously not reality than movies and television. No matter how many shirts are ironed or onions chopped the other side of a proscenium, the inherently artificial environment of a theater can never adequately duplicate day-to-day reality. Attempts to that end usually have a strained feeling to them and invite comparisons to celluloid and video, which capture coffee grounds and suburban living rooms far more effectively than a raked stage ever could.
The theater’s unique power is to evoke — to call upon and stimulate the imagination rather than supplant it. This requires a lot from the people who do theater. It requires finely crafted language that seduces the ear. It requires acting that serves and amplifies a play’s narrative rather than revels in its own, interior “truth.” It requires design and staging that judiciously select from the immediate world and which hint at a larger reality rather than attempt a Xerox. The leap made in transforming an empty space into another realm and prism for universal truths is itself affirmation of a reality that transcends the everyday. Therein lies the value of of this most communal of art forms.
We in Handcart Ensemble would prefer to promote this ideal for the theater through an uninterrupted stream of our own productions, but we haven’t quite reached that (fiscal) phase. In the meantime, a lot of people are doing great and adventurous work out there, and we can use this weblog to spotlight them. I’ll be blogging as often as I can in response to what I see happening in the New York theater scene. Other company members will weigh in as well from time to time. And we encourage you to share your own thoughts. Be sure to tell me if you don’t want your responses posted. Talk to you soon.