Brakethrough [sic] play!
Melissa James Gibson’s [sic]: “fatuous farrago” or “modern-day, urban Chekhov”? It was in any case the most buzzed about thing Off-Off Broadway last year. I missed the production at Soho Rep. I also like to think that nothing of enduring value could escape my critical hawkseye, but it’s been on the shelves at Drama Books for a month now and the raw evidence is completely damning: I missed the New York premiere of the most exciting and inventive play to be written in years. [sic] has the accessible trappings of a sitcom about artsy New York singles trying to make it on multiple levels, and it’s as unburdened by plot as the best/worst Woody Allen movies. But that’s all a fiendish ruse to distract from its entrancing poetry.
John Simon, in the first and most alliterative of the reviews I linked you to, would have probably dismissed Gibson’s text as hackneyed e. e. cummings if he had read it before he saw it. And people like Simon, resolutely suspicious of innovation in all its forms, play a valuable role in society. They keep us from being inundated by garbage, after all. But in making up our own minds, let’s do the work Simon is usually willing to do when he writes about poetry and examine a few lines from the play.
In the following snippet, Babette, an avant-garde visual artist, attempts a phone conversation with a gallery owner who displays her work and doesn’t want to talk to her:
Hi So I’m trying to Buy Some Time
so
Well has the fur vase sold I know there was
water damage but
and the glow-in-the-dark telephone table
What about the lamp covered with those
charming depictions of midcentury coal mining
agitation Well
are you sure you’ve displayed it Prominently Enough
oh can you call wait a second
The desperation in this one-sided dialogue is palpable. The tentative monosyllable in her introduction, followed by an ambiguous reference to time running out, followed by another cautious monosyllable sets up the insecurity Babette feels about her situation. In the lines that follow, her situation is hilariously revealed to be one of relying on the sale of artworks ranging from hopelessly dilettantish to ham-handedly didactic. The despair is again emphasized by the unpunctuated phrasing of her questions, which bring in interrupting qualifiers like “but” and “well” to maintain the attention of her unreceptive listener. The audacity in Babette’s then asking if her marginal artworks have been prominently displayed and then in her immediately asking someone she is pestering to hold show a surprising combination of delusion and toughness – at which point we have been given, with marvelous economy, a portrait of a recognizable and intriguing character.
Gibson’s a poet, all right. We’ll see if she can keep the style fresh and write sustainable plots. For now, the theater is blessed to have her.
Posted by Scott Reynolds at October 18, 2002 1:25 PM
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