Far away from you and me
Caryl Churchill’s Far Away, now playing at the New York Theater Workshop, is typical of Off-Broadway’s strengths and liabilities: high on theatrical invention, low on thought. But wait: Isn’t Far Away supposed to be a disturbing, thought-provoking vision of the world post-9/11? Robert Brustein and others think so. I find its litany-of-horrors evocation of that world too scattered to be trenchant. The play unfolds (or rather, bunches up) in a series of scenes depicting various evils: clandestine, mass kidnappings disguised as freedom-fighting, oppression of blue-collar workers, public humiliation of (political?) prisoners, and a warfare so total that it entangles every species on the planet in ever-shifting alignments and hatreds.
In the most affecting of these scenes, a series of ankle-chained prisoners wearing grotesquely ostentatious hats are paraded before a cheering public (all are later incinerated, we learn). Meanwhile, a panel of judges takes notes, presumably on the quality of the hats. It is unsettling to watch, bringing to mind images of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But how it relates to other scenes or sheds light with them on a common human pathology is unclear.
The final scene clearly wants to be topical, as characters express shock at a recent military alliance between cats and the French, discourse on the growing menace of butterflies, and lament the elephants’ treason in joining the Dutch. It’s an obvious reference (and a funny one, until ten minutes later we’re hearing about cattle being in league with Chileans) to the War on Terror and how it builds on distrust and shakes up old loyalties. But it fails to be more than superficially relevant or, more importantly, an inevitable development of the previous scenes. What does a determination to be at war with someone have to do with inequitable worker’s pay? With wide-scale abductions? With the windup cowboy-Santa that sings in the first two scenes? In her advancing age, Churchill seems to be tiring of plot construction, wanting atmosphere (the most pleasurable and easy aspect of playwriting) to carry the full weight of her plays. Circularity is the result on this play’s internal logic: because this is a spooky play, anything spooky-seeming belongs in it, regardless of how it coheres with anything else.
As for the allusion to the War on Terror itself, something is clearly more at play than paranoia in current efforts to identify terrorist threats. Were Katyusha rockets fired at a commercial jet last month or not? Does Churchill really think present concerns amount to chimera? I suppose that’s your privilege when success and a ready-made audience pre-empt the need to be in touch with the worries of everyday people. Unfortunately, it does nothing to help the perception of Off-Broadway as an institution that revels in its own elitism.
How about “puppies splatter from its din”?
OK, here’s my late, promised follow-up to The Three Birds. I should have taken better notes when I saw it, since my principal reservation with it was the language. Playwright Joanna Laurens is at the prow of a seventy-year-old movement to bring viable spoken verse back to the stage. It’s a movement that may have gathered horsepower for a change, what with the (not always positive) attention Three Birds and Texarkana Waltz have been getting recently. Here’s a line from The Three Birds spoken by Tereus as an objection to his sister-in-law visiting his wife:
“When you two togetherspeak / the babble of it murders doves.”
The New Yorker singled this line out for praise. The link is gone [it can be found in Google’s cache], but I believe it was praised for being menacing, superbly crafted, and quirkily fascinating. I find it menacing, clumsily crafted, and merely quirky – the combination of strength and weakness many a promising young writer brings to her early work. Here’s my thumbnail response:
a) “togetherspeak”: How do people speak other than “together”? And is there anything less poetic than compounding a boring verb with a blander adverb?
b) “the babble of it murders doves”: Absent lucidity, being evocative is only a half-virtue. Is Tereus saying the heroines’ togetherspeaking has a clamor that knocks birds out of the sky? That it has an inherently deadly quality? That the sisters bring out the sinister in each other? We can only guess, because “babble” alone (though we’re told it kills doves) refers to none of those things. It may be a nicely poetic-sounding word, but it communicates little in this context.
c) Yes, the line is creepy-sounding, and it contributes to an atmosphere of menace. But a clump of juicy words quickly loses savor when it lacks a binding clarity. Listen to any Doors song twice for a case in point. Laurens has a gift, but she’ll need the discipline of thoughtful revision if she wants the career that raw energy alone won’t sustain.
But again, she’s twenty-four. Plenty of time to grow (sigh).