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).
Posted by Scott Reynolds at December 5, 2002 03:57 PM
Comments
I too went to see Laurens’ The Three Birds at Gale Gates last year. Not only that, but I happened to be in London when the original production premiered at the Gate Theatre there.
I have to say that I believe the New York production was bad. The acting rendered the language almost incomprehensible in places. You’ll just have to take my word for it - the language, as theatrical language, works. Look at Lorca - look at his phrases - he talks of knives and of the colour green (‘Green, green I love the green’ - what does that mean, if we’re getting into all this ‘what does this mean?’ stuff?).
Each and every single word onstage does not have to refer to something concrete, something perceivable. It is enough that a line conjures up impressions of a threat - it does not have to be specific. You lose the mystery, as in most theatre out there, when writing is only naturalistic. If a story can be told through it, the language is adequately understandable. Quoting a line out of context is bound to make your readers agree with you. Language has many uses. It is dry and dead when we use it only to refer to something specific. Perhaps many people got something different out of that line you analyse - perhaps each of those interpretations you offer is valid and desired by the writer? Perhaps that is a richness you overlook in your criticism, and that richness is desirable?
You only have to compare the London reviews to The Three Birds, which unanimously acclaimed Laurens as the next big thing in theatre, to the New York reviews, which were no way near as favourable, to come to the conclusion that it was the New York production to blame for this discrepancy.
Jack Sanders
Posted by: Jack Sanders at February 13, 2003 06:16 AM
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