The Third Wheel

Norse code

With reflection, references to playwright Jon Fosse as "the new Ibsen" are not as shallow as they seemed when I first heard them. Not that "they're both Norwegian" isn't a flimsy foundation for a dramaturgical heritage, but because the sense of isolated melancholy that pervades both authors' works is enforced all the more by their unspecified, Far North locales. The two could not be more different stylistically, and Fosse has also been called "the Beckett of the 21st century" and an heir to Pinter. The playwright's U.S. premiere last month and recent English-language availability of his plays now thankfully allow examination of his work beyond the extravagant comparisons to which theater people are somehow addicted.

A lack of punctuation and a breaking-up of phrases into verse-like segments are the most striking aspects of Fosse's style. One needn't go far to find these devices in the work of other authors, whose company includes at least as many earnest mediocrities as promising experimenters ([sic]'s Melissa James Gibson being one of the latter). Are the dropped periods anything more than an oblation to High Artiness? One way to answer this is to look at what Fosse's phrases accomplish as speech, the way their arrangement on the page conduces toward a specific delivery by actors. Fosse's first play, Someone Is Going to Come, contains a telling excerpt in which the enigmatically named He and She arrive at a remote house they have purchased by the seashore:

SHE
Here we are beside our own house
Our own house
where we shall be together
You and I alone
The house
where you and I shall be
alone together
Far away from all the others
The house where we shall be together
alone
in each other

HE
Our own house

SHE
The house which is our own

HE
The house which is our own
The house where no-one shall come
Here we are beside our own house
The house where we shall be together
alone in each other

Phraseology aside, we know from the play's title (and from the mere fact that this is a play) that dramatic payoff will require an intruder to show up and violate He's and She's obsessed-over isolation. The set-up ought to feel crude in its obviousness, but the incantatory effect of the phrases prevents this. Mirroring the fragmentary nervousness of modern music, the repeating variations of "our house" and "alone together" create the sense of an outer danger even as they insist upon security. Suspense is abetted through the shape of the dialogue as much as through what is actually said. Effective enough. Could this be achieved as easily with punctuation? And without the line breaks?

SHE
Here we are beside our own house. Our own house. Where we shall be together. You and I alone. The house where you and I shall be alone together. Far away from all the others. The house where we shall be together, alone in each other.

The effect clearly isn't the same, either visually or when read out loud (though it makes for good Mamet parody). Fosse's modulating repetitions of what is essentially the same phrase require a formal freedom in order to attain a life of their own. Unbounded by grammatical stops, they act as metaphor for human thought in the existential present--never fixed, ever in flux, anxious to reinforce itself with outward assurances: You. Me. Together. The house. Alone.

It's a genuine innovation, and Jon Fosse's arrival on these shores is an exciting development for the theater. Here's hoping he'll find the momentum and small-producer risk tolerance to thrive.

Posted by Scott Reynolds at July 14, 2004 9:17 PM