Deadly
Theater Meets Dead Horse
By Gordon Rogoff
Medea, by Euripides
Uncle Vanya, By Anton Chekhov
Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare
Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2002-03
Fiona Shaw in full battle cry is a force of army engineering
more than nature--or even acting for that matter. Not that she
isn’t carrying an arsenal of acting tricks at every turn:
a master of both rant and silence, she sweeps past the narrative
hurdles in Richard II, Eliot’s Waste Land,
and, more recently, Euripides’s Medea as if texts
exist mainly to be crushed into submission by an unbridled will
to own the acting universe. Along the way, she calls upon voice,
voice, and more voice, now caressing some soft consonants, now
heaving extended phrases into unguarded air sustaining them in
a pitched, fluting tremble that wishes to be music when it is
only monolith. Every note, every gesture emerges from calculation
more than thought, and heaven help the other actors caught in
her fireworks power. Her Jason in Medea (Jonathan Cake)
attempts to outshout her at the obvious junctures, and he’s
capable of matching her serpentine sinew with buffed muscle that
ought to humble her, but apart from the way the text is meant
to settle things, he hasn’t a fighting chance anyway, so
driven is she by forces in her head that defy argument at every
turn. Even if I didn’t know that her boys are doomed, I
can see the end in every beginning because she can’t stop
herself from starting at the end.
“Who can stop grief’s avalanche once it starts to
roll?” asks a woman in the Chorus, burdened with a Scottish
accent in Deborah Warner’s up-dated high-tech production,
itself featuring plexiglass and a center stage wading pool that
share in the general placelessness so celebrated these days when
visual chic assumes greater importance than textual illumination.
There’s no doubt about the avalanche starting to roll, but
where’s the grief? Even in momentary pause, following an
opening sequence in which both Nurse and Chorus flail from one
side to another like bumper cars babbling in run-on sentences,
Shaw’s Medea can only sidle slowly from the wings, wearing
shades; within seconds, it’s clear that this arranged silence
carries only the meaning of its contrast with the frenzy that
precedes it. More a program note than a conveyed idea, it is signaling
the news that Medea must have been in tears recently, but given
all the obvious contemporary associations, it can also be seen
as a fashion statement or the gesture of a movie star (try Alexandra
del Lago in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth)
noisily trying not to call attention to herself by calling attention
to herself. Then she speaks in four short bursts, ever so conversationally:
“My lovely life is lost. (Pause) I want to die. (Pause)
He’s the vilest man alive (pause) my husband.” At
which point she laughs, thus eliciting the same from her audience;
finally, “I am a souvenir from foreign parts,” this
time punctuated not by a pause, but a kick back of one foot from
the knee--still another solicitation of laughter from an audience
now gaga in anticipation. All these controlling devices can be
construed as Medea’s, of course, but as they take over the
instrument and the narrative, they keep setting up barriers against
the original, primeval events peculiar to Attic tragedy in favor
of actorial display: a show of feeling, not the thing itself.
Then,
too, she exhibits an alarmingly literal mind, prone to illustration,
as if we won’t get the joke or the grief without her decorating
assistance--churning an imaginary brew when speaking of a witch,
dipping into a cake slice when contemplating which road to death
she might take, suddenly interjecting, “This is delicious.”
By the middle of this solo performance, it’s clear that
when she dashes over to a pile of boxes or other objects, then
hops onto a higher level, asking what Apollo says, then jumping
down just as suddenly as she jumped up, she has complete run of
the stage, the others, even Jason much of the time, more satellites
than characters, either locked in space or given to following
her orbits. When, finally, she tells the Chorus that she will
kill her children, despite the oath just sworn to Aegeus, she
adds, “I’m a woman. I have to cry.” But if that’s
the case, whatever happened to the shades?
Shaw and Warner are too smart, I keep thinking, to spread so
much incoherence over a text already compromised by its origins
in a world we can never claim to know as we know our own. If Euripides
can be adopted as our contemporary, as Jan Kott adopted Shakespeare,
then we have rights of our own to consider: for one, the right
to talk back, as we might wish the Chorus would do, faced with
the unholy destruction so clearly announced when it still might
be headed off at the pass; for another, the right to protest that,
in hijacking this play into street clothes, it has become a bizarre
display of psychological warfare gone public, which finally has
lost all contact with Euripides’s immense canvas crisscrossing
contrasts between barbarism and civil order. As William Arrowsmith
puts it in his essay, "A Greek Theater of Ideas," Medea
and Jason “are both destroyers, destroyers of themselves,
of others…And it is this destructiveness above
all else which Euripides wants his audience to observe: the spirit
of brutal self-interest and passionate revenge which threatens
both life and culture, and which is purposely set in sharp contrast
to life-enhancing Athens where the arts flourish…”
Sharp contrasts, however, are not part of the Warner-Shaw scheme,
so into the wading pool and out with the bloodied bath water go
all those layers so unavailable to splashy directorial strokes--above
all the idea dramatized by Medea’s escape (in the text,
but not in this production) to Athens on the Sun’s golden
chariot, an idea that “forces the private agon
of Jason and Medea,” says Arrowsmith, “ to assume
a larger public significance, namely that both have lost all possible
wisdom, a loss clearly pointing to “a tragic defeat for
man and human culture.”
It’s odd, too, that the Shaw-Warner team, striving so
strenuously to highlight the play’s modernity, are content
with the obvious inconsistencies that come with revisionist territory,
some of them simply a matter of theatrical strategy: are we in
the streets, a playground, a bathhouse, and if so, why does this
raving maniac have the run of the place without a cop in sight
to check her noise, if not her raucous threats? It may be one
thing for a Scottish Chorus woman to be dancing an Irish jig,
but surely it’s another for her and the others to remain
so splattered with paralysis that not one of them acts to call
the cops or save the kids. Why, when Medea asks “Why did
I ever leave my father’s house and trust a Greek?”
does it suddenly loom as a trivial intrusion, not unlike a later
observation, “Do golden lives mean happiness?” What
is served by all the blasting sound-design screeches when Medea
is doing the deed, or all the decorative blood spattered on the
plexiglass doors and window? And then, what are we to make of
the sound suddenly cut down to an off-stage radio emitting low-key
jazz, almost as if we’ve been witness instead to the poker
game in Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire? Where
in the name of sense and sensibility are we? And the answer has
to be a theatrical playpen void of anchor, placement, ideas, more
installation than drama, a shameless celebration of acting talent
run amok and quite content to surround itself--by the way--with
actors who make the showcase easy by exhibiting so little talent
themselves.
And here I pause for a contextual confession. In the best of
times, I am myself a Hamlet-manque, more adept at delay
than action, though I still insist that Hamlet, bless him, delays
not merely to push the drama to its necessary limits, but also
to engage himself in an inescapably alluring moral quagmire. That
said, I’m not so wedded to self-deception that I make claims
on Hamlet’s lofty territory. Instead, I admit now that,
in hesitating for months to write this response to Shaw and Warner’s
popular success, I’ve been thinking that “not to be”
might be the best revenge against the tawdry mess that so much
theatre-making has become: incoherence as a badge of honor (effects
vs. ideas), decoration as a substitute for meaning (the same),
and mediocrity as a democratic right (also the same). In short,
I’ve been inclined to give up. Or rather (and not so short)
to give up when bombarded with so many shamefully lazy productions
that reveal their desperation at arousing an audience with anything
less than a jump-cutting noise meant to compete successfully with
the high-tech, take-no-prisoners stupidity of marketplace media
in which every breath, every grunt, every gesture looks like a
commercial.
To be fair, not least to myself, I should add that, having seen
Medea at BAM, I bought myself a ticket later to see how Warner
might adapt her work to a Broadway proscenium, and perhaps, to
a perceptibly different audience. Not much, as it happens: the
Nurse was moderately less breathless in her opening passage, but
not more articulate or pointed than before; the others still behaved
like extras wandering on to the Warner lot; and one textual “correction”
revealed a self-consciousness that might be interpreted as damage
control. Where Jason at BAM had said: “All this…for
sex?” he was saying now, “All this…for jealousy?”--not
bad as a sign that even Warner could recognize a laugh line that,
once said and done, was exasperatingly inappropriate. It’s
safe to say, however, that nothing substantial was subjected to
fresh thought: Medea remained in place as a Tony candidate, a
new play that might be re-titled The Comedy of Terrors.
Still another pause: I have referred to “popular success,”
and there can be no doubt now that this Medea, holding
a distorting mirror up to the nature of Euripides’s tragedy,
has found an audience at BAM and on Broadway that swings into
standing ovations at the drop of a houselight, bull-dozed by Shaw’s
indisputable high-wire technique, self-proclaiming and thoughtless
though it may be, possibly because they’ve invested so much
cash and time in the hope of live-action excitement, or that half
of them are being bullied by the other half into a thoughtless
submission equal to the production’s, or--more neutrally--that
they can see the actors over the standing bodies only by standing
themselves. Whatever the explanation--and it’s a newish
phenomenon at concerts and operas also--it must stand also as
a reminder to some of us that the critical act need not surrender
its own analytical and spontaneous response in deference to an
intimidating mob.
I might have held my peace on this front, and even withheld
my review of Medea had it not been for two standing ovations
more recently at BAM given to Sam Mendes’s parade of High
School inanities under cover of Uncle Vanya and Twelfth
Night, also from Britain. Again, unequal casting left both
plays in a limbo where relationships were never explored, solo
“moments” flying thick and fast while the director
supplied the most minimal attention to narrative detail, preferring
instead to rely on his battery of special effects: a framing device
for each play (a trestle table for Vanya with a spread
of decorous grass in the back, and a giant picture frame itself
for Twelfth Night with a hundred candles where the grass
had been for the Chekhov play, and a canopy of lamps floating
over the cinemascopic central action) and as a consequence, creating
for both plays extended exits and entrances that bring what little
has been happening to an excruciating halt, as if the tempi for
each play can be the same, or that adagio ponderoso is
a steadily bearable tempo anyway.
Some solos, particularly those by Simon Russell Beale as Vanya
and Malvolio, are better than bearable: a true actor with a gift
for economical choice and physical detail--his Vanya rolling like
an aimless beach ball from one side of the stage to the other,
his Malvolio leaning into an officiously dainty ballet walk, left
arm hanging idly by his side--he’s also in full command
of that splayed, noisy outburst from a Vanya clearly more disgusted
with himself than with anyone else, and of the menacing quiet
he finds for the “notoriously abused” Malvolio at
the end. On the evidence, however, he’s going it alone,
neither hindered nor helped by a director content to be statically
visual without ever arranging space for actors to stalk one another
in urgent conversation. And to top it all, Mendes can’t
resist one painfully unfunny and vulgar arrangement: the laborious
appearance of a large sofa on a stage otherwise populated by an
army of Thonet chairs for both plays, placed there for the truly
specious effect of concealing two little fart machines under the
cushions so that Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew can sink into them
on behalf of several flatulent emissions. True to his name, Sir
Toby does belch a few times in earlier scenes, but just in case
we’re too dense to get the point of Toby’s libertarian
nature, Mendes dumps a signal to us that he really should have
been named Sir Toby Fart. Let’s hope the future Sir Sam
learns to mend his adolescent ways.
Meanwhile,
back to the more pressing alarms roused by the acclaimed Medea,
disdaining tragic scope, celebrating hip imagery while ignoring
the anguish hanging over our new century ever since it was captured
in a spectacularly stealthy coup d’etat by a new gang of
barbarians hell-bent on dominating the world stage. But even if
this rampaging performance might be seen to be soliciting a modern
political stance to match its modernist theatrical coups, it’s
a barely visible politics by the end, one that limits itself--at
best--to repeated harangues from that old suspect, the melodramatically
wronged woman. True, Shaw’s Medea is more articulate than
Joan Crawford’s Mildred Pierce, but then she’s working
with the ghost of a classier poet than Crawford ever knew. It
became all too clear, even without the missing chariot, however,
that the Warner-Shaw team was effectively performing a major lobotomy
of Euripides when it might have been more to the point had the
text been used as a springboard instead for their own new play--a
meditation, perhaps, on the consequences of revenge as a way of
life and death, or on love as a cruel, even homicidal, myth; or,
yet again, about a public wrenched into blind neutrality and dangerous
confusion when confronted by a seizure of power prepared to obliterate
civil compacts and public interests. Anything except this exhausted
remnant from the annals of victim psychology.
And then, like a deus ex machina intervening in my own exhausted
psychology, my partner and I slipped into our seats at the PanPan
Festival of International Theatre in Dublin last January only
to discover MedEia, produced by Amsterdam’s Dood
Paard, and written by Oscar van Woensel--though, as it turns out,
written in a collaborative manner with two other actors in the
company, Manja Topper and Kuno Bakker. Here, at last, is a remarkably
plain-spoken new play that gives genuine voice, most of all, to
the Chorus, here played by the three collaborators, moving gently
and firmly from one gender to another while slipping unannounced
into fresh thoughts from Medea and Jason themselves. The text
alone (published in the next issue of Theater magazine)
deliberately bypasses stage directions or descriptions of what
the company actually presents, beginning with the voice of Maria
Callas emerging from the darkness in a lamentation from Cherubini’s
opera Medea, and continuing into four scenes and three
interludes, the latter featuring TV monitor slide-shows with (mostly)
pop accompaniment that, in most circumstances, leave me in one
form of dudgeon or the other, high or low.
In this instance, however, with Callas haunting the memory bank,
and the quiet shock of the devastating opening line that follows
her--“I am so sad”--to say nothing of the unmannered,
yet quietly insistent, presence of the three actors, moving from
their initial upstage distance into a scene-by-scene forward placement
backed by the white sails they haul down from the ceiling to mark
one section of the text from another, the entire experience presents
an unembarrassed blend of sacred and profane thought. And this
mysterious mix bridges worlds otherwise torn apart by too many
interpretive differences, leaving Chorus and actors alike in numbed
awareness of their essential helplessness. Yet, even so, they
are still standing in the final moments, merciless about themselves,
Medea, Jason--us--but not entirely without salvation, because
they have demonstrated one weapon all along: the eloquence they
can summon when talking to power. By the end, then, they are almost
as close to us as we are to each other, tellers of a tale spoken
in what they call “broken English,” a claim weirdly
untrue, though a sign of their essential modesty, surely, since
what they write and speak is as undecorated and direct as an ancient
Greek statue.
And, in sharp contrast with the hortatory private wars fought
by Shaw and Warner, this MedEia is also close to the
news of the day, not by trying so strenuously, but by simply giving
voice, almost like testament prophets, to all the damage running
out of control. Take, for just one example, their pre-Rumsfeld
scolding-- “You are in the rich world now…What would
you have been without me…Nothing.” It’s as if,
by air-lifting both fact and paranoia into their story, they are
dramatizing what little space has been left for sanity to breathe.
A play that reduces itself in conventional terms to a screed about
hurt and rage has been rescued suddenly for more peaceful purposes,
telling me, at least, what I need to hear whenever I’m drawn
to public space--namely, that others are noticing the violations
causing so much suffering, that sharers out there are willing
not to be so secret after all. It’s truly wondrous to walk
behind the following exchange:
Maybe it is better not to be one of the major
Dramatis personae
Our lives in the chorus
My life as the chorus
it is troubled enough
To witness this business
it’s more than I can bear
And what I find back there is witness to complexity, recognition,
barely speakable anguish--elegantly laid across a performing space
with an honesty and grace that elude most public exchange, not
least in our theaters. The actors, incidentally, do not flaunt
themselves, nor do they make claims on technical prowess; neither
do they exhibit the slightest sign of self-pity or pride: instead,
they simply present the result of what looks like old-fashioned
hand-crafted labor. Woensel, especially, is the anti-Shaw, a long-limbed,
resonating free-spirit without guile, never pretending anything
even as he succeeds in touching on everything. He’s the
real woman inside every man, and the truly manly man unafraid
of woman.
One final observation. Dood Paard means Dead Horse, surely the
one Woensel and friends are incapable of beating as they go gently
into each good night of creation.
[Gordon Rogoff is Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic
Literature at the Yale School or Drama, author of Vanishing
Acts (Yale U P, 2000), and recipient of the Morton Dauwen
Zabel Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
in 1991.]
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