Odysseys in America
By Martin Harries
What Ever
By Heather Woodbury
P.S. 122
150 1st Ave.
Box Office: (212) 477-5288
"Long ago, in the early 1990s" — to quote the
play at hand -- I was teaching A Midsummer Night's Dream and
joked offhandedly that we should make a concerted effort to reintroduce
one of Bottom's words, "gleek," into American speech. Several students
surprised me by telling me that there was no need for this quixotic
venture: they already used the word to mean to spit in a particularly
impressive way. For a few days I pursued etymologies, fascinated by
what seemed an Elizabethan survival in the language of my students.
One of the many pleasures of Heather Woodbury's
What Ever is that it imagines a hidden Midsummer inheritance
behind teen lingo, and makes it one of the central structures of her
long solo piece. Language is destiny here, and the cadences from Midsummer
that mark the speech of the play's young ravers metamorphose into a
plot that self-consciously recalls that of Shakespeare's comedy. Clove,
for instance, a character who begins by appealing to the waves in mock-Shakespearean
rhymes — "And clean from me these drops o' mortal jism/ and pull them
far into earth's liquid schism" — finds herself lost and far from her
friends, riding a sculpture floating through the air that looks like
a Brussels sprout and is meant to resemble female orgasm, and pairing
off with Job, the dead ringer for the boy she loves, Skeeter. Skeeter,
of course, turns out to be her half-brother; he pairs off with Clove's
"best friend and fairest cohort," Sable. The model for all this pairing
off is Midsummer. What Ever's preposterous plot might
go somewhat beyond even Shakespeare's comedies and romances, but it
might also be that it reminds us of just how preposterous those plots
are.
A testament to many of the pleasures and some
of the perils of a certain grand American preposterousness, What
Ever is a curious, hybrid thing. It began, in 1994-95, as a series
of Lower East Side performances — skits, really, though that word seems
taboo — and developed into what is now an intimate marathon: a solo
performance piece in eight sections spread over four evenings. What
Ever is now on a return engagement at P.S. 122, where its run continues
over the next two weekends. So, a series of performances is now an epic,
An American Odyssey in 8 Acts, the play's subtitle, or a Living
Novel, the curious subtitle of the published text. A note in the
program tells us that Woodbury "actively seeks producers for a film
version." Series of skits, epic, novel, possibly a movie: what ever
is What Ever?
The briefest account of the plot must mention
these interlocking characters: Skeeter, Clove, and Sable, teen ravers
caught in a long-distance erotic triangle; Violet Smith, aged hipster
doyenne who tells tales of New York, Paris, and trans-Atlantic bohemias;
Paul Folsom, disenchanted corporate CEO, who loves Skeeter's New Ager
aunt, Jeanette Gladjnois; Polly Folsom, the bewildered Southern belle
whose marriage to Paul is falling apart and who has fallen in love with
a black repairman, Reuben Scott Clay; and Bushie, a.k.a.. Mollie Bright,
a deliriously profane hooker who loudly haunts the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood
where she grew up. What Ever brings together the stories of
each of these characters, Bushie's plot being the most tangential to
the others. The play's end is comedy in an old-fashioned style. (Maybe
this is, after all, theater?) Each central character ends with his or
her beloved, while Violet, the single raconteur, blows her trumpet.
She plays, if I heard right, a few bars from Miles Davis and Gil Evans's
"Sketches of Spain," here made the boho emblem of the love
that will overcome. "Must you speak in verse all the time, deah?" Violet
reprimands Clove. "Other than that you're a perfectly pleasant girl."
As if to say: enough Shakespeare, bring on the jazz.
What Ever's aspiration is to have both
Shakespeare and jazz — or Shakespeare as jazz. Jazz has the heavy duty,
not for the first time, of standing for the union of all sorts of disparate
sources, characters, and strands: corporate insider and Wiccan priestess;
Shakespearean rhythm and raver argot; improvisational performance and
the institutions of theater, performance, and genre. In one passage,
Violet remembers her desire to create "a room that is like jazz, like
jazz itself." When Cora May, her housekeeper, hears her plan, she replies
that to make such a room would be impossible. "But so is jazz!" replies
Violet.
The acknowledgment of the simultaneous impossibility
and manifest existence of jazz sets up the concluding moment where Violet
plays, impossibly, Miles Davis's trumpet. (The trumpet was given to
her by Sammy Tine, a black jazz musician who appears at Polly Folsom's
concluding "Interracialist" Tupperware party.) This act of ventriloquism
summarizes four evenings of Woodbury's quite amazing feats of ventriloquism,
producing, along with the voices and gestures of the main characters
sketched above, those of Mexican migrant farm laborers, members of the
Lakota nation, and Puerto Rican teenagers. "Ventriloquism" is perhaps
the wrong word; these are not, in the manner of Anna Deavere Smith's
work, enacted performances of oral testimony. As the Shakespearean resonances
suggest, the play as often features invented and highly stylized argots
as it does carefully observed versions of everyday speech. Inclusion
here is not a matter of responsible reporting and transcription. If
anything, What Ever's dramatis personae recalls the scattered
hipster casts of rock and roll, where Quinn the Eskimo, Crazy Janey
and her mission man, and other spirits in the night appear on the same
stage.
But to repeat a refrain: maybe this is, after
all, theater. The artifact What Ever most closely resembles
is that other sprawling, self-consciously "American" work with a whole
set of titles and subtitles, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on
National Themes. The parallels are many. Both contain rattled,
verbally unruly central characters who are haunted: for Prior Walter's
angels, What Ever substitutes none other than the ghost of
Kurt Cobain, who occupies Clove, rattles Violet in a visitation that
recalls Prior's first erotic encounter with an angel, and frightens
the farm laborers, Carlito and Helacio. Both Angels and What
Ever include older female figures, Violet Smith and Ella Harper,
who surprisingly meld with the only superficially hipper younger folk.
Both feature powerful members of the establishment, Paul Folsom and
Roy Cohn, whose fates, surprisingly, become intertwined with those of
the plays' marginalized protagonists. Beyond these connections of plot,
What Ever shares with Angels a utopian confidence
in the theater's ability to represent — and potentially help create
— some alternative America, a counter-nation.
What Ever's image for this alternative
America, a spectacular cross-generational rave, unquestionably differs
from Prior Walter's more somber blessing, but the comparison of the
two works is most telling as a measure of the theatrical ambition they
share. One body, eighty, ninety, one hundred characters!: This is one
way to sum up the terrific ambitions of What Ever, and Woodbury's
remarkable talents and stamina. What unites these characters is not
simply that body on stage. The eight acts and four evenings and scads
of characters are also part of an epic, "An American Odyssey." This
odyssey at once describes Skeeter's picaresque crisscrossing of the
United States and Clove's foray up the northwest coast, and also the
audience's four nights in the theater: It should be the audience's odyssey
and the audience's America.
As with Angels, the efforts at performing
inclusion to some extent backfire. With the single and problematic exception
of Bushie, who wakes up to the fact that she is queer late, late in
the story, the central and most vivid figures in What Ever
are straight and white. That Bushie is the exception also draws attention
to the autonomy of her plot; it is the most loosely tied to the rest
of the stories, and in many ways the least convincing. In general, Woodbury's
treatment of those for whom marginalization is not an elective affinity
but a fact of American life is so gingerly as to lead to a familiar
kind of racial sentimentality. The chaotic glee with which she occupies
her raver characters and the good-natured battiness she bestows on Violet
disappear in the sort of genteel respect one associates with well-meaning
entertainments of the 1950s. Reuben Scott Clay, Polly's lover, a powerful
man of few words, recalls Dennis Haysbert's character in Far from
Heaven, but What Ever does not have that film's uncanny
distance from the conventions within which it works. (When Reuben finally
speaks, it's a shock.) Cora Sue, housekeeper as confidante, exists mostly
to listen to Violet's tales. Carlito, whose letters home to his wife
in Mexico we hear, speaks elegiacally but all too familiarly: "I wish
I could be there at the moment to drink a coffee in the sun and watch
your face and neck while outside all of our little donkeys are braying."
This inclusion of familiar stereotypes feels, on another level, like
exclusion.
What Ever, once more like Angels
in America, asks to be judged in the light of its own ambitions
to contain "America," to embody national themes. Its published form
tempts one to think of What Ever as a finished thing; in performance,
however, it remains a work in progress and the text is still in flux.
The manic pleasure with which Woodbury invests Skeeter or Violet limns
a brave new world, a surprising and compelling counter-public. But what
are the limits governing which bodies Woodbury can anarchically occupy,
and which not? Must these limits, too, follow the color line? The limits
of such imaginative and performative investment are certainly not those
of Woodbury alone. This is American theater, and the failures of What
Ever are far preferable to the timid successes of ten thousand
"well-drawn" plays set in some zone next door to Friends. I
look forward to other, even more capacious odysseys.