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Hope Springer, Paul Gross, and Matthew Kuenne. Photo by Michal Daniel
1.
Let’s say you wrote a play, it was semi-successful, you sold the movie rights, and sight unseen bought a Nantucket trophy home with the winnings. Your lawyer told you to, so really—why not? Land of Herman Melville. Real estate investment. Good stuff. You’ll visit… eventually.
And let’s say that one day you get an alarming phone call from a peeved policeman—your trophy home, as yet untouched by you—is implicated in a child pornography scandal and yup, if you want to get out of this thing intact, you’d better catch the next puddle-jumper out of New York.
And let’s also say that when you arrive, and you start to unravel the dirty business with the policeman, more dirty business comes to head, and all of a sudden the officer is shouting strange words, strange words that you strangely recognize: “I’m not losing you to Uncle Joe Stalin!” he screams, “Stalin in Russian means man of steel. I’m an American; I’m stronger than any man of steel.”
Huh?
He drops the intensity. “Then I coughed up blood on the white tablecloth,” he says. “I got applause on opening night.”
Opening night?
Oh.
He’s not just a cop, he’s an amateur actor who’s recently performed in a Nantucket production of The Internal Structure of Stars… that semi-successful play you wrote. The play that paid for the now-irritating trophy home.
And then you remember: You had been invited—nay, begged—to attend his production, but you don’t attend amateur presentations of your work, so you had turned down the invitation.
And that’s why this guy’s upset. More than upset. Enraged. Along with what feels like the rest of this odd little island.
2.
“You,” it turns out, are Edmund Gowery, narrator and core of John Guare’s newest flight-of-fancy play, Are You There, McPhee?, at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton. And “you” are in for a wild, whirligig of a ride, an outing stuffed with Ritalin and puppets. Borges and Jaws. Lobsters and Disney.
As you make your way from one odd character to another, unraveling the rat’s nest of your life, you realize that yours is the journey of the writer’s comeuppance. The journey of facing your work, and all that it means to people, for good and bad. The Internal Structure of Stars left your pen, found its way to a printer, flew to Nantucket, and spawned itself into a whole new creation—founded in you, yet independent, an object wholly separate from its creator. And now the fans of that new creature expect something of you. But you missed their play. So what’s left to get? Revenge? Gulp.
Guare’s ambitions are large, his emphases manifold—any number of interpretations are viable. But Guare repeatedly seems interested in the bizarre contract between artist and consumer; the curious way one’s work or art or words separate from their creator, become their own breathing organisms, and stand there, complete, ready to be devoured, adored, or manipulated by a fickle and diverse public. On their own.
Gowery, unlike most writers, must confront his public, the independence of his work, and the way that work has woven itself into the lives of his fans, in a direct, cop-story sort of way. Gowery’s fan’s seethe at him, blame him, abuse him. Want him in jail.
But in some funny way, this behavior is the fiercest pledge of fandom, the strongest proof of impactful work.
Guare himself probably has something to say to this. Parts of McPhee are surely based in his experience.
But what responsibility does he bear to reveal those experiences? And what rights do we audience members have to Guare’s attention?
Depends with which characters you side.
Eh, McPhee?
… McPhee…?
An interview featured in the program for John Guare‘s Are You There, McPhee?, at the McCarter in Princeton, includes a particularly striking response from that esteemed playwright. When asked, “What would you like an audience coming to see the play to know?” Guare responds,
“I would like the audiences to be aware of the story that they live in. Are they comfortable in the story of their lives? And another level, what is a love story? It’s two people sharing the same narrative. And what is a divorce? When you realize that your partner is in a completely different story than you are, and you don’t choose to be in that person’s story anymore. You want to more on to a new chapter. We talk about lives in literary terms, “I want to move in to a new chapter.” I would like audiences to look at the story that they’re in. Sometimes it’s so much easier to look to other people’s stories and completely ignore our own story, [and not ask] if our story is giving us nourishment, if we’re interested in our own story. Horror of horrors, when we live in a story that we [realize] is not the story we intended to be in. I think it’s just to be aware of what narrative we have chosen for our lives, what narrative we have made for our lives, and what narrative we can change in our lives.”
Much food for thought.
More soon to come on the play itself.
photo by Paul Chinn/ San Francisco Chronicle
Yes, theater-words has been depressingly barren for the past two months, but this dearth is not without good reason: I’ve been cutting my teeth in loads of fun, smaller pieces over at the wonderful American Theatre Magazine. Grab the print edition for those stories (it’s found “in fine bookstores everywhere”), or check out these links to pieces I’ve wrote for the Magazine’s blog, TCG Circle:
The Canadian Club – dance-theatre is gettin’ out of town!
Somewhere That’s Green – art meets sustainability meets programming
A Real Turkey – Arena Stage invites the military to Thanksgiving
Why is the Sequel Never the Equal? – of plays and sequels
Vera Farmiga in "Higher Ground (L), Lily Rabe & Josh Hamliton in "A Doll's House," (R)
“The Walkout:” It’s an ideal 11 o’clock moment, that instant your hero shouts, “Enough!” then marches out the door, leaving the familiar behind for the unknown.
A film and a play recently made Grade A hay out of this conceit. The first, Vera Farmiga’s “Higher Ground,” examines one woman’s life journey in and out of faith; the second, “A Doll’s House” (which I saw in revival at Williamstown) presents a wife no longer at home with that title. Each woman makes a dramatic exit, and each gives a wrenching, final-hour address in why she’s leaving and what she clings to as – click click – her heels take her into uncertainty and solitude.
Brian Stokes Mitchell has written,
A theatre is a living thing.
It is born, it breathes, it eats, it communicates.
It grows old
And like all things in our universe,
It eventually dies.*
To prove this point, here are three gorgeous theaters I recently encountered on the West Coast. Each is at a different stage in its march toward death, and each sits caught between faded past and hopeful future.
1. It was the “crossroads of the world,” and now it’s a hangout for the vagrants of San Francisco’s Tenderloin area. The “Key Klub” seems to decay before one’s very eyes — and that’s part of its haunting appeal. Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve all seen what I like to call Sad Summer Shakespeares, limp little salads of productions wilted by their naïve enthusiasm and self-important claims of universalism. Mix your fork around in one of these creations too intently, sniff a little too hard, and the dramaturgy, acting, and storytelling reveal themselves as pallid cauliflower, rubbery carrots, and decaying lettuce. Waiter, thanks but no thanks!
The scene of the Sad Summer Shakespeare crime is usually a public park, a civics center, or a geriatric watering hole. “Accessible Shakespeare!” or “Shakespeare for everyone!” is the rallying call of their half-baked director-chefs. Throw together one of those old Bardic standards for The People, they seem to believe, and you’re golden.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this idea – on paper it sounds pretty ideal. (Sometimes it is: the Public’s free Shakespeare in the Park is often a heart-quickening confluence of space, audience, and thought—a Wolfgang Puck of a summer salad, as it were.)
If one had flown to California to Los Angeles as I did and one were seeing a play one might be seeing this play This. If one wrote This one might be Melissa James Gibson and if one directed This one might be Daniel Aukin. But what of this? As I said one can see This in LA, and what is This? This is this:
This was about this and that but mostly this: There was this man and this woman and there was this baby and there was this odd door with these funny hinges and this jazz singer with this sparkly frock.
As you see I can and will go on and on about This. This is about these sad people these sad people in their 40’s these sad people who are sad because they are in their 40’s and really would wouldn’t be sad to be in their 40’s but mostly This is about this one particularly sad lady in her 40’s. One feels that this particularly sad lady in her 40’s has a frightful sadness in her.
