|
The vision and oeuvre of Robert Wilson notwithstanding, the spoken word remains the primary mode of communication in contemporary Western theater. Writers write them, actors speak them, audiences absorb them, and from that we form the meaning of the performance. Time was, words spoken and the meaning they held weren't all that far apart. People didn't always speak the truth, of course, but even in lies, the meaning was understood; it was just not true. Ah, for the days of the good, simple, straightforward plainspoken lie. It's different now. In the current corporate and government-controlled media world of spin and slippery syntax, we have at last truly entered the Orwellian world of doublespeak. As Jonathan Kalb noted in a recent essay on theater criticism for Yale's Theater magazine, we are living in "an age when the agents of power (big media and politicians) have co-opted the language of rebellion to the point where counterrebellion is often indistinguishable from rebellion." To which I might add: truth, intent and meaning as well. We are now in a world where nothing is as it seems or how it is spoken, a world where intentional, unequivocal bald-faced lying of the type regularly put forth by Vice President and corporate waterboy Dick Cheney can become "misspeaking" when the lies expire or are exposed; where murderous, bumbling oppression can become "liberation", where unrelenting, uncontrollable chaos is "opportunity." The point to all of this, of course, is to obscure the actual truth, to cloak true meaning in the thick, comfortable wrap of meaningful-sounding meaninglessness. And when the sense of language becomes calculatedly nonsensical, when does the nonsensical make sense? ******* If you're in New York, it's in two downtown shows by a pair of cutting-edge contemporary playwrights with remarkable gifts for language, Mac Wellman's "Cellophane", which recently closed at TriBeCa's Flea Theater, and Kristen Kosmas' "Palomino", running through November 1 at Tonic on the Lower East Side. Wellman has noted that he began "Cellophane" as a language experiment with some "aberrant verb forms." For two and a half years he recorded and riffed upon various manglings of the English language, exploring what he called this "undiscovered continent of bad writing" to create a "spectral portrait of America through the medium of bad language." "Cellophane" is indeed all of that, but to say that is all it is would be to sell the play short. Way short. "Cellophane" is not just a menagerie of strung-together, strangled syntax spun out by actors with amazing memorization and recall abilities to confuse and amuse its baffled audience (though it is that, too); Wellman's play creates ultimately -- and often very humorously -- an entire alternate plane of communication. As the tweaked and tortured language continues to evolve, certain words and phrases begin to recur and thus take on an assumed significance: "Cheese." Wellman's iconoclastic text is aided immensely by his cast of 21 members of the Bats, the Flea's stellar acting ensemble, and by director Jim Simpson's nimble staging, mixing the actors amongst the audience in the Flea's nightclub-like Downstairs space. Structurally broken into an hour's worth of brief monologues, Simpson instills his cast with a genuine sense of urgency in their mostly spoken, sometimes sung deliveries. When one cast member pops up suddenly in the control booth proclaiming, "Tango! Tango! Drill the square cheese!" the line seems less a flippant, foolish burst of nonsense than a genuine attempt to communicate in a language we can almost, but not quite, understand the meaning of. Sitting amongst this, watching the actors struggling to communicate to an audience straining to understand, I was reminded of a couple of times when language, both speaking and understanding, had completely failed me. Once, when wandering Paris armed with a French vocabulary totaling three words ("parlez-vous Anglais?") and another time, at a motel in Dodge City, Kansas when the guy in the room next door started talking to me and I still have no idea what he was saying (seeing the Kentucky plates on his '62 Chevy Impala later went a long way towards explaining my loss on this one.) ******* Where Wellman's "Cellophane" is a staccato, driving, bop-fueled exploratory riff, Kosmas' "Palomino" seems at times downright conversational by comparison, yet is possessed of a unique and oddly endearing, quixotic drive of its own. Kosmas flirts some with conventional plotting and linear progression -- the tried-and-true one about the stranger who comes to town and shakes things up -- but it's pretty clear from the get-go she's not all that interested in plot. What does interest her is language; specifically, the language of her characters' inner lives -- their drives, desires, fears and failures. After a disconcertingly goofy opening, an odd glitch in director Kip Fagan's otherwise smoothly inventive staging, "Palomino" quickly settles into the fluid, quirky groove that is Kosmas' powerfully evocative writing. Kosmas examines the lives of her five characters with sporadic, often combatively syncopatic dialogue exchanges interwoven with some beautifully written monologues: Louisa, the stranger (Larissa Tokmakov, in a remarkably assured stage debut) makes a discourse on the history of the motel sound like a love poem while locked in a slow-dance embrace with Albert (Paul Willis), the husband of fiery Frieda (playwright Kosmas), a rebel with red shoes and without a cause. Their neighbor Peter's (David Brooks) bartop recounting of his dream of being trapped in a packed, unfamiliar express train heading for towns he never heard of with no way to get off could serve as a metaphor for most people's lives. Like the pleasant strangeness of watching a play lit with natural daylight from the skylight above, Kosmas' is a sharp, prismatic voice that refracts her characters' language into a new world both oddly familiar and intriguingly foreign. ******* In his 1978 essay, "Retrieving the Past, Exposing the Present", Italian socialist playwright Dario Fo expanded upon the Brechtian concept of "epic theater" by delineating the artificiality of "bourgeois theater" with its fourth wall, its raised stage and its actors pretending the audience isn't there from the inclusive immediacy of "popular" (read: "people's") theater, which moves amongst its audience, engaging it. One, says Fo, is meant to keep you at a distance and in your place; the other, to draw you in, involve you. The same might be said of the singular visions of Wellman and Kosmas in today's doublespeak world, where drilling the square cheese speaks with infinite more clarity and honesty than all of Dick Cheney and his kind's disingenuously twisted "misspeaking." -- Brook Stowe "Palomino",
Copyright © 2003 The Write Word, Inc. All rights reserved. |
