Murray Ross

A Map of the Beautiful

 

My title is borrowed from a former teacher of mine, Stephen Booth, who gave a talk about the beautiful, using the classic children's book Go, Dog, Go! as his unlikely example.  He pointed out there is not a lot of plot in Go, Dog, Go!  The pleasures of the book come mostly from reader's enjoying the comparisons and contrasts of its repeated imagery: houses, toys, wheels, hats, and water. Some of the same pleasures are at work in Marivaux's Game of Love and Chance, which is also not an intensely plot driven play.  We can anticipate the ending from the start, when unbeknownst to each other servants and masters have changed places during a courtship visitation.  It doesn't take us more than a few seconds to know that despite all the confusions it will all be sorted out in the end with the lovers paired off happily with their own kind--this is France, 1730, well before the rigid codes of class were abolished by the revolution, and this is clearly a comedy.  But while short of plot, the play is rich in variation. Marivaux (and his brilliant adapter, Stephen Wadsworth) invite us to see the same scenes played out between masters and servants--the same, only different. In one scene the Masters, disguised as servants, fall in love.  In another,the two servants, also disguised, also fall in love.  The masters have their own joy in having their hearts opened, and then their own torments when they realize they are in love with someone they can never be with and intensely disliking their presumed partners.

 

They are all giddy in love, and yet all deeply serious. They are all wearing masks, and yet we are all seeing their faces revealing and concealing themselves behind their masks. At times the play seems to be acted out in an infinite hall of mirrors, like the famous room in Versailles. 

 

Yet in the Game of Love and Chance, it's not the visual excitement of glass and crystal that produces pleasure, but rather the experience of seeing these shimmering variations at play in the characters and their actions.  Is there social and metaphysical significance in all of this, and portents of class mutability that were to come fifty years later? Very likely. Yet in the end, as Booth points out, it is the experience and not the meaning of a work of art that matters, and that most of the time works of art are actually what they seem to be. So it is with childrens' books, and so it is with this play, which, as its title suggests, is a kind of game. And the experience of this play is a particularly rich one as we watch the game being played out--with a surprising and somewhat disconcerting turn at the end. I find it beautiful. Go, Dog, Go! Go, Marivaux!

 

What's in a name?

The Girl of the Golden West is a play with no names.  Or a play where the names are all made up.  As the girl says of all the miners and everyone passing through the Polka Saloon, "Not one of you travelin' under your own name." Her outlaw love interest is traveling under the name of Dick Johnson, preposterous enough even before the age of porn stars.  His real name is Ramirez, but the Wells Fargo agent on his trail tells us his ancestry is undetermined and his name is assumed. The girl herself is identified in the script just as the Girl.  Her lover asks what her name is after he's got her first kiss:  "What's your name, Girl--your real name?"  She says her name is Minnie, and her father's name was Smith.  But then she says, "it wasn't his right name."  His right name was Falconer.  He loves that, and who wouldn't love a girl named Minnie Falconer?  But even that name isn't certain neither, as she admits: "I think it was.  I ain't sure.  That's what he said it was.  I ain't sure of anything---only--jest you."

In Belasco's golden west, the past is something you don't remember or want to forget. His 1905 play was written during a period of sharply rising immigration, bringing more people to new lives in a new land, especially in the west. It was a time and place to re-invent yourself, to discover a self more fundamental and true than can be contained by any name.  The girl may be Minnie, but before and beyond that she is the Girl.  The west is where you can rise up and be all new again---as the Girl tells her lover, haunted by his criminal past, " Suppose you was only a road-agent--an I was a saloon keeper: we both came out of nothin' an we met, but through loving, we're goin' to reach things now--that's us."  That's the hope anyway, and it's the promise of the golden west.  Things have changed now; the west ain't quite what it used to be and names tend to be a whole lot more fixed.  Yet I remember my mother, abducted from a stately English manor and taken to California by my Texan dad where she rejoiced in the open unconstrained space of mountains where her eye could run out forever.She wasn't all that old, but I think she felt all new again.

That's one of the joys of theatre too--actors get to reinvent themselves continuously, assuming different names and new identities.  Belasco himself did it it, and very well.  Born of Sephardic Jewish parents he headed east and began outfitting himself with a clerical uniform, becoming the "Bishop of Broadway."

He was an entirely new man. And he rose up and reached things.  Yes he did.  And you can too.  At least it's pretty to think so.

A House Divided

We're happy to report that 40% of the people who saw Ghosts and filled out the audience surveys thought our production was exceptionally well done, and another 40% thought it was quite good.  But never before in our history has there been such a divergence of opinion in written comments.  Here's what people thought of the acting:  "terrific," "superb," "stilted," "wonderful," "awful," "excellent," "horrible," "overacted," "underacted," "especially good," "disappointing," "wooden," "amazing," "phenomenal." As for the show itself:  "boring," "gripping," "magnificent," "intense," "deep," "like a Greek tragedy," "like a soap opera," "riveting," "dated,", "totally relevant," "fast," "a little slow," "magnificent.  Absolutely magnificent." You get the idea.

Our audiences were markedly vehement in their opinions. Most of them loved it, some of them hated it, and no one messed with Mr. In-Between.  Perhaps this is just a reflection of the violent disagreements that mark our society and community, where we regularly assaulted by the Gazette editorial page and occasional theatre review (I'm happy to say nearly everyone disagreed with that one).  But there may be something about the play itself that provokes such deep division.  Last year I saw a terrific production of Ghosts in London, which won all sorts of awards--in fact the production was instrumental in my deciding to do our version here.  So I was shocked later to read the New Yorker review which called it empty and episodic, with "so much overacting,that everything is reduced to soap opera—without the cheap thrills."  It seems that a house divided on the play is a global as well as a local phenomenon.

Ibsen's play is a complex affair. The chief protagonist, Helene Alving, is forced to spend so much time hearing news she doesn't want that she can seem boxed in and therefore underacted. Her antagonist, Pastor Manders speaks almost entirely in a language that is deliberately fabricated from truisms and cliches, and so his performance is likely to seem both stiff and hammy.  These two used to be connected but its clear they aren't anymore, so audiences complain they weren't connecting.  People who want their realism to stay entirely in the kitchen sink will be disappointed in a play in which every particular is more metaphorical than grounded in concrete fact, and audiences hoping for the symbolic operatic heights of melodrama will be disappointed in how Ibsen frustrates these expectations by staying on dark hard ground.  The play is at once creaky, slow, swift, repressed and flamboyant.  

I liked it even more after directing it. I liked how the little things might mean a lot: Oswald sitting on the table with his back to us, his life going up silently in the exhale of a cigar; Mrs Alving asking if there can be salvation in the joy of life, and Regina entering laughing with a bottle of champagne, providing the answer.  But I like the play in its grand scheme too, a harrowing demonstration of a nightmare best described by Karl Marx, who died two years after Ghosts was written: 

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

It's a great play which gradually reaches a level of intensity you don't often find in theatre.  I like to think the long silence which followed the end of many of our performances might have been a measure of how strongly the play landed. At least on some. Others perhaps were merely sleeping out their time,waiting for this old Norwegian turkey to dry up and go away.

 

Die! Die! Die! And Bring the Kids!

 

The burden of my song is:  Kids Get Shakespeare.  I speak not only of myself, who first saw Shakespeare in a small city park in Altadena a hundred years ago (how I wish I could thank those players bursting from the bushes), but of all the hundreds of kids I have watched watching our productions for the last three decades. Sometimes their parents are a little tense, straining to comprehend every word and phrase, and sometimes fretting so much they only make matters worse.  But kids don't know that Shakespeare is a test, and they go with the flow, and you can watch them catching the waves, delighted.

There is no better way to start your children on Shakespeare than with A Midsummer Night's Dream.  It's got magic, fairies, lovers, goofballs, a prankster, a fabulous ass, and the funniest tragedy ever to hit the stage.  Many kids have already been introduced to the play by movies or classroom projects--they may have even made some fairy wings. But even if they haven't a clue they will get one in no time, especially since in our production the fairies are kids too.  And by the end everyone will be deliriously happy, since the play concludes with two actors enjoying protracted pretend death scenes. When I was a kid back in the golden age, dying was an art and a joy.  In our neighborhood canyon we played guns with wooden weapons, and the next best thing to killing someone was getting killed, because then you got a death scene: your knees would buckle, your weapon would drop from your hand, you would look up for one last glimpse of the sun, and then collapse, groaning, with legs twitching spasmodically  for several minutes. Every kid knows how much fun it is to die, trust me.

And so does every actor.  Shakespeare knew this too, and at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream he wrote two extended, beautiful and very different deaths for the bad actors playing Pryamus and Thisbe.  They can't act, but they die great.  In our production they die so well and so thoroughly our entire tent is shaking with laughter like jello.  

You ought not to deprive your children and grandchildren of this unique opportunity.  Here is a play both merry and tragical, and its most tragical moment is its merriest. The play proves over and over that in death there is life, rippling hilarious life. This is the true magic of theatre, as conjured by it's greatest magician, Mr. William Shakespeare.

 

Almost a scene

This weekend I checked in on four theatre productions in town---four! That's a personal record, and I'm proud of it, but I'm writing to say they were all quite different, and each had a whole lot going for it. 

On Thursday night I saw Tomas Kubinek, the "Miracle Man" at the Millibo Art Theatre. 

He can put a glass of wine on his forehead, drop down, do a backward somersault while humming "It's a sin to tell a lie" and playing on the ukelele, remove the wine class with his knees, then drain it holding the glass between his teeth.  I had not seen that before. He is a true clown, innocent, skilled, endearing, companionable with an edge of menace, anarchy and danger.  He got four hunky guys to get in touch with their feminine sides while flying balletically over their heads.  He did some stupid magic and then some dumbfounding magic.  He got us out into the great outdoors.  He was a true and false miracle man!

On Friday night I went to Colorado College for their production of Arnold Wesker's historic and rarely performed 1959 play, The Kitchen. Rarely performed because it requires 30 actors and a working restaurant kitchen large enough to plausibly feed 1500 diners in one hour.  It's a terrific play, and it was brilliantly orchestrated by Andrew Manley, and impeccably costumed by Jan Avramov, rising to a crescendo of mechanical frenzy, then sinking back into a numbed exhaustion.

On Sunday afternoon I slipped into Dracula at the Fine Arts Center-- a handsome production that resembled a late Victorian salon painting. It was old fashioned theatre on an old fashioned stage, and that is surprisingly new and rare these days, and just as comfortable as it used to be. 

Then Sunday night I was off to the technical rehearsal of our very own Psycho Beach Party, which is looking beautiful and silly, just as it should, on an actual little beach in the Bon Vivant Theatre. It opens this week. Here some of the cast get notes in the lobby while their waves are being adjusted on stage.

 

 

So what I learned this weekend is that we have, in our very own town, something like a theatre renaissance--though you can hardly call it that since we have never ever had so much. It's worth noting despite my full dance card I still couldn't get to everything worth seeing : a Hamlet at the Black Box theatre, and Rattlesnakes at the reliably excellent Stage Ensemble Theatre (SET).  

When you consider there are 4 and more such different and distinctive productions going on here, despite the nearly complete absence of local media (The Gazette apparently does not consider culture as part of its promotion of good values), you have entered into the unprecedented and nearly miraculous.  It's not all good news.  Tomas Kubinek can fill a theatre of 1200 in Italy on one night ("they put the word out and everyone comes," he said), but he probably won't get close to that after a three week run here  . We actually don't do clowns in America ,except maybe in congress.  The production of The Kitchen played six times over one weekend, so about 600 people got a chance to see it --it's another example of conspicuously elite theatre at a privileged private school with more resources than any other outfit in the region, and the only one that doesn't need an audience to survive. None of the productions were as fine as the best of what I saw in London and New York this year (A View from the Bridge at the Young Vic, and Dry Land in New York).  But even so this was all good theatre, real theatre, different theatre.  Let it not be said theatre is a dying art in our town. It's alive, it's kicking, it's almost a scene!

 

 

It's Alive!

I have been working on our own adaptation of Carlo Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters. I'm not the first to have attempted this.  I've looked at 5 different English ranslations of the play, and each is much more distinct than the different translations I have consulted while constructing our own versions of Chekhov and Ibsen.  That's partly because Goldoni was writing something like a very detailed arrangement of a jazz score, but still leaving room for comic invention and improvisation.  He was the Duke Ellington of Italian commedia dell'arte.  His play was set in his contemporary Venice of 1745, which is no longer qutie as familiar to us, so most translations tend to update the play, both in period and in language, while still being firmly anchored in the original. That's we have done too, resetting the play in Venice Beach, California in the 1950's, but remaining quite faithful to the active plot, characters and style.

I've always liked the play, and have seen three excellent and very different productions of it. But as familiar as I have become with it, I never really appreciated its unique greatness until I got into the rehearsal room.  And then a remarkable thing happened.  Every single one of its 10 scenes jumped immediately into life.  Of course this has something to do with our terrific cast--and they are terrific too.  But it also has something to do with the play itself.  There are very few indelible lines, or scenes of startling invention.  Goldoni rarely shows off or calls attention to his genius.  Yet every minute of Serbant of Two Masters is pure theatre, as if still connected umbilically to the two centures of comedy it is based in. The play jumps immediately to life. And boy is that fun.  The actors are instantly liberated into a world of pure play--into an atmosphere they were born for.  I'm not directing so much as trying to keep these fabulous frogs in a wheelbarrow. So whatt can I say after a week of rehearsal?  Well, this joint is jumping. The Servant of Two Masters is as alive as any show I can remember, and alive right from the get go.  What a way to feel the pulse of spring!

Just How hot Is Venus?

 

There's been a little buzz about our forthcoming production of Venus in Fur. People are asking just what kind of show it is.  Is it basically porn?  That question is actually raised in the play, when the actress auditioning for the role of Venus asks the director about his dramatic adaptation.

Vanda: This is based on something, right? Besides the Lou Reed song?  "Venus in Furs"?

Thomas: This is based on an old German novel called Venus in Fur by Leopold Sacher-Masoch.

Vanda:  I bet you read German.  I bet you read it in German.

Thomas.  I did, actually. Anyway the book was a huge scandal in 1870.

Vanda. Well sure. Basically it'sS&M porn.

Thomas. It's not S&M porn.

Vanda. You don't think it's porn?  Or porn-ish . . . ? For medieval times, 18-whatever, I mean?

Thomas. Venus in Fur is a great love story.  It's a serious novel.  It's a central text of world literature.

Vanda. Oh,I thought from the play it had to be porn.

Who is right here, the sophisticated intellectual or the clueless streetwise actress? It's a question to be asked, among many others, throughout the performance. It's a question the real author, David Ives, asked himself after he wrote his first draft.  He had been reading the novel, and was struck by the theatricality and intensity of the relationship between the writer and the elegant woman he meets wearing fur. He thought he could condense it and turn their dialogue into a play. And he did.  He showed it to a director friend, who told him he didn't think it would work.  Ives realized the erotically charged relationship of the novel could only be sustained in the reader's imagination; once it became a play it was drained of its power and mystery.  He had started out to write a hot drama and ended up with a Monty Python skit. 

So he went back to the script, and wrote an entirely new play--which no longer feels like Monty Python. It still does, at times, feel like the novel, and yet is entirely new: funny, sexy, thought provoking and surprising. 

But is it porn?  Well, there are a few f-bombs hurled around now and then, yet most of the language is witty and much of it is "elevated"---or medieval, 18-whatever, as Vanda might say.  There is no nudity, and no simulated sex.  Yet I think it fair to say there is erotic tension from start to finish.  And there are some rather provocative costumes.  It's the theatre.  It's not porn, it's a take on a central text of world literature-- though, yes some might still say it is a little porn-ish. That's actually a good thing.  You are warned and you are invited!

 

Hot Ice and Wondrous Strange Snow

I've been reading my way through the preposterous 3,600 page novel My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

It's not really a novel; it's a comprehensive and remarkably honest autobiography in six volumes.  In the second volume he is in love, and his girlfriend loves the theatre, so he goes. He's not impressed, he says it's like watching fish in an aquarium.  But then, later, he goes to see Ibsen's Ghosts, directed by Ingmar Bergman.  And this is what he writes.

"The first act was terrible, truly wretched it was,and in the interval, sitting at a terrace table with a view of the harbor, Geir and Linda chatted away about just how terrible it was and why.  I was more sympathetic, for despite the small, cramped feel of the act, which colored the play and the visions it was supposed to be depicting, there was an anticipation of something else, as if it were lying there and waiting.  Perhaps not in the play, perhaps more in the combination of Bergman and Ibsen, which ultimately had to produce something.  Or else it was the splendor of the auditorium that fooled me into believing there had to be something else.  And there was.  Everything was raised, higher and higher, the intensity increased, and within the tightly set framework, which in the end comprised only mother and son, a kind of boundlessness arose, something wild and reckless.  Into it disappeared plot and space, what was left was emotion, and it was stark, you were looking straight into the essence of human existence, the very nucleus of life, and thus you found yourself in a place where it no longer what was happening.  Everything known as aesthetics and taste was eliminated.  Wasn't there an enormous red sun shining at the back of the stage?  Wasn't that Osvald rolling naked across the stage? I'm not sure anymore what I saw, the details disappeared into the state they evoked, which was one of total presence, burning hot and ice cold at once. However, if you hadn't allowed yourself to be transported everything that happened would have appeared exaggerated, perhaps even banal or kitschy.  The master stroke was the first act, everything was done there,and only someone who had spent a whole lifetime creating, with an enormous list, more than fifty years' worth, of productions behind them could have had the skiull, the coolness, the courage, the intuituiton and the insight to fashion something like this.  Bright ideas alone couldnot have brought this off, it was imposible. Hardly anything I had seen or read had even been close to apoproaching the essence in this way. As we followed the audience streaming out into the foyer and onto the street, not one of us said a word, but from their expressions I could see they had also been carried away, into the terrible, but real and therefore beautiful place Bergman had seen in Ibsen, and then succeeded in shaping."

Isn't that marvelous?  I don't know a better account of what happens when going to the theatre really takes hold of you, often very slowly.  He gets to the heart of tragedy, and explains why at its best it is exhilarating and not depressing; as sad and terrible as it might be it is above all real and beautiful and wild (I think of Biff and Willy at the end of Salesman).  And Knausgaard recognizes that theatre, even great theatre, happens to people differently.  Some catch the wave, others are left standing outside the aquarium.

Some of us saw a production of Ghosts in London this January, and we live to say Ibsen is more than a force of nature.  As the New York Times critic noted, the terrific cast at the curtain were visibly shaken and exhausted; you wondered how they could put themselves through it night after night, it was if they had fallen through a black hole in universe, and taken us with them.

 

 

Country Matters

Right now there are at least two excellent shows set in rural locations playing in Colorado--and the country and the plays could hardly be more different.

At the Denver Center The Legend of Georgia McBride has become a sensation.  It's about a charming if run of the mill married Elvis impersonator whose act is running down in Florida's panhandle. His fortunes change when he is thrust onto the stage in a drag show, and he finds he has a real talent for what at first appalled him.  The cast of 4 actors (including the wonderful Jamie Ann Romero, who has appeared on our stage too) are fabulous, funny, and endearing while playing different sharply drawn roles and both genders. The bright design is terrific, the jokes are good, the pace is what it should be. Many of us in the audience agreed it was just about the best time we ever had at the DCT.

Meanwhile in our own house we have a show set in rural Ireland. Though full of ghost stories, The Weir is decidedly not sensational.  Mostly it's four guys talking, one woman listening.  The plot is unaggressive and almost circular. No one has changed all that much when the play ends.  If you decide not to pay attention, you could fall asleep in this pub--and that would never happen at Georgia's drag show.

And yet it is The Weir which may survive as a modern classic, a reputation it has already earned. Georgia McBride has all the flash and most of the fun.  But in ten minutes you know all there is to know about the characters, and the plot is both tidy and thin. By the time we get to the second act there is very little left to learn, and the play's moral seems a little trite and easy outside of S.A. (Southern Alabama). The Weir, by contrast is unassuming and almost bashful about its revelations and movement.  Yet by the end of the play we have traveled further and deeper into the interior. We learn how each of the story tellers is haunted in different ways, how each is isolated from and comforted by other people.  You may leave the theatre thinking not much has happened, and in some ways you would be right: tomorrow will not be so different down at the pub. But after The Weir's one hundred minutes,you may also find an abiding glow in a new place in the chambers of your heart. It's a little like sipping a good glass of whiskey--it takes time for the flavors to come through and the chakras to open. You have spent some time with interesting, ordinary people. You've gotten to know them.  You've actually taken a trip to Ireland.  And you've heard some really great stories, each of which lets us travel well beyond the boundaries of the ordinary into a numinous landscape.

Faith and Begorrah

In a recent propaganda essay I wrote The Weir was the first Irish play THEATREWORKS has ever produced. What was I smoking?  As astute readers have pointed out, that is completely untrue.  We have produced three plays by George Bernard Shaw:  Candida, Pygmalion, and Arms and the Man.  GBS was not a man you forget easily, and certainly Irish too. 

Another Irishman whose work we've staged is a fellow named Samuel Beckett. Krapp's Last Tape, which featured Bob Pinney eating a banana, and Not I, a 12 minute play about a mouth which won Cathy Matthews a best actress award, are two of my favorite memories.  Beckett too had a face which imprints itself indelibily

And finally there is this chap, the one and only Oscar, who wrote a play called The Importance of Being Earnest which you might have seen at THEATREWORKS a few years ago.

Shaw, Beckett and Wilde were all born in or near Dublin.  Their Irish pedigree is indisputable. So again, what could I have been thinking when I wrote The Weir was our first Irish play at THEATREWORKS? Could it all be explained by that Loch Lethe bud I lit up for inspiration?  Well, maybe.

And yet it's also fair to say there isn't much that is distinctively Irish about the great plays by Irishmen we have produced. They all  spent most of their lives out of Ireland.  Wilde went to university at Oxford, and lived most of the time in London after that, when not in Paris or touring America.  The Importance of Being Earnest is the definitive English drawing room comedy--an Irishman would never be allowed near its premises.  Samuel Beckett moved to France and wrote in French.  His dramatic characters have been distilled to a bare human and universal essence: we don't think of them as coming with accents or national particularities.  George Bernard Shaw left Ireland when he was 20 and never lived there again. The wonderful Shavian characters who have appeared on our stage--Marchbanks, Candida, Sergius, The Petkoffs, Captain Bluntschli, Henry Higgens, Liza DooLitte-- are more English, Swiss or Bulgarian than Irish.  The alarmingly prolific Shaw actually only wrote one play with an Irish theme.  John Bull's Other Island was a huge hit in 1904,and at a command performance King Edward VII laughed so hard he broke his royal seat.  But the play is rarely, if ever, revived.

So perhaps I was not led so far astray by my Shamrock Special Blend when I wrote the Weir was our first Irish play. The young author, Conor McPherson, though not as an arresting a figure as the three Irish giants of modernism, at least looks like an actual Irishman, the sort of fella you'd see having a small one down at the local pub.

 

 

What's more,  The Weir is of, by and about Ireland from start to finish. All the characters are Irish, and they sound like Irishmen (and woman). By the time the play's 100 minutes are over you will feel that you too are in Ireland, and ready for another pint (which you can have, served from the pub's bar immediately following the performance).  It's a magic haunted place for sure, and you will be having a grand time there.  The Weir is far from being our first irish play, but it is our first Irish Irish play--and we're thinking, faith and begorrah, it won't be our last!