Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
2005-2007
Current Concerns [2005]
Let us now consider Pity, asking ourselves what things excite pity, and for what persons, and in what states of our mind pity is felt. Pity may be defined as a feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves or some friend of ours, and moreover to befall us soon. ... And, generally, we feel pity whenever we are in the condition of remembering that similar misfortunes have happened to us or ours, or expecting them to happen in the future.
Aristotle (tr. Roberts)
Rhetoric 1386a-b
Compared to his plays of the last few years, Richard Foreman's latest, The Gods Are Pounding My Head! (aka Lumberjack Messiah), is spare and more textually "written" than usual. The stage design is pared down: still an object-filled consciousness, but not as crowded as, say, the design for Panic! or King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe. The text is still gnomic, but richly textured, with extended reference to the great 19th century poet of the Middle Industrial Age Alfred Lord Tennyson and imagery of the heart, nature and stars that reaches back to the German Romantics. More, it marks the end of a cycle of production of at-arm's-length chamber dramas that started with Bad Boy Nietzsche (2000).
In the development of Foreman's body of work, this cycle marks a growing consciousness of the tragic relations between subject and object, relations which seem more and more phenomenological than ontological. Foreman's early plays, from the 1968 Angelface to the 1975 Rhoda in Potatoland, examined the quality and quantity of perception: for character Rhoda to perceive a character Sophia in the middle of her room was not ontologically different from Rhoda perceiving a large potato; what's more, Rhoda could project her subjective obsessions (including her Jungian animus) onto the potato as well as she could on Sophia without changing the essential potato-ness of the spuddy object.
This tips our sympathy as audience towards a recognition of the "soul" (if such a word is appropriate) of the organic world outside of us. We can only know a potato if we can recognize an essential element of its a priori being. In Schopenhauerian terms, this is the will, the unconscious essence of all noumenal existence that expresses itself through the phenomenal object. Foreman's great achievement in this latest cycle of plays is to find theatrical expression for this sympathy of object for object through a recognition of this inner will. As perceiving subjects who know the expression of this will most intimately through the unique objects of our own physical bodies, we can do one of two things: we can recognize this same striving, insatiable will to satiation and destruction in other objects, and we can urge its (and our own) renunciation in the service of compassion for the world; or we can, like the lumberjacks we all are, cut a swathe through experience with our phenomenal axes, levelling the constructs of the phenomenal past in an effort to allow this striving, insatiable will to fulfill its tendency to destroy.
Beckett >> Foreman
Foreman's latest work continues that started by Samuel Beckett, whose contemplation of perceiver and perceived began in his fiction with the great early "trilogy" and in his drama with his 1962 Play -- a first stab at a new theatrical practice, following the quasi-realistic Krapp's Last Tape with more formal explorations of subject and object.
Beckett's great achievement in the latter half of his theatrical career was to render the stage a laboratory for these experiments. Beckett used some of the most basic elements of the theatrical convention (the roles of audience and performer [subject and object], the spoken word as archive of past phenomenal experience [a linguistic container for time]) to parallel perceptual conventions. That he rendered these experiments precisely theatrical and not, say, filmic is testimony to the live performance experience.
Beckett's late plays are rife with observer/observed partnerships. In Film, Buster Keaton fled from his own eye: a solipsistic rendition of the central issue of the later plays. Later, these partnerships became more and more complex and less-and-less self-referential. There are, for example, the explicit Listener and Reader of Ohio Impromptu; the questioner Bam and the questioned Bem, Bim and Bom of What Where; the ultimately tragic Protagonist of Catastrophe, beaten by an increasingly dictatorial director and audience.
The theatrical audience for these plays has a uniquely sympathetic role in this parade of suffering. They are observers of this live dynamic between perceiver and perceived, between subject and object, and as such are uniquely both subject and object of the theatrical experience itself. Nowhere is this more clear than in the stage version of Beckett's 1972 Not I and its ensuing video adaptations. In the theatrical script, the stage directions are explicit:
Stage in darkness but for MOUTH, upstage audience right, about 8 feet above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face in shadow. Invisible microphone.
AUDITOR, downstage audience left [interposing him- or herself between MOUTH and the audience–GH], tall standing figure, sex undeterminable, enveloped from head to foot in loose black djellaba, with hood, fully faintly lit, standing on invisible podium about 4 feet high shown by attitude alone to be facing diagonally across stage intent on MOUTH, dead still throughout but for four brief movements where indicated. ...
In the video adaptation, on the other hand, Mouth filled the screen; the Auditor had been dropped from the experience of Mouth's monologue, audience taking the Auditor's role. This renders the play's experience by the audience inherently different: no longer is the relationship between Mouth and Audience central to the play; instead, the audience's pity and sympathy is drawn more explicitly, more sentimentally, through the now-central content of Mouth's monologue. It is just as powerful as the theatrical experience, but its content is different: the dynamic of Mouth-Auditor-Audience introduces the issue of aesthetic communication in the particular medium of theater.
In the past, though Foreman has made films and videos (the 1979 Strong Medicine, for example), he has demonstrated an ambivalent attitude towards mechanical and technological media, and I'm guessing that this is because the theatrical dynamic between subject and object is so central to his vision. In The Gods Are Pounding My Head (and in earlier plays such as the 1987 Film Is Evil, Radio Is Good), Foreman again expresses doubts as to the validity of the technologically-reproducable object as a means of human expression. Rumor has it that Foreman's future work will have more of an element of multimedia expression. Has Foreman found a means of subversively expressing his concerns about the phenomenal world through its more ambivalent signifiers?
Sometimes It Works
I come from a tradition of Western culture in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and "cathedral-like" structure of the highly educated and articulate personality -- a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. ...
But today, I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self -- evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available." A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance -- as we all become "pancake people" -- spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or "super-consciousness"? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so -- and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality.
This play speaks to that anguish. ...
Richard Foreman
Program Note
The Gods Are Pounding My Head!
Poor Dutch, the angsting lumberjack of Foreman's play. As performed by Jay Smith, all movement and statement is tentative and ambivalent when you've lost faith in the validity of the world and your own identity. It's not a good place for a lumberjack to be, especially when you're urged on to a reconciliation with the world by your skeptical sidekick Frenchie and the alluring siren of desire Maude, who want nothing more than to drag you back, via insult and love potion, to this phenomenal sphere.
My own mind constructs narrative as I search for meaning: stuck in the phenomenal world described by Kant and by Schopenhauer in Fourfold Root, I by my nature expect to find significance in time, space and causality. Narrative makes meaning; one thing happens because another has happened before it; succession in time and space is a form of explanation. Characters like Frenchie and Rhoda in Richard Foreman's plays have lost their mooring in that phenomenal world, having for some reason been vouchsafed an indication of the will, of the thing-in-itself, and their own capacity for destruction and suffering.
As an avant-garde artist Foreman is unusually cognizant of Western Civ. I was surprised to see, in King Cowboy Rufus, just how indebted his work was to Racine and the Restoration dramatists. In Gods, he makes some of his most explicit references to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, especially to sin, temptation and suffering; the stone tablets of the Old Testament commandments and the crucifixion of the New Testament's resurrection narrative are central to Foreman's vision in this play. Foreman, however, takes these talismans of Western Christianity seriously. They tell a truth about the use of moral and ethical force and the inevitability of suffering; they are fables about the destructive will operating through human history. In this deeply ironic vision, though, the joke is that God (and the gods of the title of the play) is unknown and unknowable. We construct meanings and narratives around a suffering which may have no meaning.
The avant-garde artist and his or her audience generally dismisses Christianity as a book which bores us and instead turn to popular culture to grant our lives narratives; in these narratives, in which transformation and transfiguration are generally dismissed as impossibilities, distraction and titillation and noise generally flatten experience and ourselves to the depth of a pancake. They are magic potions (love potions and otherwise), and at the end of The Gods Are Pounding My Head, each of the characters having been vouchsafed a glimpse of the thing-in-itself, they turn deliberately to that pancake world in an effort to re-enter the safer, more comforting milieu of the phenomenon, God bless it. They down chalice after chalice of the potion (whether it's a love potion, Christ's blood or a pint of Brooklyn Lager is insignificant). They either have returned to the midst of shallow illusion and wish to remain in that state, or they recognize the comfort of the shallow phenomenal world and wish to regain that state again. And sometimes, as all three characters admit at the end, that escape to shallowness works; it gives us unwarranted hope and comfort; it gives us significance.
I am a little hindered by the lack of a text of the play, but in paging through a few of Foreman's earlier writings I find that the thoughts of the program note are echoed even in his earliest work (Foreman has remained consistent in his worldview if not in his practice). This is from the conclusion of July 1974's Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto II:
... style works on the level of the pre-conscious, where most men prefer to say "oh, nobody goes THERE any more" as if it were an ancient vacation place that has long since lost its clientele.
And so style attacks, with truth, where man most deeply is but where he has the least developed navigational techniques. So truth storms as style in the pre-conscious And man IS shipwrecked, unable to navigate in that storm
So he says NO! To the offending work of art.
And in saying no ... he says no to what he is and prefers to remain animal-man. At home in the world. Asleep in his mother's arms. Balanced (seemingly). Whole (seemingly). Happy (seemingly).
Brecht >> Foreman (or, Perhaps the Greatest Play Never Written)
"Brecht's annotations to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot indicate more than a passing interest -- perhaps an intention to write a counter-play."
Frederic Ewen
Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art and His Times
New York: The Citadel Press, 1967
Theater Practice Makes Perfect
Photographs of Richard Foreman's shows, as those plays have developed over the last 37 years, indicate that whatever else has changed about them Foreman's approach to objects (what us theater types call "props" or "properties," words which in Foreman's scenography have evocative definitions) has remained unique. This is also a term that gathers in the human bodies who populate these plays. His trademark dotted strings, sometimes strung from object to object, at other times just strung from floor-to-flies or wing-to-wing, play with the classical perspective of the proscenium theater and emphasize, more than any other construct, the widely differing perspectives of each individual audience member. A downstage string six feet off the ground and stretched wing-to-wing will visually connect two objects upstage from it, if you're looking at it from one part of the audience; from another, that same string will connect two entirely different objects.
While Foreman's plays have sometimes been described as intellectual or user-unfriendly, this technique demonstrates just how much faith Foreman has in the validity of each audience member's approach to the aesthetic object in front of them. During performances, Foreman usually situates himself, with his sound board (a patchwork quilt of electrical tape and wires) somewhere just off-center in the audience, controlling the pace and presentation of the production, but what he sees and manipulates is a different show, phenomenologically speaking, than say an audience member on the other side of the seating area, who is connecting different objects than Foreman (or anyone else in the audience) and, much to Foreman's chagrin (one suspects), is thereby creating a different aesthetic object in toto.
Still, one is in a theater, undergoing a theatrical experience in a world rich with objects each of which has a different and changing significance, validated merely by existing in this theatrical world. Brecht (along with Gertrude Stein a central influence on Foreman's early work) wanted to "demystify" the theatrical experience, to remind audiences always that they were in a theater; the audience's absorption in narrative and illusion, he believed, was indefensible; in no way would problems presented in a play be considered soluble so long as they remained problems of the well-defined and well-performed "character." What Brecht missed in this remarkable show of bad faith was that audiences always know that they're in a theater, no more so than in modern times, when electronic media and film have largely displaced theater from its place on the cultural map. The mere social and cultural barriers that theater places on the potential theatergoer, from high ticket prices to the hassle of making reservations to the need, in most cases, for silence, remind the theatergoer that this is an odd thing to be doing, this sitting and watching a play. The theatergoer is always aware that one is a member of this temporary community called the audience, and he or she notices that this community is dense and packed when a show is popular and rather sparse and somewhat depressing when it isn't.
Foreman's theater foregrounds not only this element of the theatrical experience but also the perspective of each individual theatergoer as a special subject/object, with a unique way of perceiving emotion, passion and knowledge even when presented by such a control freak as Foreman. Intellectual? User-unfriendly? One begs to differ. In fact, I'm guessing that Foreman, while celebrating the individual perspective on experience, can hardly bear to release such personal perspectives to audiences not himself.
Beginning Again and Again
One night at a performance of Panic!, I think it was, the show started only to be interrupted by Foreman himself about a minute into the performance. "One of the sound cues isn't coming in right," he announced to the audience from his perch behind the soundboard. "We're going to have to start again, from the top." Behind him, in the open light booth, the board operator turned to the audience and said in a stage whisper, "He does this all the time."
A Dumb Joke
In one scene of The Gods Are Pounding My Head!, lumberjack Dutch compares his eyes to a pair of fried eggs (again, I'm a little confounded by the lack of a script at my side, so I can't tell you exactly how or when this occurs); following this, the stage crew enters, each carrying a a prop frying pan on the bottom of which are pasted prop eggs, sunny side up: so much for reading things literally. While eggs can mean a lot of things (in addition to simply being eggs, not eyes), I am given momentary pause by the thought that eggs, at moments, are signs of fecundity. But then it just becomes a dumb but funny joke about literalism again.
Notes on Zomboid! [2006]
Many thanks to Garrett Eisler at Playgoer for pointing the way to Richard Foreman's essay on his new show Zomboid, to open January 2006 at the Ontological-Hysteric. It's published at Jonathan Kalb's excellent HotReview.org, which you should bookmark immediately.
Mr. Foreman's essay provides a wealth of fascinating ideas with which a neophyte like myself can fill blog entries. Here's the first:
Again and again these days I see films and plays being promoted to audiences on the basis of the many "interesting" real-life subjects presented in those works.
It seems we live in a world where everyone is interested above all else in "interesting subjects." But shockingly -- I maintain, that the desire for subjects of "interesting subject matter" is, in fact, an avoidance of the REAL subject of real art, which is -- What?
The real subject is presence itself, the scintillating "presence," of any and all selected items -- but presented in such a way that one's primary experience (the aesthetic experience) is to realize that the SUBJECT ITSELF doesn't matter -- but is always in fact the TRIVIAL aspect of the art event.
That trivial aspect (the "subject") is what we focus on when we chose NOT to be deeply engaged with what art is deeply about -- the full, multi-dimensional "presence" of whatever subject is being obliterated by the power of "present-ness." However, by the usual gluing of our attention onto the ostensible "subject matter" -- we try to protect ourselves from the deep ego-shattering experience of art.
Traditional metaphysics from Plato on suggests that our perception of the world is rooted in a formal subject/object relationship: that we, as perceiving subjects, are faced with a world of perceived objects; if we read it that way, Foreman's "subjects" (by which I assume he means plot, character, dialogue) are actually those theatrical elements that are perceived by the audience member. They are indeed objects (and we all know what that means in Foreman's universe). And most theatrical experience is based on this distinction.
The object par excellance in the theater is the speaking human body, of course, and it relates philosophically speaking to our own somewhat schizophrenic status in the world. Hopping onto my Schopenhauerian/Kantian high horse again, I observe that the individual human being perceives existence in two ways. First is through that so-called status as "subject," or perceiver; second, though, is through that thing we all share in this world, embodiment; the body then is indeed the object par excellance, for it is the only way that we can perceive ourselves in a way which resembles the way in which others perceive us. However, as objects par excellance, the individual subject is privileged in knowing his own object in a unique way: in the ability to sense, to experience, the Kantian thing-in-itself (what Schopenhauer called "the will") operating through this body.
Foreman is right to locate the aesthetic experience in "presence" rather than "subject matter," that is in the perceiver's experience of the object rather than the perceived object itself. What is interesting to me is in how this relates specifically to the theatrical experience of the body: the body of the actor, but also the body of the individual audience member, or the perceiver. And in a way this ties in to Grotowski's insistence on the "selfless" actor.
One of the aims in Grotowski's project is to train the actor to use his body "selflessly," that is, to discipline his technique to the extent that this Kantian thing-in-itself, this will, has free access to it. In this way, the body isn't used as self-expression but as will-expression, as "ideal" expression. The actor then presents, as it were, an exemplar of sacred being: an example for the audience to contemplate, and to recognize the possibility of this self-negation as a cathartic, healing process. In this is true "sympathy" with the audience: that the actor presents a possibility as a bodied individual that is open to every single member of that audience individually. (And if we can do this, it is suggested, we can extend this sympathy to other objects in the world, both human and otherwise.) In short: to present the truth, the existence of the unconscious will, which is in itself utterly unknowable (though it can be sensed), through the presence of the body, the self-conscious ego as eradicated as it can possibly be. (This is one deep sense in which the idea of "losing yourself in the character" is especially resonant.)
If this kind of theater sounds cold, academic, passionless, I assure you that it is not. Because it emerges from the deepest wellspring of human experience, the bodied experience, it is on the contrary warm, accessible, passionate. And it must be so, for two reasons: suffering and sex, Thanatos and Eros.
Whether you call it God, or nature, or the lifeforce (I call it the will, along with Schopenhauer), our bodies are vehicles for the Thing-in-itself, vehicles which share two essential qualities: the capacity for suffering and the capacity for reproduction, and this is why the two classes of the exemplary human being, the saint and the artist, come closest to giving us symbols of redemption. Both attempt, through eradicating the self, to ameliorate suffering, one through asceticism and the other through creation or sensuality, creation and sensuality that lead not to the replication of the race (and therefore the increase of suffering) but instead to a recognition of its tragic situation. The true "subject matter" of theater is the communication and communion of the perceiving subject and the perceived object through contemplation of that object par excellance they both share, the body.
Where does the playwright come in all this -- in this Grotowskian, Foremanesque theater? As I mentioned above, the speaking human body is the essential element of the theater, as the moving human body is that of dance, the sound-making human body (through its extension into musical instruments) is that of music. Unique to the form is its utilization of humanity's capacity to form symbol-making, complex linguistic constructs, and to use these as a means, through the actor, of bodily expression. These texts have the same form as the musical score, and the same limitations: they exist as marks on a piece of paper until fulfilled by the actor's or the musician's creative contribution.
I'm trying, at the moment, to consider the craft of playwriting contemplated by the Grotowskian or Foremanesque project of theater, and I've come to no firm conclusions, except that as playwrights we have to train ourselves as the actor trains himself or herself: to work to minimize, discipline or eliminate that self so that this will, as a linguistic construct, can emerge through the work. This does not lead to a concept of anything like automatic or extemporaneous writing as a text for the theater. Instead, it leads to the need to allow those complex linguistic constructs, as we've experienced them through our interactions with myth, character and narrative ourselves, free and unfettered rein through our own personal experience and consciousness; by discipline I mean the ability to strip away everything that is linguistically extraneous to our expression of the will as reflected through myth, character and narrative, as the performer him or herself struggles against all the blocks and restraints that prevent a full bodily expression of that will.
This differs from the strictly literary project of poetry or prose in that it presents an opportunity for the playwright to further eradicate that self and to enter into a new relationship with the performer and the audience: a new sympathetic, cathartic, collaborative relationship: it is a way of coming out of our hidey-holes and into the world again.
In Praise of an Elitist Art [2006]
In Richard Foreman's "Notes on Zomboid", he makes the case for an elitist art which is not necessarily a coterie art, elitist in its conceptual project, not in its political one. Writes Foreman:
I REALIZED THAT I BELIEVE, THAT NOW IS THE TIME FOR A CELEBRATION OF ELITIST ART!
Let's dare proclaim that in the face of a society increasingly crying for a media-driven, market-oriented, popular art, reaching out to everyone at once -- while "deep thoughts" are officially allowed in such art, they must only come in a form that is easily communicable to all.
BUT I MAINTAIN
that to feed the individual human spirit, the true art of these times must be a kind of demanding gymnasium where sensibilities get rigorous exercise -- so that those sensibilities then become more refined, able to pick up on and appreciate the patterned intricacies of a world which is usually, in art, simplified into recognizable social and psychological clichés or knock-out effect. Such normal strategies lie about the world because they talk about what we already know (which is always wrong) in languages with which we are already familiar (and therefore put our more delicate mental mechanisms to sleep) -- all this, instead of waking us up with the uncharted energies that throb behind the facade of the shared world of communicable convention.
There is a distinction here about the wisdom of communication as communication -- whether it's doing us any good to think about communication when we're not thinking about what it is we're communicating, or whether the vehicles we use for this communication (especially language) are reliable, or whether we're even driving these vehicles for communication properly.
As I understand Lacan, language itself is a piss-poor car. The unconscious may be structured like a language, but it is not at all the same thing as a language, and so far as this goes for the stage, Grotowski's efforts to develop an embodied visual language must partake of this same ambivalent status. It is, then, in the way most of us conceive of language as somehow reliable that we're engaging in a fool's errand.
Why elitist, though? Because Foreman's project and admission of quotidian language's failure to communicate what we need for redemption rather than what we want requires a revolutionary, radical break with what we might call a collective consciousness. Ironically, our urge as human beings is to reach beyond this collective consciousness and recognize ourselves as capable of more penetrating perceptions. The collective consciousness itself drags us back into its prison of convention; it sets up taboos and makes a crime of any perception or definition or experience not easily digestible in its own meaning-making intestinal tract.
"Elitist" does not mean wealth. "Elitist" means that this is art for each of us individually (which is where aesthetic experience inheres, whether in a gallery or in a 3,000-seat theater), not for the health of the collective consciousness. Foreman again:
SO IN TODAY'S ARENA, I MAINTAIN THAT ONLY ELITIST ART
presents the true facts of "always-in-process" human beings who, while pretending to themselves and others that they are coherent "wholes" -- are really but a tissue of micro-tendencies and impulses, most of which are effectively ignored by the defense mechanism of consciousness that allows the individual to feel secure in his or her "picture of the world."BUT ELITIST ART
Offers the spectator a chance, through the development of subtle discriminations, to enter the true PARADOX of lucid, aesthetic sensibility.ELITIST ART
"trumps" the popular art of media culture, offering the alternative to the bottom-line world that leaves so many of us parched, spiritually depleted, half human precisely because we are asked --TO DENY OUR ELITIST TENDENCIES!
The experience is available to anyone who wants it: "Anybody is welcome to enjoy elitist art," Foreman continues. "It tends to speak of powerful hidden things and energies, in language (the full range of theatrical language) that is isomorphic with those hidden things and energies, rather than in the language of daily life -- because a language made isomorphic with such intuited processes seems most connected to ultimate, deep-lying things." I'm afraid, though, that this experience is not going to be available to those who want to be entertained through traditional, conventional methods, or amused through picking through the shinier objects flowing through the spiritually dead but still pulsating intestinal tract of the everyday collective consciousness, especially as we drag that consciousness into our private selves and construct ourselves through its continually simplifying assumptions. The jokes may be harder to get (though once we get them funnier for all that). It will be harder to situate ourselves in the theatrical experience, but once situated there, we will, in fact, see more of the stage that constitutes both our aesthetic experience and the world which is represented to us through our own unreliable consciousness.
More, we will be able to play in language, seeing it as a place for the dynamism of self, rather than an avenue to closed-off cul-de-sacs of conventional meaning as defined for us by genre, by mass media, by our own imprisoning closed-mindedness. And we will be able to play in our lives–that serious play in which children engage as they figure out how this fragmented body, how this fragmented world, how this fragmented perception works. We will see other possibilities than that which socially-defined language presents for us.
Some will no doubt be worried by the riskiness of the venture. They will no doubt ask what the risk is; Foreman says it is this:
To risk offering an art based on this "split" is to walk the tightrope over the abyss between imagined human mastery and the un-chartable "other" [that frightening Lacanian "Other" that is located in our own absorption of and definition in language, our own desires that we seek to understand] that is never controllable or knowable.
-- BALANCING PRECARIOUSLY
in that energized limbo where the art called "difficult" does its secret and unpredictable work.
And that word "difficult" is only in quotes because our collective consciousness puts those quotation marks around it, trapping it in a place that can safely be ignored or dismissed by those of us who wish to continue our sojourn in the darkness.
Zomboid! [2006]
"There must be something wrong with a face that's always the same face."
–Zomboid!
In Zomboid!, which Richard Foreman bills as his
"Film/
To begin the process, one liberates the formerly functional aspects of perception, and for Foreman that means letting go of the need to control those aspects: in his theater, the "dwarves," the supernumeraries who in past Foreman productions have been largely responsible for set changes and choral interludes. Several members of the Zomboid! cast were dwarves in previous Foreman productions. They have been let loose here, to be given their own chance to learn to see as individuals.
There's nothing obscure about the objects scattered on the stage at the beginning of the show: large eyeballs and alphabet blocks introduce the thematic concerns of Zomboid!. The two other objects with which the characters need to contend during the show are the blindfold and the donkey, a "beast of burden." Fortunately, the Girl in the Beret (Temple Crocker), who is making the effort to find a purchase for herself in this world, is assisted by three other women and a tall man, who demonstrate for her the ways in which both the blindfold and the donkey can be manipulated to her own interpretive ends. The blindfold is an indication of sexual and perceptive vulnerability, but in this vulnerability is potential interpretive power: the possibility of seeing the world anew; after all, under a blindfold the eyes don't cease to function, and she indeed sees something; what each of us sees when blindfolded will be different for each of us, a play of color, an imagining of the world we can't see and over which, therefore, we have full interpretive range.
Most of the comedy of Zomboid! appears in the guise of the poor stuffed donkeys, which provide multiple prods to interpretation. As a metaphor for our own human bodies, the donkey is certainly a burdensome if inescapable part of our perceptions: poorly conceived vehicles for "racing" (both the human race and the rat race), but also, in one of the coarser jokes of the production, a vehicle for sex, for our personifications of Eros. Whether we saddle up our donkeys or the donkeys saddle up us is a central question in Zomboid!. The beret-girl's teachers counsel recognition, integration and play, which may be the wisest choice.
In freeing his dwarves to interpret this world, Foreman seems to be striking out on a new humanistic road following the pessimism of last year's elegaic The Gods Are Pounding My Head! As if he reached the end of a road with that production, he and his theater needed to begin again, and though only a few of his former design and aesthetic approaches have been abandoned, the addition of video has introduced a new exterior world into this perceiver's world: it suggests a new attempt to come to terms with the social world outside the theater, a newly-recognized antagonism, and a suggestion that liberation from externally-constructed realities is still possible if only we, as perceivers, learned to begin again as well.
For the play ends on a note of a new beginning. Perceptually illiterate at the start, the Girl in the Beret (and Temple Crocker's performance is terrific, a Maria del Bosco set free from her name and social identity) learns through the process not to see the world through Foreman's eyes, but through her own as she, a contemporary version of Vermeer's "A Girl Reading a Letter by an Open Window," sits at the hole to the world, looking out, examining with confidence her own communication to herself in the light of the world, as earlier she had learned to write, to make her own symbols, with confidence and considerable beauty. (The reference to Vermeer is no mistake: the 17th-century Dutch painter's bright, unique lead-tin yellow is also used in several of the costumes worn in the video.) It's an unusually peaceful, emotionally moving moment: an image of serene empowerment.
Katherine Brook, Ben Horner, Caitlin McDonough Thayer and Stephanie
Silver wittily lead Temple Crocker through her apprenticeship in seeing
for herself. Zomboid!, I'm glad to say, is also a daringly sexy
show, not least because of those blindfolds and Oana Botez-Ban's
costumes. Because this is one of Foreman's most technically complex
productions in several years, credit is also due to technical
director/
NOTE: I don't know whether this is Foreman's best show or not, but I was certainly moved by it, as I was by Panic!, a sentimental favorite. It shouldn't be necessary to say, but: everything I've written above is applicable only to myself. Foreman's perspective on what's going on, Temple Crocker's, yours, is going to be quite different. My interpretation blindfolds me; you shouldn't allow it to blindfold you as well. You've been warned.
Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead! [2007]
If happiness enfolded human beings, then human beings would find it difficult to improve themselves.
"The invention of the airplane, a mortal blow to the unconscious," a deep voice says at the beginning of Richard Foreman's Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!, his 2007 extravaganza. And despite this characteristically dour observation, Mr. Sleepy is one of Foreman's most cheerful, optimistic plays in years. As the technology of flight (and perhaps technology in general) robbed the 20th century of a dream of flight by making it physically possible, a dream fulfilled but unsatisfying in its fulfillment, the century has had to recover the dream of flight, and perhaps dreaming itself, amidst a technology of images that threatened to render dreaming and the unconscious itself superfluous.
No wonder Foreman was driven to integrate the video and film image (the dream) into his stage work (the world), beginning with last year's Zomboid!, which was to many spectators an unsatisfying marriage: but first steps, baby steps, are ever tentative. This self-created technology is a minefield, and we're unprepared to negotiate it (as adults, our feet are awfully big and we're not as dextrous as we used to be). In Mr. Sleepy, an aviator (James Peterson) attempts to manipulate those remaining on the ground (Joel Israel, Chris Mirto, Stefanie Neukirch and Stephanie Silver) in this landscape newly shorn of the ability to dream, and he fails more often than he succeeds. The girls, somehow, manage to regain this ability first (perhaps it's the sensual fertility of women, of which we're reminded by the babies and their worn stuffed animals on stage and often in their own hands), but it's not gender that's important: it's the ability to see anew, to waken what technology (or, rather, our submission to technology, since technology has no conscious will of its own) has put to sleep; to tear the newspapers (filled with useless information gathered from around the globe) wrapped around our heads to see what lies beyond them. To regain a childlike wonder, we need to become as children again.
Or we risk missing the point. Foreman's plays are completely devoid of subtext; they're all surface, there's nothing to figure out. "Ok, ok, are there any young children in the audience tonight?" a deep voice asks 23 seconds into the play. "If there were young children here tonight I would now be explaining to them specifically. Everything here is just for you." These are such shallow thoughts that even boys and girls can understand them without trying; the play contains its explanation within itself, it's not a puzzle. The unhappy adults of the play, the languid actors and actresses of the video presentation (filmed in collaboration with The Bridge Project at Lisbon, Portugal's Miguel Bombarda Hospital, a retreat for the sick and injured) grouse and complain about their situation: "Maybe it could happen in my lifetime, tick tock, tick tock; it's broken and it can't be fixed," they repeat to themselves, having given up. The unhappy children left on the ground are fearful and anxious, and much of the first half of the play is spent in seeming flight (pun intended) from the airplane that hovers above. Finally, a girl in a pantsuit begins to climb a wall and finds that, without technology, through a movement and placement of the body, a new perspective on the world can be recaptured. It's a hint that dreaming is possible again.
Midway through the play, the adults on screen are impelled toward hope as an escape from their unhappiness: "Maybe it could happen in my lifetime," an on-screen character says. The deep voice provides, with hindsight, the antecedent to this "it" with an instruction to the children onstage and in the audience: "When the unconscious is dead the fighter airplanes say we are alone on earth, we are blind, we are deaf, with no tactile sensation. (If it is broken, if it is broken.) When the unconscious is dead please use the human mind to dig up from the depths that mental baffle machine, uncovering the sleepy giant whose name must never be spoken. (Never spoken.)" So all right, a reach for that Judaic G-d. But we left that personal god behind generations ago: the sleepy giant of our unconscious begins to be personated in ourselves. On screen and on stage the human body's sensuousness begins to be explored: a woman's bare leg is slowly caressed, the woman's face, turned toward the audience, begins to register a subtle pleasure. The world can even learn from the dream: a woman rubs her belly, slowly and thoughtfully, on screen; a girl (Stefanie Neukirch) before us imitates her action, a soothing, calming gesture that wakens the body and the unconscious alike.
Foreman's brand of political and cultural didacticism is crystal clear in Mr. Sleepy; you can't really get more obvious (as I said before, no subtext). "Remember, things bite back. Risk it," the voice implores. "If there were young children here tonight, I would now be explaining to them specifically that once upon a time a lonely man cried out." The voice finds, in a memory of childhood (the voice's childhood, one would never assume that the voice is Foreman's because the assumption is not necessary -- all surface, remember), a means of negotiating technology to find human connection again:
Guess what it really happened to me when I was a kid. I was a young person dreaming and I climbed out of a pit in this dream, a pit dug into the earth, and as I climbed out of the pit, and looked over the edge of the pit, there over my head was an airplane flying low, and in that airplane were people, people looking at me, people jammed into the cockpit looking at me, and from their eyes, from their eyes into my body.
This could be an intense glare of belonging, of love. (And hence a woman's voice [the voice of Foreman's partner, Kate Manheim, who returns in recorded presence after some years of absence from Foreman's plays]: "... no distinction is made between ideas that are good for you, and ideas that are bad for you.")
One needs to be a young child again, a boy or a girl, to make a new beginning beyond the cultural moralisms dictated by ideas of "good for you" and "bad for you." An Eden is recaptured; as one of the screen legends has it at the very end of the play, these are "THINGS HIDDEN SINCE ... THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD" -- that is, our beginning, the world into which we are thrust at birth. Theodor Adorno, at the end of his life, posited all of his own work as an attempt to recapture his childhood, and through it, the primal source of our origin. This means recognizing the world, and all the things in it, as having emerged from that same origin: technology the human-built screen to blind us to it. Ironically, all we need do to recapture the unconscious is to see the conscious world true. If all this seems too much to handle, Foreman holds our hand in a program note:
RELAX! Do not work overly hard trying to understand. Know instead it's about the elusive Unconscious Mind. Surfacing and re-surfacing (as in music). Just stay alert and notice everything that arises and asks to be "noticed."
As usual in Foreman's plays, there are beautiful sequences, the most beautiful here being the rejection of the suicidal impulse when it all becomes a little too much; just as the girls prepare to slit their wrists with a pair of long knives, they make the decision, instead, to live, even with the pain that this rediscovered unconscious brings them; they drape their white delicate blindfolds over the knifepoints that threatened their very lives.
Not to put too fine a point on it (and to bring in a little irrelevant biographical gossip), Foreman might have, at the beginning of his 70th year in this technology-strewn world, rediscovered in his revised aesthetic a new means of coping with a world that, through mankind's use of technology as a blinker to possibility, has had airplanes flying around it since his birth. Might he, at 70, have rediscovered his love for it, and found a means of communicating the possibility of this love to his audience (if they can make themselves as childlike as well)? As Proust knew, too, in every attempt to recapture childhood is the attempt to recapture Eden, to see and be seen as intensely innocent boys and girls, and the world opens to perceptive possibility again.
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