Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
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Thursday, 10 July 2008
Crave by Sarah Kane. Directed by Cheryl Faraone. Sound design
by Ben Schiffer. Lighting design by Laura J. Eckelman. Scenic design by
Mark Evancho. Costume design by Franny Bohar. With Adam Ludwig (A),
Stephanie Janssen (M), Rishabh Kashyap (B) and Stephanie Strohm (C).
Running time: 45 minutes. Performed on a double-
A quartet of voices explores the craving for love unto death in Sarah Kane's play.
Adam Ludwig, Stephanie Janssen, Rishabh Kashyap
and Stephanie Strohm in Crave
(Photo: Stan Barouh)
Crave (1998) marked a substantial formal departure from Sarah Kane's first three physically frenetic and explicit plays. She writes here for four seated performers who do not move from their chairs for the duration of the work; in this, she draws entire attention to the language of two couples, an older woman (M) and a younger man (B) in an illicit relationship, and an older man (A) and young girl (C) engaged in an abusive tryst that threatens to destroy both of them. But the ease of identity is not that simple as the play progresses; not only the roles of abuser/abused and exploiter/exploited (and each has their own definitions of abuse and exploitation), but family roles as well (are the older man and older woman also related in some way?) are under constant redefinition; the pedophile is granted the most eloquent paean to love in the entire play. Morality and judgment, then, slip out from under the lyrical dialogue in Kane's effort to present, on the stage, the impossible cravings and desires that emerge from love.
Ninian Smart, in her article about Buddhism for Macmillan's Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, sums up four doctrines of Buddhist philosophy. "They affirm that (1) life is permeated by suffering or dissatisfaction (dukkha); (2) the origin of suffering lies in craving or grasping (tanha); (3) the cessation of suffering is possible, through the cessation of craving ..." These Buddhist ideas seem central to Crave, which refers throughout to a variety of other texts (among them Eliot's The Waste Land and Beckett's Waiting for Godot) as well as both local and apparently (though not necessarily, this being unknowable) autobiographical references; the language and references permeate and render timeless and complex the everyday gestures of both love and abhorrence that the characters verbalise. For her characters, however, the fourth tenet of Buddhism – that "the way to [the cessation of craving] is the Noble Eightfold Path," as Smart has it – remains a dogma beyond their reach. In the end, the craving for love is revealed as a craving for death and oneness, a spectacular realisation that transcends emotion and simple good/bad, optimism/pessimism dichotomies without a vision of an afterlife; instead, in an ecstatic final vision, their individual lives beyond the world become pure undifferentiated light and energy; until then, they are trapped in their individuated, special, personal darkness.
The act of craving speaks through each character individually, an act which is mirrored in Cheryl Faraone's insightful and solid production (a difficult thing in an ambivalent play of shifting surfaces such as this) by the simple set design by Mark Evancho. Though there are four chairs, each is quite different from the other, individuated instances which refer back to some Ideal "chair," as the characters' unique cravings each refer back to a primal undifferentiated craving.
The four performers bring an appropriate sensual passion to the language, though I sensed something vaguely lacking. Because Crave is a language piece for four voices, these voices are ideally differentiated as the different timbres of the instruments common to a string quartet. Not to question the age-specificity of the performers here, who all seem to be around the same age and become deeply enrapt in the play's obsessions as the play progresses, but the range of the play's linguistic and musical tonality suffered from the lack of a deeper, more weathered voice – the viola or cello, if you will, of the quartet. Adam Ludwig, as the older man and the abuser of a schoolgirl (perhaps his daughter), is affecting in his role and delivers the central monologue of the evening with a tightly controlled passion and anxiety. But as written (and as played in other productions of Crave), the role is for an older, more weathered voice, a timbre which would have contrasted with the higher registers of the voices of the women and the younger man, rendering to the play a wider tonal spectrum. Another minor problem with the production is in its costume design; in dressing the younger woman in a schoolgirl's jumper, the production stacks the deck against a properly ambivalent reading of the play; instead, we're drawn into a vaguely conventional consideration of abuser/abused and guilt/innocence which the play works hard to mitigate against. It's not pity that Kane is after, at least not exclusively; it's the recognition that the nature of craving is, beyond individuation, the same for all four.
My reservation about vocal tonality aside, the four performers here
– Ludwig, Rishabh Kashyap as the younger man, Stephanie Strohm as the
schoolgirl, and especially Stephanie Janssen, who brings a brittle
hardness to her role as the older woman – are fully vested in Kane's
language and absorbing in their presence; in effectively restricting their
movements in a tight space through this passionate 45-
The Potomac Theatre Project offers here a fine production of one of Kane's most mature, elusive and complex plays. I only wish that the program wasn't burdened by the anonymous dramaturg's note for Crave – the note doesn't detract from the power of this production or the play itself, nor do I mean any slight against the dramaturg who wrote it, but because I feel strongly opposed to the sentiments it expresses I must argue with it. The note begins with the phrase "Art is autobiography" (is it really? And if it is, in what sense? Is that the whole or even the most significant dimension of it?) and unfortunately ends with the observation that "Kane hung herself with a shoelace some months after writing the play, a necessary part to the completion of it," an irresponsible statement that flies straight in the face of Mark Ravenhill's 2005 essay in the Guardian, commenting on his friendship with Kane:
When a friend commits suicide, you're always going to feel angry with them. Any personal anger that I felt towards Sarah has long since gone, but I still feel a flash of anger that she could leave a fine body of work that can be appropriated as suicide art. Her work is far better than that. ... Myth, biography and gossip crowd around the work of any artist, clouding our view, but maybe no one more so at the moment than Sarah Kane. We don't know her. We never knew her. Let's look at her work.
A play is not an obituary. Crave is not about the sufferings of Sarah Kane through her experience of craving; as this production ironically suggests, it is about the sufferings of each individual audience member as they experience the cravings of passion and love as well. To characterise it as an extended aestheticised suicide note is not only inaccurate, but in bad taste, denigrating the status of Kane's plays as a poetry that has the potential to speak personally to every individual; the biographical context is utterly irrelevant. It also makes the assumption that any person's final catastrophic act is ultimately knowable and explicable. It isn't. She and her plays deserve more.
More about Sarah Kane in these earlier posts.
Posted at 9.46 am in /Notices
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