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Monday, 27 April 2009
Angelface. Play in five scenes. Written, directed and
designed by Richard Foreman. With Ken Kelman (Max), Prentiss Wilhite
(Walter), Eleanor Herasmachuck (Agatha), Larry Kardish (Karl), Ernie Gehr
(Walter II), Mike Jacobson (Weinstein) and Judy Kardish (Rhoda). Presented
by the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre at the Filmmakers Cinematheque
(80 Wooster
Street), New York, April 1968. Published in Richard Foreman: Plays and
Manifestos, edited and with an introduction by Kate Davy, New York
University Press, 1976 (out-of-print). Regrettably,
there are no photographs extant of the original production.
 Foreman's first play for his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre,
produced in a space lent to him by Jonas Mekas,
takes for its situation a
centerpiece of bourgeois boulevard theatre – the wedding – and
draws from it a farce of anxiety and perception. The impending marriage of
his sister Agatha to Walter has led to something of a perceptual
catastrophe for Max ("Who loves her best?" Max asks Walter). Walter's
entrance into a living room has induced paranoia and fear; Max perceives
Walter as burning the house down ("Oh boy, listen to those flames. What do
those flames lick like, huh? Do those flames lick like tongues?"), a
perception that Walter does nothing to alleviate. Max and Walter engage in
a duel for supremacy, even over the family itself, when both Walter and
Max claim to be "guardian angels" over Agatha's sister Rhoda.
Not that Rhoda has any need of guardian angels; she seems to be her
own. In the midst of the physical farce of the play, the male characters
become saddled with clumsy wooden wings that bar their entrance and exit
from the room. Only Agatha (whom Max and Walter treat as a possession to
be hidden and revealed) and Rhoda demonstrate any real perceptual
freedom, as well as an enervating comic energy.
The men bang their wings against a window frame as they fall into and out
of it, but it's Rhoda, who falls out of the window herself at the end of
scene four, who is able to tell the other characters, "I'm floating." By
the end of the play, Max is alone again, but this time "tied up, a rope
around his shoulders lifting him toward the ceiling, until only his
extended toes manage to touch the carpet": his mind free (not unlike,
perhaps, Beckett's Murphy) but still unable to claim an ability to
interact with the physical world, with physical bodies, both those of
others and his own.
Part of the enjoyment of looking at a dramatist's early plays is that,
with 20/20 hindsight, one can see the emergence of themes that will obsess
them through the body of work. Here, the elements of physical farce –
of individuals straining with their physical environment and the tricks it
plays on their bodies – are inherent in the structure and subject
matter of the play (in Foreman's comedies, sexual anxiety is played for
its ludicrous and ridiculous qualities); amplified speech gains a
character of its own:
RHODA: (Pause. Laughs and brings her fist before her mouth.) My
fist is an electric microphone.
OVER LOUDSPEAKER: (Everything over the loudspeaker is distorted and
accompanied by feedback.) THANKS.
And, in a speech pregnant with significance for Foreman's productions
of the next forty years, Walter, surveying his relationship with two other
men in the room, says, "Rays of light ... dotted lines between the three
of us."
What is this anthropomorphic angel, saddled with these clumsy wings?
Something of and beyond the world at the same time, and certainly invested
with considerable spiritual, sexual and sensual significance ("Erotic
angel: – a shape," Foreman scribbled between the lines of his 1972
"Ontological-Hysteric" manifesto). Perceptual possibilities of the
space and relationships between individuals just begin to be explored in
Angelface. Sexual anxiety played for laughs provided the
jumping-off point for Foreman's project – just as it did in that
other exploration of male and female anxiety in the context of a wedding,
Plaza Suite, by that other emerging young American playwright Neil
Simon, which opened a few miles uptown a few months before Foreman's play.
In act three, George C. Scott found himself falling into and out of
windows as well in a comic attempt to cope with his sexually anxious
daughter. But Scott was never able to say – with Rhoda – "I'm
floating."
Richard Foreman on Angelface:
The dialogue of Angelface was stripped bare of all normal social
interaction. That's a reflection of the real me, I suppose, because to
this day when people ask such things as, "How are you?" I don't know what
to answer, because I don't, in fact, know how I am. To me that question is
so vast, I'm incapable of coming up with a simple, "Oh, fine." I do say,
"I'm fine," but I feel dishonest afterward because I'm not telling the
truth; I'm playing a particular game I don't want to play. In the same
vein, I wanted my plays to represent an escape from that sort of social
game. I resolved never to make a theater that reinforced your belief that
such games were the necessary way to move through your life. ...
Everything I've ever done, including exaggeration, could probably be
found in [Angelface]. Essentially an artist does one thing
throughout his career, but over the years he discovers its various
implications and expands upon and deepens aspects of what has always been
present in his work. Perhaps that's the difference between a serious
artist and an entertainer. The artist is constantly deepening a single,
obsessive theme, rather than decorating a succession of topical themes
with a more superficial talent.
"From the Beginning"
Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater
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