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Friday, 21 May 2010
 On the late lamented television
show Murphy Brown, Wallace Shawn occasionally guest-starred
in the role of Stuart Best, a former newsman who was occasionally invited
to deliver short, whimsical, observational essays in the high-pitched
whine for which Shawn is perhaps best known. His vacuous, folksy, cheery
commentaries, utterly devoid of content and which always ended with a
broad smile, shrug and the cheery admission "That's all's I know!" would
eventually drive Murphy into homicidal furies that would almost lead
to her leaping across the desk to strangle him.
Shawn's own commentaries in Essays, written over a twenty year period and
recently collected between hard covers, are not as bad as all that. His
meditations here on politics in the first half of the book and theatre in
the second are deeply-felt considerations of the intersections
between public and private morality, and Shawn makes few concessions even
when he considers his own capacity for violence and injustice. But, like
David Mamet's prose style in Theatre,
it partakes (like Shawn's style in dialogue) in that
faux-naïf quality that I identified as a failing of American
writing about theatre in general:
Our family was privileged, but it was carefully explained
to me that we were not rich, only "middle class," and so, oddly, I would
need to "work for my living" rather than just receiving it automatically
— in other words, the little package that was the life I'd evitably
possess would be waiting for me in the baggage room with my name written
on it, but, annoyingly, it wouldn't be delivered to the house, I'd have to
get into a taxi and go get it.
Despite this, I grew up lazy, and I've stayed lazy. I've
always like to eat ice cream and cake, and the line of least resistance
for me has always been close to the border of sleep. What I was nine or
ten, I kept an enormous mound of comic books on the floor of my bedroom,
and my favorite thing was to burrow into my mound, find myself a
comfortable position there, and in this wonderful swamp, which was also
readable, I would reach a state that fell exactly midway between reading
and napping.
This excerpt is selected almost at random from the first half of the
book, on politics, in which the policies of the Bush and Clinton
administrations are excoriated for their global brutality, and Shawn's
honesty in confronting his status as a member of the leisure class in an
advanced Western democracy is entirely welcome. But because the stakes he
discusses are so high, this "that's all's I know" quality becomes, at
times, problematic. Charles McNulty in his Los Angeles Times review of the book called Shawn's tone
"Pollyannaish," but that's not the worst of it: "[C]omplicated questions
are approached with a simplicity that strips the conventional barnacles
from the search for truth. There's something bracing about this when it
works. But when it doesn't — which is about one-third of the time in
this collection ... — it can seem as though reductive cliches are
being replaced with tendentious caricatures." Perhaps McNulty had this
passage about Bush in mind:
The love of killing is inside each one of us, and we can
never be sure that it won't come out. We have to be grateful if it
doesn't come out. In fact, it is utterly wrong for me to imagine
that Bush is violent and I am not, that Bush is cruel and I am not. I am
potentially just as much of a killer as he is. ... But we can't deny that
Bush and his men, for whatever reason, are under the sway of the less
peaceful side of their natures. From the first days after the World Trade
Center fell, you could see in their faces that, however scary it might be
to be holding the jobs they held, however heavy the responsibility might
be for steering the ship of state in such troubled times, they were in
fact loving it. Those faces glowed. ...
Which, for all's I know, might be true. But it's just this
tendentiousness that makes the first half of the book sometimes grating
reading, even when you agree with the man. Because those stakes are
higher, so should be the discourse: the reader balks that things might not
be as simple as all that, an observation with which Noam Chomsky (whose
interview with Shawn appears in this volume) famously trounced William F.
Buckley in a 1969 debate.
Shawn is much better in the second half of Essays when he
discusses the art form to which he has devoted his life, the theatre. Like
David Mamet (the anti-Shawn, perhaps), Shawn has created a body of
work unique in the American theatre as well: plays which explore and
examine the nexus of morality and amorality in both the public and private
spheres. Human viciousness emerges in a variety of characters and private
situations, especially those that are most intimate: a bickering married
couple (Marie and Bruce, which will be revived this winter by The
New Group); the personal and almost erotic relationship between an older
woman who defends America's right to bomb Cambodia
and an impressionable, innocent younger woman (Aunt Dan and
Lemon); and especially Shawn's
masterpiece to date, The Designated Mourner, an elegy for the
decline of culture in the midst of barbarism and that culture's
responsibility for it. In this play as well as in his most recent,
Grasses of a Thousand Colors (which regrettably does not have a
New York premiere date yet), Shawn eases his characters and thoughts into
a dystopia of the near future, narrated from the distance of time by those
responsible for those dystopias; their monologues, which crawl and twine
back upon themselves, say far more about our oral culture of
rationalization than any other plays of our time.
And, as Mamet has his own theories on the status and decline of American theatre
in his time, so does Shawn. Shawn's diagnosis is perhaps more persuasive
because more broad-reaching:
... the people who would ultimately hear what I had to say
were the theatre-goers. And who were the theatre-goers? In my
country they were a small group, altogether, because theatre in the United
States has simply never caught on in the way it has in England or on the
European continent, for example. ... The habit simply had never been
formed. For most people in the United States, the issue of theatre simply
didn't arise. And as for those who, somehow, had gone to see a
play or two — well, the experience had left most of them rather
nonplussed. ...
So the theatre-goers in the United States — the
loyal followers of theatre, the ones who, despite everything, loved the
theatre — the theatre-goers were an odd little circle, a funny
old group. Not the sophisticates, one would have to say. Not people who
listened to Hugo Wolf or George Crumb or Charlie Parker on their evenings
off from the theatre. Not the aesthetes, with their well-worn copies
of Kawabata and George Herbert. And, of course, not anyone who was poor or
desperate or hungry or oppressed, because theatre is only for the middle
class. ...
No one would reward me, and no one would punish me, if I
followed the conventions of nineteenth-century theatre or rejected
them, if I wrote in a more naturalistic style or in a more surrealistic
style. In writing a play, should I draw my inspiration from George
Balanchine's ballets? Frederick Wiseman's documentaries? The verses of
James Merrill, Fra Angelico's frescoes, the songs on the radio, the day's
newspaper, my own life? No one cared.
In the corner of the universe where I'd be writing, there'd
been a breakdown in the system of rewards and punishments that
behaviorists would consider the only possible system of teaching a dog or
a writer how to do a task well. And yet the breakdown meant I was totally
free.
I quote at length like this because Shawn's prose style, like his
monologues, turns back on itself and reveals, deliberately, more than
the surface intends, and this takes time (both The Designated
Mourner and Grasses clock in at two-and-a-half hours or
longer). Shawn's drama draws in his interests in aesthetics and philosophy
and recapitulates them as detail in the turn of a phrase.
As also suspected, Shawn is at his best in writing about sex in the
theatre, particularly his own. Like Mamet, he saves the best for last, and
in "Writing About Sex," the final essay of the volume, he reveals the
power of sex and drama to provide an exemplar of contemplation and
self-invention in the midst of a growing authoritarian culture. "Sex
seems capable of creating anarchy," he writes, "and those who are
committed to predictability and order find themselves inevitably either
standing in opposition to it, or occasionally trying to pretend to
themselves that it doesn't even exist. My local newspaper, the New
York Times, for example, does not include images of naked people ...
because if it contained such images it couldn't be the New York
Times, it couldn't present the portrait of a normal, stable, adequate
world ... which it's the function of the New York Times to
present every day. ... The contemplation of nudity or sex could tend to
bring up the alarming idea that at any moment human passions might rise up
and topple the world we know. ... [Sex is] a symbol of the possibility
that we might all defect for one reason or another from the obedient
columns in which we march."
Like David Mamet's Theatre, Shawn's Essays is also a
maddening and enlivening read: for many different reasons, perhaps. But it
too defines a lack of a certain concept for drama on the American stage,
and the centrality of this drama to the culture in which it's produced (or
unproduced, as the case may be). Between these two books can be gleaned a
shimmer of those ideas and experiences that remain absent from the
American art of the theatre.
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