Superfluities Redux

On culture and theatre, by George Hunka

The Last Room in the World:
Notes on Daniel Keene

2005

Something disastrous has already happened before any of Daniel Keene's plays has begun: a stonecutter has been laid off, a workman has fallen from a great height and died, nuclear war has run its course. The eight plays collected in Terminus and Other Plays, then, are meditations on how to survive, how to think and how to find redemption in a world not merely fallen but, in some sense, already destroyed. They're spare and lyrical plays, profoundly moral in the ambivalent, shifting conclusions about personal responsibility, even in the face of a burning, charred landscape, that they reach.

These are plays meant just as much for the page as for the stage. In texts like Scissors, Paper, Rock, in which a stonecutter and his family must contend with a sense of purposelessness and emptiness that unemployment has thrust upon them, character assignments to individual lines are not identified so that the reader has to make his own way through the bleak but affecting language of the text (much as the spectator would need to find meaning in this same language and the stage pictures they suggest); some of the monologues in the book work just as well as poems as they do as drama. This attention to the everyday language of the workers and drifters on the margins of society draws them linguistically to the center of Keene's experience of the world, for so many of these plays have to do with basic human relationships: man and woman, parent and child, family (perhaps most importantly). The relationships, like the language, are elemental, set in landscapes that have been stripped of traditional cultural anchors like work, art, media, church and community.

There are exceptions: these are also politically-aware, violent works. The highly stylized monologue The Fire Testament is the story of a bloodied destroyed body wandering through a burning landscape littered with death, in search of other living survivors, and Terminus itself begins with the senseless strangulation of a young boy on a train. There is a sense in which this guilt cannot be expiated, and the struggle becomes that of internalizing this guilt in the individual, so that the generations who come after will be untouched by it. Keene doesn't offer any suggestion that this is even possible, and indeed perhaps the only major fault of these plays is that we fail to see by what means the innocent child becomes the guilty adult; is it that we grow into the evil that we each carry within us? Do we inevitably teach evil to the young despite our desperate attempts not to? Is the question ultimately unanswerable?

Of the plays in this volume I find the most recent work the most affecting: Scissors, Paper, Rock, the extended father-son dialogue River and The Fire Testament. Terminus, with its contemporary, homeless, wandering Richard III spreading death and evil through a countryside, partakes a little too much of Woyzeck's sensationalism, perhaps, to match the evocative spareness of these later plays, though is still highly effective for all that.

Keene's work is better known in his native Australia and in Europe than here in the US; let's hope this changes, and that a daring company will soon take up perhaps a pair of monologues or another of these haunting contemporary tragedies; although his work has been done in New York, it should be done more. Companies looking for politically-aware but linguistically imaginative work are especially directed to these plays. Keene's Web site contains a biography, a few interviews with and essays about the playwright, and a list of recent productions; his essay on theater, "An empty church," appeared in the second issue of Masthead.

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