Drawing Upon the Past: Classical Theatre in the Contemporary American Theatre (Artists and issues in the theatre)

Drawing Upon the Past in the Theatre August W. Staub General Editor Vol. 15 PETER LANG New York y Washington, D.C./...

Author: Robert J. Andreach

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Drawing Upon the Past

in the Theatre August W. Staub General Editor Vol. 15

PETER LANG

New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Robert J. Andreach

Drawing Upon the Past Classical Theatre in the Contemporary American Theatre

PETER LANG

New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt am Main y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Andreach, Robert J. Drawing upon the past: classical theatre in the contemporary American theatre / Robert J. Andreach. p. cm. — (Artists and issues in the theatre; vol. 15) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. American drama—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Classical drama—Adaptations—History and criticism. 3. Classical drama— Appreciation—United States. 4. American drama—Classical influences. 5. Mythology, Classical, in literature. 6. Classicism—United States. I. Title. II. Series. PS352 .A535 812' .509142—dc21 2002155188 ISBN 0-8204-6356-6 ISSN 1051-9718

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek. Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de/.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2003 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 275 Seventh Avenue, 28th Floor, New York, NY 10001 www.peterlangusa.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany

For my sons, Kevin and Jason

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Acknowledgments Four sections of the book, before I rewrote them for the book, appeared in scholarly journals: Robert J. Andreach, “Unredeemed Savagery in The Orphan: David Rabe’s Contemporary Oresteia,” Classical and Modern Literature, vol. 15, no. 4, 329–344. Copyright © 1995 by CML, Inc. Robert J. Andreach, “Charles L. Mee’s Orestes: A Euripidean Tragedy as Contemporary Transvaluation,” Classical and Modern Literature, vol. 16, no. 3, 191–202. Copyright  1996 by CML, Inc. Robert J. Andreach, “Ellen McLaughlin’s Iphigenia and Other Daughters: A Classical Trilogy from a Contemporary Perspective,” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 35, no. 4, 379–392. Copyright © 1998 by The Pennsylvania State University. Reproduced by permission of the publisher. Robert J. Andreach, “Overmyer’s Amphitryon: Adapting Kleist for a Contemporary Audience.” Reprinted by permission. Papers on Language and Literature, v. 36, no. 2, Spring 2000. Copyright © 2000 by The Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. I also wish to thank Ellen McLaughlin and her agent, Joyce Ketay of the Joyce Ketay Agency, for letting me have a typescript copy of Iphigenia and Other Daughters and George Lane of the William Morris Agency for letting me have a typescript copy of Harry Kondoleon’s The Little Book of Professor Enigma. Finally, I wish to thank R.E. Cook for the preparation of the manuscript.


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Table of Contents Introduction.................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: A.R. Gurney, Tina Howe, and Edward Albee ............................. 5 Chapter 2: Charles Ludlam and Harry Kondoleon ...................................... 47 Chapter 3: Richard Foreman ........................................................................ 83 Chapter 4: A.R. Gurney, P.J. Gibson, and Adrienne Kennedy ................. 105 Chapter 5: David Rabe, Charles Mee, and Ellen McLaughlin................... 127 Chapter 6: John Guare ............................................................................... 165 Chapter 7: Eric Overmyer, David Greenspan, and Richard Foreman ....... 189 Conclusion.................................................................................................. 221 Notes ........................................................................................................... 225 Index ........................................................................................................... 235


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Introduction A phenomenon of the contemporary American theatre is its recreating and invoking classical theatre. The plays that do are not revivals of classical plays. Three, one of which is a trilogy, recreate in contemporary images material from the House of Atreus as dramatized by the three Athenian tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. One is an adaptation of what was originally a Roman comedy. The others invoke classical theatre and myth in two ways. They incorporate from classical theatre a structural component such as the chorus, a staging component such as Aristophanic costuming, or a dramaturgical component such as a recognition token. The other way is to dramatize a mythological episode such as the Judgment of Paris, to include in the cast a god such as Eros, or to allude to a figure or a subject such as Jocasta or goat sacrifice that is associated with classical theatre. And the phenomenon is encountered so often that it warrants study. A trap awaits the unwary. The presence of the phenomenon can elicit assumptions about classical theatre, especially its historical origins, disposing the spectator to see the assumed historical origins in the recreations and invocations. Fortunately classical scholars themselves provide the means to circumvent the trap. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet propose that since Greek tragedy’s origins cannot be established with certainty, 1 scholars focus on the genre’s “irreducible characteristics.” The one with which they begin is the interaction a play generates by bringing onstage in a present, democratic age as embodied in a chorus a bygone, heroic age as embodied in a legendary or mythic figure such as Orestes or Oedipus. Contemporary American theatre does much the same thing in the sense that it brings onstage a bygone theatre to interact with the present one, and the bygone theatre is that of Greece and Rome. Before proceeding, let me remind the reader that this study does not examine contemporary American productions of classical plays. It examines classical theatre in the contemporary American theatre, and it focuses on the interaction between the two with the discoveries exclusively in the contemporary theatre. The book’s

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assumption is that the focus, the interaction with classical theatre, will yield a greater understanding of the contemporary American theatre. There is no attempt at comprehensiveness, however. Omitted, for instance, is John Jesurun’s Philoktetes, the script of which I chanced upon in 2 the magazine Theater. Not a reading experience, neither is theatre a purely visual experience (excluding pantomime and the like), which is why I am reluctant to include a discussion of a play for which I do not have the text. Twice in this study, I examine plays the texts for which have not been published, but in each case the playwright’s agent sent me a copy of the script. Though I saw the plays performed, I cannot trust my memory for the spoken word. Theatre is the interaction of the performing body, the spoken word, and the mise-en-scène. Richard Foreman encourages the spectator to imagine his work performed differently, yet I cannot imagine it performed without language any more than I can imagine the works of Tina Howe and Adrienne Kennedy, Charles Ludlam and Eric Overmyer—to name but four of the artists—performed silently. The book is organized into three sections. In the first section of three chapters are works that dramatize change, dissolution of form in the flux, and reconciliation. The plays, in other words, are in the genre of comedy. What changes is the self: personal, theatrical, or national or any two or all three selves because they are interrelated, but no matter which self the play forefronts, the emphasis always is on the contemporary theatre’s actualizing of the self. The first play examined in the comedy genre expands the theatrical form to accommodate more elements of the society, or the national self. When the protagonist of one of the last plays examined in this section descends from his formed personal self into the generating flux beneath experience, he also is descending into the chorus to revitalize the theatrical self. In this section playwrights reinvent Aristophanic old comedy and Menandrean new comedy. Another playwright brings Hecate to life in a college town. Still another takes the audience inside the stage structure that Greek audiences only saw from the outside. In the second section, also of three chapters, are works that dramatize the inability or the unwillingness to change, dissolve form in the flux, and reconcile. These plays of isolation are in the genre of tragedy. The protagonist’s failure in the first play examined to join the revelers not only solidifies his personal isolation but implies consequences for the nation and the theatre. Two of the three plays that dramatize material from the House of Atreus are national tragedies. One of them alludes to the President of the United States. The return of Iphigenia and Orestes from isolation to the center of the city, in the third of the Atreus-inspired plays, has implications for the

Introduction

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female self in history and for feminist-oriented theatre. Combining comedy and tragedy, the final play in this section prepares for the next section. The third and final section, which consists of a single chapter, examines three plays, each for the self primarily actualized, although it is practically impossible to keep the three selves separate. Though the first play dramatizes the fluidity of personal identity, it does so theatrically. The play is a surrealist adaptation of a Romantic adaptation of a courtly farce adaptation of a Roman comedy. The second playwright gives the aesthetic for his play in Whitmanesque imagery. Since the protagonist journeys through an underworld invoking Dante’s Commedia, Virgil’s Aeneid, and Homer’s Odyssey, the imagery suggests that the personal self is the bardic self that is the national self. Moreover, the playwright links the Whitmanesque imagery with a theatrical image: the dithyramb, the choral hymn from which Aristotle asserts that tragedy evolved. The protagonist of the third play, which involves a descent into the dance of manic theatricality, is the President of the United States. The final section is summational. It examines the three plays from the perspective of a summational set of antinomies: a unitary standard and multiplicity. For a time I considered entitling the book Form and Flux in the Contemporary American Theatre because the action within the plays does or does not move between the two poles or antinomies associated with the complementary deities, Apollo and Dionysus. But I decided against that title for two reasons. I did not want to begin the examination with a cumbersome apparatus involving definitions that would have to be modified in individual chapters. Instead, I let the context of each play or theatre, if more than one of a playwright’s works are examined, establish the two poles of form and flux. The second reason is that I did not want a title that might sound forbidding to the general theatregoer. For the same reason, I have kept documentation to an essential bibliography. To the degree that I am capable, I have written with the Hermes series of books on classical studies as a model because its audience is the audience I try to reach. In the words of general editor John Herington, “The first, middle, and last goal of the Hermes series is to guide the general reader to a dialogue with the classical masters rather 3 than to acquaint him or her with the present state of scholarly research.” I have the same goal for this book with the exception that I would like to guide the general theatregoer to a dialogue with selected American playwrights who draw upon the materials of classical theatre to refine their art in the contemporary American theatre and their vision of contemporary American life.


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A.R. Gurney, Tina Howe, and Edward Albee Having just adopted a strategy for circumventing a discussion of the historical origins of Greek theatre, I want to begin the first chapter with those origins as they apply to comedy. But only because A.R. Gurney, the first playwright whose works will be examined, has a character put the genre in a historical context. And the focus is not the historical context, whether accurate or not, but the character’s reason for giving it. In The Cocktail Hour, a playwright in his early forties has come to his parents’ home to ask their permission to contract to have his latest play staged, a play centered in them. The father, Bradley, refuses since he knows the son, John, well enough to know that he will be disrespectful of his rearing WASP culture. The mother, Ann, who is not as adamant, tries to persuade him to recast the material in the form of a novel where he will have more time and space in which to explain and qualify family idiosyncrasies. Now John refuses. He cannot do anything but write plays, although he does not know why. Not even his psychiatrist can unlock the mystery of his compulsion. As John and Ann recollect his earliest attempts at creativity, he has a sudden insight that he was, aesthetically speaking, exhibiting his penis to her and his father: Listen, Mother. I’ll put it in a historical context. What I was doing was acting out a basic, primitive impulse which goes back to the Greeks. That’s how comedy originated, Mother! The phallic dance! These peasants would do these gross dances in front of their overlords to see what they could get away with! And that’s what I was 1 doing, too, at three-years-old!

Realizing what he was doing then, John understands that he must continue writing plays. For a fuller statement of the reason why Gurney characters feel the need to declare their independence from their parents and their culture, we should look at a two-performer play. Love Letters is an epistolary play with an actor and an actress reading letters exchanged over decades.

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Toward the end of part 1, the actor reads a letter from which the following is excerpted: I’ve thought about all those dumb things which were done to us when we were young. We had absent parents, slapping nurses, stupid rules, obsolete schooling, empty rituals, hopelessly confusing sexual customs…oh my God, when I think about it now, it’s almost unbelievable, it’s a fantasy, it’s like back in the Oz books, the way we grew up. But they gave us an out in the Land of Oz. They made us write.2

Gurney comments on this passage in the introduction to the volume in which the play is included: “Writing to him is the only way out of the restrictive prison of the self, and the only way to extend himself toward the woman he loves” (vii). The playwright does not explain in detail why his characters feel trapped in the prison of the self, though the introduction has two telling images for the culture in which the selves are formed: “cozy, protected enclave” (vii) and “genteel respectability” (x). Gurney does not have to explain because his plays dramatize the conflict his characters have. We will look at a few of his plays before proceeding with The Cocktail Hour. The characters are born into a WASP culture, imaged in The Dining Room as a hallowed dining room that intimidates children and in The Middle Ages as an exclusive club that breeds rebellion in adolescents. To discover oneself—one’s creative impulses—the restrictive self must escape the confining civilization, as the teen does in What I Did Last Summer by sojourning in a more natural and open-minded atmosphere. There the solitary Indian woman with whom the teen, Charlie, takes a part-time job encourages him to express himself, a freedom which enables him after college to write a play. He writes the play, however, in civilization because Gurney characters come home to their WASP culture. The boy’s mother knows Anna, the Indian woman. When she was a girl, she took a few art lessons with her but did not persevere. She even ran to Anna on the eve of her wedding but returned to her social class for marriage, children, respectability (though she slips into a short-lived adulterous affair while her husband is overseas in World War 3 II), and all the advantages that membership in the “network” brings. When the father in a letter advises his wife, in response to her appeal for help in dealing with their son’s rebellion, to put Charlie into a boarding school, she starts making phone calls until the school accepts him despite his academic deficiency. 4 The “network” metaphor also appears in The Old Boy. During graduation weekend at a New England boarding school, the commencement speaker, an Under Secretary of State, comments in a conversation that a

A.R. Gurney, Tina Howe, and Edward Albee

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friend in the school’s old-boy network secured his first position for him in the State Department. In The Cocktail Hour, the playwright son complains to his sister, who has stopped by for the family reunion, that they never saw their father work. He has spent his life relying on his friends, he animadverts. His sister explodes, “Because that’s life, John! That’s what business is! The golf course, the backgammon table at the Mid-Day Club, the Saturn Club grill at six—that’s where he works, you jerk!” (62) Characters do not return home just for the privileged network. They return for the social and cultural activities that the privileged network maintains. Yet embedded in the sponsoring of these civilizing activities are the chafing rules and conventions from which the rebels fled to discover their creative impulses. To express themselves, they create, but here too they find rules and conventions. In other words, the characters are ambivalent. They have a love-hate conflict with the forms of their social and aesthetic lives, for the two are analogous. The analogy follows from the premise of Gurney’s imaginative world. The given in a Gurney play is the collapse of the old order. The classical and medieval worlds, which had centers that structured their civilizations, are gone, and the result is a moral vacuum filled by whatever in the hurly-burly collects adherents. The encroaching nonhuman, a metaphor to be encountered again in this book, is not death but the surrounding barbarism that threatens the human community. Such a community, or enclave, is WASP culture in that it honors traditional values by codifying conduct in its rules and conventions, just as theatre codifies its rules and conventions for stage works. A heritage, the rules and conventions can ossify; a standard, they can restrict. Hence the creative character finds that although the enclave is a sanctuary from the encroaching threat of the hurly-burly without, he is not immune from the encroaching threat from within. It is the shrinking of his community and culture and therefore of an audience for his art. The solution is to enlarge the community. To do that, he has to stretch the rules and conventions without breaking them, for they protect the sanctuary from the chaos without. The creative character has to open the closed forms, social and aesthetic, while maintaining the forms. The artist experiments with the forms because he separated from the culture to discover his creative impulses, and having separated himself, he separates the aesthetic and social forms. As Nina in The Cocktail Hour defends their father’s work to her brother, Bradley’s WASP culture is unified; his socializing is his craft. By being critical of the socializing, John’s playwriting separates him, in a love-hate conflict, from the WASP culture. When he likens himself to a “medieval stonecutter, hacking away in the

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dark corner of an abandoned monastery, while everyone else is outside, having fun in the Renaissance” (43), he uses images that the father would not. For the son the forms or activities are not identical but analogous and unpleasantly so. They are unmalleable and inhospitable. John asks his parents for permission to write about them because he feels a responsibility to them. When Bradley, who feels a responsibility to his unified culture, withholds permission unless his son changes the play, John withholds it from the producer because he feels a responsibility to his craft. That neither father nor son can yield is the conflict between them which the play must resolve. Gurney, who like John is both without and within the culture, opposes different visions of social and aesthetic forms, stretching them before reconciling them in a new vision. Bradley takes the position that civilization depends on good servants because their dedication makes it possible for a family of breeding to enjoy the preprandial cocktail hour. John argues to Nina that servants are exploited labor who revenge themselves on their employers. The audience witnesses a combination of the two positions. The new girl in the kitchen is an incompetent cook who has to be bribed and who nonetheless ruins the roast. The family do not exploit her but do not treat her as an equal either. They deny her her identity by calling her Shirley, Sharon, Cheryl, and “whoosie” (57) when her name is Sheila. The conflict between the two positions is resolved when they pay her off and prepare their own dinner without interrupting the cocktail hour. Dinner does not inhibit the cocktail hour, a venerable institution from the parents’ point of view. From John’s point of view, the reverse is true. The hour inhibits dinner because the event does not end after sixty minutes. As he reminisces with Nina, it went on forever when they were living home, driving mad the servants waiting to serve dinner and their stomachs growling with hunger. The play dramatizes the activity as a combination of the two positions. That every family member, child as well as adult, socialize is not so much a rule as an expectation in civilized society. The parents are genuinely disappointed that their younger son, Jigger, and his family cannot attend and that John and Nina did not bring their families. Adults who do attend are expected to drink whether they want to or not. “It’s a convivial thing, drinking together” (50), Bradley endorses his son’s decision to switch from soda water to scotch. And a single drink does not count, not in an activity that runs the length of the play so that the requested splash for a refill becomes splashes that, when added up, fill glasses. Bradley’s pouring the drinks is a convention. Another is that he is always right about whatever the topic is, and challenges to an authority such


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as a printed source are not permitted except when he takes a book and leaves the group to manifest his displeasure with the others for persisting in discussing John’s manuscript. Gurney is testing the social form to see how far it will stretch. It holds despite challenges from without and within. The hired girl cannot cook, necessitating frequent absences of family members from the socializing, the effect of which extends the hour’s duration and increases the drinking and the hunger pangs. A phone call from Jigger necessitates additional absences as one by one the family members leave the living room to speak with him. John threatens to defect, going so far as to grab his bag and walk to the door, and at one point Bradley withdraws to the hall to thumb through a book. Not only do the absences disrupt the flow of conversation, they put a strain on it in that they reduce the number left in the room to converse, the reason for the preprandial hour. If the two men are the only two, the conversation is strained to begin with. The father so scolds the son for being critical that the latter is put on the defensive. Bradley directs his scolding at John’s playwriting, which is being tested at the same time the socializing is. Two characters who affect the action, the servant Sheila and the son Jigger, never appear onstage. Their absence can be considered a threat from without the drama. When Nina arrives within it and learns that she has a minor role in the manuscript, she protests that she deserves a larger role, that her brother does not appreciate the role she plays in the family and the culture. She in effect wants to stretch the dramaturgy as the others do by discussing the play’s problems such as John’s struggle to better understand the “secret” (64) around which the action revolves. Dramaturgically The Cocktail Hour is a series of revelations which threaten to end the play, as the interruptions and kitchen announcements threaten to end the cocktail hour. They do not, though. They stop the action, only to have it start up again. John realizes that he was “parading” (45) his penis before his parents by composing dramatic scenes at age three. Just as Ann is about to leave the room rather than listen to a breach of propriety, he puts the insight in the context of the origins of comedy. Still in act 1, father and son reverse the inquiry with the former questioning the latter about what he says about his grandfather in the projected play until John admits that he includes the suicide. Bradley quickly reveals to his son’s surprise that the grandfather left a note. Furthermore, the father puts his father’s death in a historical context. Adding his own anticlimax, the son reveals that his son, Bradley’s grandson, inherits the family’s inclination to depressing moods but counters them by building model airplanes. Just when it appears that the inquiry will break drama’s boundaries by splintering into anecdotal digressions, the two confront the principal revelation: the secret that John struggles with at the cocktail hour and in his play. The phone call

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from Jigger to the father interrupts the son’s confession, but he continues it in act 2 with Nina. John has always suspected himself to be illegitimate. From childhood on he has felt slighted by his parents in their preferential treatment of his younger brother, Jigger, and restricted by his culture. His alienation affects both the social and aesthetic forms. He is uncomfortable at activities such as cocktail hours, and he took up playwriting, the “phallic dance,” to get his parents to notice him. His father and sister notice his “obsession” (53 and 64), which refers to the secret of his birth. Early in The Cocktail Hour, John and Bradley mention three great plot structures in Western literature. The three have to do with discovering parentage and inheritance. Gurney’s play is itself a plot structure on these themes, but it is Ann who delivers the climactic revelation. Gurney’s women are more liberated than his men, closer to the natural rhythms to which men must escape to discover themselves. The cocktail hour is “sacred” to Ann no matter where she is: cooking “in the kitchen” (21), for example. Socializing for her is essential to life, but it does not require a set place or format. It requires only the desire to interact with another. She interacts with her son in act 2 when she reveals to him that she wrote a 622-page novel before burning it. The audience is not so much surprised by the writing, because throughout the play Ann has argued for the supremacy of fiction over drama, as by the novel’s content. She told the story of a well-born woman’s tempestuous affair with her groom. John seizes the content as revelatory of her life and therefore of his, for he expects her to confirm his suspicion about himself and his estrangement from her husband and their culture. Instead she identifies Bradley as the source for the groom. Ann’s revelation is John’s recognition. Bradley is his father, and his parents’ WASP culture is his heritage. The reconciliation of father and son and the renewal of the heritage complete the comic drama. When Bradley says, “It’s all over. The life we led is completely gone” (25), he voices what every sensitive WASP feels in his heart. Their culture is declining. Since he is the culture’s center and in his “waning” years (18), it will die with him unless it can be revived. With Jigger moving to California, Nina attending school in Cleveland, and John critical of the culture’s institutions, he does not see an heir to continue the tradition. He does not understand that reviving requires more than perpetuation. The enclave must expand or shrink, for it cannot remain as is. The exclusive club of a play from the mid-1970s, The Middle Ages, cannot be preserved in life. Neither can the past of a play from the early 1990s, The Snow Ball, be revived as it was from death. In Gurney’s theatre the perfect party does not exist with the result that any attempt to create it is self-deflating. What exists is reality,


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and reality is change. WASP culture is real as the description of the play’s set makes indisputable: “The overall effect should not be opulent or grandiose or particularly trendy, but rather tasteful, comfortable, and civilized, an oasis of traditional warmth and solid good taste, a haven in a heartless world” (6). WASP culture also is changing. “Oasis” and “haven” are diminishing realities, besieged from without and shrinking within. Two declarations by the father to the son, one in each of the two acts, reveal the degree to which his culture has withdrawn from the surrounding life into the enclave. He denies any Indian blood in the family, though conceding that “Great-uncle Ralph may have had a relationship with an Indian woman” (52), and he lauds the family’s efforts since arriving in the 17th century “to establish something called civilization in this wilderness” (73). Civilization’s values are worth the effort but not isolated from reality. Thus the attenuated culture, like the social form and the aesthetic form, is an endangered species that can be revitalized only by an influx of new energy. Bradley has a secret, however. He would like the play to be produced if it presents the venerable institutions as he perceives them. John cannot oblige, but just as the father’s secret disposes the older man to reconciliation, so does the son’s secret dispose the younger man to reconciliation. Harboring a suspicion about his place in the culture, John does not know where he stands in relation to it. Once he discovers who he is, he is willing to consider possible endings for the projected play that show the culture in a better light. As he recognizes the older man as his father, the father recognizes his older son as his heir. Bradley even suggests a more appropriate title for the play: “The Good Father” (91). With each one’s internal conflict resolved, the two men reconcile the conflict between them; the play will be produced. The reconciliation of internal and external conflicts is possible, though, only because of John’s separation. Toward play’s end Bradley resigns himself to the “centrifugal force” (84) dispersing the family. The centrifugal force acting upon John is his playwriting. It has separated him—distanced him and his aesthetic form— from his family in that he is critical of their culture—their social form— from which he feels alienated. Yet the distancing has given him a perception of the culture that when he returns he presents for opposition to and then interaction with his family’s perceptions. Playwriting also is the centripetal force that brings the son home and reintegrates the family. The family’s cocktail hour is the subject of his play, and since his sense of responsibility dictates that he ask their permission to have his play produced, it becomes the subject of their cocktail hour. The father, mother, and sister present their dramaturgical perceptions for opposition to and then interaction with his perception. As the family members

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resolve the play’s dramaturgical problems, they create the play; creating it, they create the cocktail hour. That is, they enliven the socialization with wit, conviviality, grace, responsibility, intelligence: the values of civilization that WASP culture honors. Interacting, the aesthetic form and the social form unite. The play and the hour are identical. John and his family are reconciled. Accepting his son’s art as a legitimate medium for reviving the culture, Bradley realizes that the centrifugal force has become centripetal. “Don’t we all want to celebrate something at the end of the day?” (89) he asks. The word “celebrate” subsumes two notions fundamental to theatre: performing the activity more than once, thereby making it a ritual, and performing it publicly with participants. The participants are the spectators present for The Cocktail Hour, the title of both Gurney’s play and John’s projected play. As witnesses to the fusing of the two dramas into one drama that expands the contents of the social form, they are invited to participate in the creating. Together they and the enclaved family are the new energy needed to revitalize society by expanding its contents with new members. The fused drama also expands theatre’s contents within its form. It is in the medium of theatre that Gurney renews WASP culture by reviving it and expanding it through reconciliation. As he does, he renews theatre by reviving it and expanding it through reconciliation. The Cocktail Hour develops the pattern outlined at the beginning of the chapter. One must leave the culture to discover his or her creative impulses and then return to create. In the developed theatrical pattern, one does not merely leave but threatens to dissolve the form before reviving it creatively by reconciling it with the discovered impulses and contents. Though Gurney does not use the term, dissolution is the principle associated with the slain and resurrected chthonic god, Dionysus, whereas upholding civilization’s values is the principle associated with the immortal Olympian god, Apollo. Moreover, the reconciling is a transforming process. John’s phallic dance at age three becomes his formed art as an adult, and that process suggests that an ancient ritual, intimated in the phallic dance, can be revived in contemporary images. These are no more than suggestions, yet we will become increasingly aware of the movement from form to dissolution to art as we proceed through the contemporary American theatre. “We’re discussing the future of the American drama” (88), Bradley responds to Ann’s announcement to him and John that dinner is ready. The theatre artists in this book know that normally the future does not, like Athena, spring full-blown from the head but is connected to the past. With the next playwright, we return, not to the origins of comedy, but to alleged origins of tragedy presented comically. Since John’s psychiatrist could not


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help him understand his phallic dance, we will not ask a psychiatrist for help with the next playwright. Besides, a poet-mythographer will interpret a bizarre ritual we can call a uterine dance. In 1993 Rosette C. Lamont edited an anthology of plays demonstrating the contribution of American women playwrights to the avant-garde theatre of the 20th-century’s closing quarter. With Rosalyn Drexler she introduces Tina Howe as influenced by Eugène Ionesco and Theatre of the Absurd. The evidence for such an influence is enticing even before the reader experiences the play anthologized, the 1973 Birth and After Birth. The editor cites the American playwright’s shock of recognition encountering The Bald Soprano during the year, 1960, she spent in Paris and her excitement in 1986 introducing, from the stage of a New York auditorium, her “‘idol’” to an 5 American audience. The evidence within Birth and After Birth is compelling, leading Lamont to conclude that the play’s form is “derived from Dada/Surrealism, and its direct descendant, the metaphysical farce” (xvii). I want to study the play closely, however, not because I disagree with Lamont, but because it contains material that enables the theatre scholar to identify not only the source of the influence on Howe but also the source that she rejected. In this book’s scheme, she follows Gurney because in 1973 she did not test traditional form as he does to accommodate new contents. She rejected it to make theatre new. Birth and After Birth is a two-act play. Act 1 opens with a couple, Bill and Sandy Apple, preparing for their only child’s fourth birthday party. The preparation is interrupted when Nicky bursts into the kitchen-playroom and begins unwrapping his presents. The remainder of the act oscillates between meditative pauses during which the couple reflect on the joys and traumas of parenthood and the frantic enactment of those joys and traumas as Bill films Nicky’s antics. The parents plan to show the film later that day to the party’s guests, Sandy’s first cousin and his wife. Professional anthropologists, the couple are childless. In act 2 Jeffrey and Mia Freed present Nicky with a projector and slides of exotic tribes they have visited on their adventures. But the film has failed to record images of the tribe with the most bizarre ritual so that the screen is blank as Jeffrey narrates. So too is Mia blank as Sandy, who believes that being a mother is a woman’s most fulfilling experience, unsuccessfully tries to induce labor in her guest, who passes out and appears to be dead until play’s end when she and her husband leave, excusing themselves from watching their host’s film. Though momentarily deflated by the defection, the Apples become elated again when Bill begins showing the film, and the curtain falls on mother, father, and son embracing in happiness as they watch images of their creation.

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The plot of Birth and After Birth resembles that of The Bald Soprano, in which a couple have invited another couple to dinner; their arrival is followed by that of an uninvited guest who regales the two couples with increasingly preposterous stories. Yet the plot is only the beginning of the similarity. The play’s opening scene illustrates the fundamental dramaturgical principle of Theatre of the Absurd. When Nicky bursts into the room, he tears through his presents hoping to unwrap the pony he expected, manically provoking Sandy into cleaning up and Bill into filming the activity until the son withdraws into the wagon he received sucking his thumb in disappointment, the mother shakes sand from a scalp withering from age, and the father produces a company letter citing “‘professional inconsis6 tency’” in its evaluation of his work performance. As the mercurial mood fluctuations, frenzied role-playing, and exaggerated self-discoveries propel verbal images in spiraling intensity and visual images in spiraling action, the principle reveals a disjointedness between the surface and the subsurface that the meditative pauses gloss over. The Chairs and The Killer are two representative Ionesco plays. The setting of the former is a room on an island. Until the end the characters are two, an elderly couple. The old man has composed a message, the distillation of a lifetime of service, which can save mankind from suffering. Apprehensive that it may not be delivered, they have invited guests from all walks of life on the mainland to the island auditorium, and they have hired a professional orator to deliver it for them. Their work done, they throw themselves into the sea. Yet except for the professional speaker, who takes his place at the dais, the stage is empty of people but filled with chairs because each time the doorbell rang, either of the couple escorted the invisible guest to a place in the space where he or she set up a chair. The center of the auditorium therefore contains another form of life, one capable of undermining the recognizably human form. The orator is a deafmute who can only mumble incoherent sounds. When he realizes that he is not getting the reaction he hoped for from the guests, he exits the auditorium, at which time the audience hears sounds 7 coming from the space: “bursts of laughter, murmurs….” The elderly couple’s plan for ensuring that their farewell address to mankind be delivered is defeated. For the purposes of this discussion, The Killer completes the image of rationality crumbling before the irrationality contained within it. The pro8 tagonist, Bérenger, who is described as an “average, middle-aged citizen,” is in the radiant city, the technological wonder of the future but at the time of his visit limited to a district. It symbolizes the finest accomplishment of man’s skill and his dream of perfection in that nature itself is controlled to


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the extent that rain has been eliminated. Not surprisingly after The Chairs, the stage is empty with the atmosphere created by lighting alone. As Bérenger marvels at the surroundings, he looks at and points to emptiness. The radiant city within a city has not been extended to other districts as called for in the original plan. Instead it will be pulled down, the only solution to the problem that plagues it. It contains a killer responsible for two to three deaths per day. When Bérenger learns of his presence, he is overwhelmed, for he sees in the city the “continuation of the universe inside” man (19), the place that fulfills his deepest yearning. Feeling himself falling into despair at the realization that life is once again plunging into chaos, he resolves to do something about the evil. He will apprehend the culprit and bring him to justice. In the play’s final scene, “alone on the stage” with “mounting anguish” (94– 95), he encounters the Killer, whose response to the demand for a rational explanation for destroying happiness is to chuckle—a demented, encroaching chuckle—until a demoralized Bérenger, after pleading futilely for sanity, drops to his knees and submits to the other’s knife. The stage directions suggest a second possibility. Bérenger “could be talking to himself, alone in the halflight” (98). He does not have to confront another character because on one plane of experience he is confronting the silence within himself, and before this mystery, language is irrelevant. Ionesco’s plays dramatize the tension caused by imposing a surface structure onto a subsurface disorder. Language is an example of an arbitrary ordering of existence in that it conceptualizes a rational scheme for irrational experience: sets of paradigms onto fragmented, oblique, spontaneously personal utterances. Logic is another example. The absurdity in the incongruity between the rational system and existential experience is the source of the comedy. The source of the anguish is the realization that an invisible or concealed reality in life does not respond to reason. In the terrifying confrontation in The Killer, Bérenger submits to the human condition. Death is life’s inevitable destination. Before this reality all human constructs collapse, for death lurks within man himself, at the core of his being. The same dramaturgical principle yields the same philosophical perception in Howe’s play. Beginning in act 1 and continuing through much of act 2, Sandy insists that her first cousin’s wife should have a child because motherhood fulfills a woman as no other experience does. Yet after failing to induce labor in her guest, she has to confront the truth of a reality for women: “Well, I guess some women just…can’t have children” (104). Mia is barren—she cannot give birth—and dead—after passing out she remains unconscious—until moments before the play ends. Since part of Sandy’s motivation is the fear lurking within her that her biological clock, imaged as

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sand falling from her scalp and teeth from her mouth, is winding down, she has to consider the possibility that she will be unable to have a second child. If the perception were all that the play dramatized, Birth and After Birth would be interesting as another instance of an American woman’s putting her imprint on a theatrical form thought of as post-World War II European and male. But the play would not warrant extended analysis. It does because it dramatizes much more than a fear of biological infertility. The Freeds are infertile in another sense. They cannot sustain a visual presentation of their anthropological experiences with birth and death. Without a visual record, the audience must rely on their narrative. With the narrative, we can begin the analysis. After setting up the projector, Jeffrey starts showing slides of children from other lands, but except for the native costumes the images appear to be generalized. Bill’s reaction is not to any anthropological discovery but to the color quality of the film. Almost immediately Jeffrey directs the Apples’ attention to a slide of the “Io children.” Yet though they have a curious ritual of decorating “their faces with an iridescent paint made out of powdered giraffe hooves” (91), the Apples do not have a correspondingly curious reaction. As a result the audience does not know what the characters are viewing onstage. Then as Sandy’s first cousin introduces the “most amazing” (92) tribe they met, he turns off the projector, explaining later that something on the natives’ bodies caused a toxic reaction to the film. After only a few moments, the slide presentation is finished so that the narrative continues unaccompanied by visual images. According to Jeffrey, the tribe with the “most amazing” culture, a Bush tribe, is the Whan See. I assume the name is fictitious. Io is not fictitious, however. She is the suffering princess of Argos whose story is told by, among other ancient authors, Aeschylus in The Suppliants and Prometheus Bound and Ovid in Metamorphoses. Either Zeus or Hera transforms the maiden into a heifer, the former because he loves her and wants to protect her from his wife or the latter because she is suspicious of her philandering husband. The latter has Argus guard her, but Zeus has Hermes kill the hundred-eyed watchman. Retaliating, Hera sends a gadfly to torment the cow, who after long wanderings through Greece and Asia reaches Egypt, where she resumes human form and gives birth to a line of descendants who figure in other tales. Thus the “Io children” in Howe’s play are Io’s illustrious offspring. To appreciate how the Io children function in the play, we have to understand the relationship between them and their mother’s myth and the relationship between myth and the traditional theatre. For Robert Graves the tale of the transformed princess is the literal reduction of the myth of moon-goddess Io, whose worship he studies in The Greek Myths and The


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White Goddess. That there can be no question about the identity of the Io in Howe’s play is established by her children’s curious ritual of decorating their faces with iridescent paint. “The priestesses of the White Goddess in ancient times,” writes Graves, “are likely to have chalked their faces in imitation of 9 the Moon’s white disc.” The poet-mythographer’s thesis is that before Europe had gods, it had a goddess. The White Goddess was the moon goddess responsible for moisture essential for life’s sustenance. As the matrix of life, she was worshiped in triad, her phases of new, full, and old moon incarnated in maiden, nymph, and crone. As the eternal feminine principle, she was goddess of the sky, earth, and underworld, worshiped in human, plant, and animal forms, especially ones that resembled her or could suggest her aniconically: the horned animal such as the cow or the chalked face. She was the giver of life and the wielder of death through whom life was eternally consummated and therefore renewed. After introducing the Io children in Howe’s play, Jeffrey turns to the Whan Sees. He does not connect the two groups, but I believe that Howe does in the Bush tribe’s three distinguishing characteristics, explanations for which can be found in Graves’ books. The tribe is arboreal. Graves devotes chapters to analyzing tree lore. Since different trees blossom and shed at different times of the year, their seasonal foliation and defoliation made a natural calendar for moon worship. The bodies of tribe members are covered with a “silvery down” (93) which radiates a “kind of shimmering electricity” (96). It is the down that Jeffrey opines caused the toxic reaction to the film, preventing images from registering. Combined with their simian ability, the silver also creates impressions of “meteors” (95) when they swing from tree to tree. Graves locates the seat of Io worship in the Peloponnese at Argos, 10 which word he translates as “‘shimmering white’” and “‘quick as a flash.’” The third characteristic is the most bizarre ritual the Freeds encountered on their trips, the one we can call the uterine dance, the counterpart to John’s phallic dance in Gurney’s The Cocktail Hour. As a woman delivers, the other women in the tribe take the infant and reinsert it into the womb, continuing the ritual until the mother withstands the required number of insertions or the infant dies. For the woman who survives the shock to her uterus and whose infant survives, the thrill is that of “experiencing birth again and again” (99). As Graves traces its history, moon-goddess worship reigned before our ancestors evolved the notion of fatherhood, before patrilineal institutions overran the matrilineal ones. The goddess and her priestesses took lovers from among their sons (because all of the tribe’s males were sons). The son’s birth, ritual slaying, and rebirth incarnated the cycle of the sun god, beloved

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of, though subservient to, the goddess. The sacred king, the poet-myth– ographer summarizes, “was borne by, married to, and finally laid out by, the 11 White Goddess.” But how is moon-goddess worship related to Sandy’s fear of infertility in Birth and After Birth? The answer has to do with the theatre associated with myths of the Io children, the theatre Howe rejects, and the fear of artistic sterility creating for the theatre the playwright accepts. In some versions of the myth of Io, the princess restored to human form is the mother or the nurse of Dionysus, from whose worship evolved Greek—that is, Western— theatre. The precise connection between Dionysus, the god of vegetation and especially of wine whom cult followers ingested; the animal, the goat; and tragedy, the earliest extant drama that we possess, has engendered much speculation by scholars and much disagreement among them. Yet we know from the word for theatre performed at the annual Dionysia festival in ancient Athens that they were connected. Tragoidia is usually translated as the 12 song sung at the sacrifice of a goat. As soon as the Freeds allude to a moral defect in the Whan See culture but before they can elaborate, Bill blurts out, “They eat their young!” (96) His response invokes Euipides’ Bacchae, in which sacrificial victim Pentheus becomes Dionysus in the omophagia rite on Mount Cithaeron, where he is dismembered and devoured by the possessed Theban women, including his mother. Twice during his narrative of the anthropological adventures, Jeffrey refers to a goat in a way that suggests a ritual slaying, devouring, and resurrecting. In one instance he and Mia came across a skeleton of a goat; in the other instance he saw a child nursing a dead goat back to life. The play, then, identifies the Freeds with the traditional Western theatre that originated in Greece in that they present kinship narratives, or myths, about birth and fear of death in a primarily religious context. They narrate myths of the Io children. At the same time the play identifies the Apples with an experimental theatre in that they present kinship activities celebrating birth and fear of death in a primarily metaphysical context. They celebrate their child’s birthday. The distance separating the older Greek theatre and the newer Theatre of the Absurd we can gauge from the dramaturgical principle that the Apples initiate in the opening scene, the spiraling intensity that reveals a disjointedness between the surface and the subsurface. To keep the comparison consistent, for the moment we will look at the Apples’ verbal images, since the Freeds present in verbal images. At one point while Nicky snuggles in Bill’s lap, his father and mother share insights gleaned from parenting until they are shouting non sequiturs that could have been shouted by the two couples in The Bald Soprano:


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Bill: Children learn from observation! Sandy: Tolerance comes from acceptance! Bill: Self-respect is built on sharing! Sandy: Reading readiness precedes cognition! (66)

Greek theatre reveals a disjointedness too, but it is temporary. The disorder beneath the surface ultimately is resolved in a higher order, which is to say that Greek theatre is religious. Orestes’ madness, Oedipus’ rage, and the Theban women’s ecstasy are irrationalities subsumed under a higher intention or purpose. As the traditional higher order disappears, the plays move away from classical tragedy to a newer form of drama. That Ionesco’s theatre reveals a problematic disjointedness which undermines traditional intention or purpose is to say that Theatre of the Absurd is metaphysical and existential. The difference between the Freeds’ traditional theatre and the Apples’ experimental theatre affects two areas of human activity, which Howe dramatizes in the play’s two acts. The first area is moral. After her attempt to induce labor in Mia fails and she realizes that “some women just…can’t have children” (104), Sandy and the males return to the table to begin the cake-cutting ceremony, leaving the guest on the floor, presumably to join them. She does not so that what follows is typical Theatre of the Absurd: a scene both comic and frightening. Her husband drags her body to the table, but when Mia falls back to the floor, Sandy, who has been lighting candles, becomes aware that something is wrong. Taking responsibility for her guest’s condition, she initiates a family effort to revive her. Countering the Apples’ effort is Jeffrey, who not only insists that his wife should be left alone because she passes out “all the time” (105) but threatens the Apples when they persist. He is right about his wife. Mia revives as she always does, and once on her feet, the Freeds leave, excusing themselves from watching the newer, experimental theatre as filmed earlier that day. The counterpart to that scene is Nicky’s fainting in act 1, a scene that Howe links with Mia’s passing out when she writes in the stage directions for the act-2 scene that “there’s something vaguely comical about her collapse as with NICKY’s fit in the morning” (105). In the morning scene, Sandy’s and Bill’s “reactions to NICKY’s fit are completely outrageous, a parody of parental panic” (60) as they dash about the room gathering ice from the refrigerator, converting a dish towel to a tourniquet, holding the boy’s head under a water faucet, and applying artificial respiration. Nicky revives. Though both scenes are comic and frightening, because Howe is not creating Theatre of the Absurd simply to satirize the Freeds’ theatre, there is a critical difference between the two scenes, and it is a difference between the two theatres as they are presented in the play. Jeffrey absents himself

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from the effort to revive Mia because he knows that she will revive. In a purposeful universe, she always does. Lacking that assurance, because the universe they inhabit is problematic, Sandy and Bill race to save Nicky and Mia. The Freeds feel themselves freed from responsibility. The Apples feel themselves freed from the traditional religious center of culture. That freedom is both terrifying and exhilarating. Born from the encounter with death in life, the freedom is the acceptance of responsibility to be moral and creative. The second area is creative. While the Freeds do participate in tribal rituals on their anthropological adventures, they report the activities. Since Jeffrey has no responsibility that prevents him from going on an adventure whenever he chooses and since Mia always revives to accompany him, they feel no need to create from within themselves. The Apples feel the need. Because Bill’s ambivalent performance-evaluation makes him vulnerable at work and because Sandy’s loss of scalp and teeth marks the onset of mortality, the Apples have a presentiment of death, which explains why they act with Nicky, who, coming from them, continues their life. When he revives, Sandy cradles him and sings to him. The boy snuggles in Bill’s lap while his parents share insights in the non-sequitur scene quoted above. Relieved and grateful, the two adults play games with him. They celebrate their love for him by creating the birthday party. The second area, the creative area, is artistic as well as personal. The most general statement that can be made about the way in which the Freeds view artistic creation is that since they inhabit a universe assured of continuing, they feel assured that the traditional theatre will continue with it, a 13 theatre that historically did not involve women in the creative process. Mia’s barrenness is partly symbolic of the traditional theatre’s barrenness for women with original plays, even in America where Susan Glaspell and Lillian Hellman are rare names among playwrights prior to the 1960s. The situation was changing when Howe started to write in that women artists were beginning to gain recognition, though as editor Lamont observes, Birth and After Birth is “still unproduced” (xvi). As a result the Freeds experience no anguish over Mia’s failure to deliver or the failure of the visual images to register on the film. So long as there is a corpus of anthropological kinship narratives, no matter how bizarre or remote from contemporary existence, the myths can be orally transmitted. By 1973 Howe was committed to writing for the theatre but with a view of artistic creation different from that of the Freeds. Her view is the Apples’ view, and there is a possible factor in her arriving at it. When in the closing decades of the 19th century Emile Zola pleaded for a new theatre grounded in a naturalistic conception of man, he argued that the time was right for


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replacing romantic drama, just as it had deposed classical tragedy. In its “uninterrupted, unbearable declaiming” about passions unreal for a modern audience, the latter had become immobile, sitting “still on its throne, 14 guarding its cold majesty, persisting with its speeches and descriptions.” When in 1951 H.D.F. Kitto published his introduction to the character and history of the Greeks, he repeated the criticism, not about classical tragedy 15 in itself, but about modern productions of it. They were too verbal. I do not know whether Howe saw any Greek theatre in the decade preceding Birth and After Birth. If she did, she may very well have seen productions better considered staged readings. It was not necessary for her to see any, however, because Ionesco’s plays, which gave form to her aesthetic and philosophical inclinations, expose the inadequacy of language by itself to communicate the metaphysical mystery that the disjointedness discloses. In Theatre of the Absurd, language is a traditional intention or purpose that collapses before the mystery of existence. Yet she does not compensate for the theatre’s excessive verbalization by minimizing language. While identifying herself in an interview with Lamont as a “‘visual artist’” (xix), in a collection of her plays she affirms her “love of slinging language around.”16 It is the interaction of verbal and visual images, the slinging of language around in a visual set, which initiates the frenzy that uncovers the mystery of existence, the irrational subsurface of life and theatre. In 1973 Howe rejected the traditional theatre because its surface was closed. In her perception, different from that of Gurney, its form was incapable of accommodating new contents such as those that she as a woman had to offer. The same contents were continually reinserted into it with the same result. The fixed form permitted only verbal replication. Perceiving traditional theatre as dead, Howe creates theatre anew. She reenvisions the staging of images. The Freeds sling language around in their report of bizarre rituals, but after Jeffrey shuts off the projector of visual images and Mia concludes the narrative, they have little to say or perform. Neither do they interact. He utters an occasional remark about anthropological curiosities while ignoring her lying on the floor. The Apples visually perform their verbal images to create the new experimental theatre. When Bill tells the tale of the fantastic behavior of a co-worker threatened with the loss of his job because of professional inconsistency, Nicky enters the closet, strips to his underwear, and pantomimes the action. By closing and opening the door, each time wearing a different mask, he impersonates a variety of roles. Later he and his father increase the tempo of Sandy’s coaching to induce labor in Mia by simulating a medical team, and a physical one at that, as the son sits on the patient’s legs to prevent her from rising.

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The colliding images open the surface. The Freeds return to Greek theatre’s source of inspiration in myths of the Io children, but, like the Whan See tribe, they reinsert the myths into the fixed form to replicate them. In so doing, they kill the inspiration. With Gurney, Howe knows that Greek theatre was natural for its culture yet cannot be replicated. Since theatre must create for its culture, the way to regenerate theatre is to return to the source beneath myths, the subsurface contents that the artist converts into form. When Birth and After Birth opens, Bill and Sandy are wrapping masks and tambourines as presents for their four-year-old. The masks suggest Greek theatre. The tambourines suggest Euripides’ Bacchae, the tragedy which celebrates the rites of the god of the grape who appears in Thebes as an effeminate cult member to reward those who accept his divinity while wreaking vengeance on those who do not. As Dionysus reminds the chorus, he 17 can be “most terrible, and yet most gentle, to mankind.” In Howe’s play Nicky passes out after his mother, who has just expressed her bewilderment that he can alternate so easily between being “sweet” and “savage,” denies him “grape juice” (59–60). A contemporary Dionysus who revives to play party games wearing masks, he leaves the room to return draped in his mother’s undergarments over his clothing. Interrupting his parents’ amorous reenactment of birthday parties when they were young teens, he once again demands his grape juice. On the basis of the preceding paragraph, the source would seem to be the drama of the near death and revival of Nicky as Dionysus with the counterpart for the Freeds the near death and revival of Mia. But since Mia’s collapse occurs while she is trying to deliver but cannot because she and her theatre are barren, the original drama is the one that creates Nicky and his family’s antics. Howe returns to creativity’s origin in a uterine dance that precedes historical origins and modern replications. Creativity’s origin is in generation. To see how the contemporary playwright renews theatre, we have to go back to classical theatre. A Greek tragedy was performed in front of a facade denoting a palace or shrine, for example, with action such as a slaying taking place offstage and reported to the audience. Only when the facade opened, as in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, did the audience have a glimpse of the interior. Ruth Padel summarizes the Athenian audience’s experience at the theatre on the slope of the Acropolis: Tragedy’s language stresses that whatever is within us is obscure, many-faceted, impossible to see. Performance gave this question of what is within a physical force. The spectators were far away from the performers, on that hill above the theater. At the center of their vision was a small hut, into which they could not see. The


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physical action presented to their attention was violent but mostly unseen. They inferred it, as they inferred inner movement, from words spoken by figures whose entrances and exits into and out of the visible space patterned the play. They saw 18 its results when the facade opened to reveal a dead body.

Padel’s study of the relationship between inside and outside, unseen and 19 seen is complemented by an article by Froma I. Zeitlin. From it I am extracting a few simplifications. Greek tragedy’s initiation is the male’s rather than the female’s; her role is instrumental to his. The structure on the stage is a visible exterior concealing a mysterious interior. The stage structure, or house, like the body, though owned by the male, is the domain of female power; she rules the hearth. His initiation involves discovering the mysterious interior within his house and himself. In Zeitlin’s words, the “tragic process, for the most part conveyed through the catalyzing person and actions of the feminine, puts insistent pressure on the facade of the masculine self in order to bring outside that which resides unacknowledged and unrecognized 20 within.” Declaring her preference, in a conversation with Lamont, for exploring the “‘mystery of the hearth’” (xvi), Howe revolutionizes drama and theatre by taking the audience inside the locus of women’s procreative and creative power, from which men are not excluded. They are not instruments of a woman’s initiation but partners in the process. This shift constitutes a reimagining of theatre: inventing it anew. The Apples’ kitchen-playroom, the “center of the house—a big, cheerful room” (47), is Theatre of the Absurd’s subsurface disorder within a surface structure. The hearth as mystery of existence is the contemporary equivalent to the ancient palace that is womb and tomb; in it Nicky and Mia are slain and resurrected. Finally the hearth as metaphysical mystery at the core of the human being is a stage image of, or analogue to, a woman’s self from which issue moral choices and personal and artistic images. Problematic though it is, Sandy’s self offers greater possibilities for new myths than does Mia’s barren self. Sandy and Bill worship their son because they created him and because he is not immortal. Every fit could be his last. And just as Sandy has no guarantee that Nicky will revive, she has no guarantee that she will have another child. Life contains no guarantee, in other words, that she can continue to create, since throughout the play giving birth is equated with creativity. “It’s such a wonderful feeling…life…fluttering…inside you…,” she rhapsodizes (110). Because they create from within themselves, which means that they must live with the fear of artistic sterility, the Apples do not rely on narration alone for Nicky’s party but present it in the most engaging theatre experience that they know while trying for more children.

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After Sandy’s realization that not every woman is parturient, the boy expresses his wish to have brothers—900 of them. His mother agrees that she would like to give birth to 900 more children but conceiving is not easy. “I’ve been trying,” she confides, to which Bill quickly adds, “We’ve been trying a long time” (109). Sandy has the “unborn eggs” in her, but the “timing has to be just right” (110) or they will not hatch. Howe’s contribution to theatre art in 1973 was a play that not only dramatizes the barrenness of theatre which replicates old myths but celebrates the discovery of theatre in which contemporary artists can create new myths while revitalizing the traditional ones by recreating them. Birth and After Birth images this innovative theatre’s originating in a hearth. Interior, its rhythm is alternately frenzied and reposed, its activity a communal ritual celebrating birth, death, and rebirth. Subsequent Howe plays such as The Art of Dining and One Shoe Off develop this image central to creativity whose dramatic center is the woman artist. The set of The Art of Dining is two rooms of a private home converted into a public restaurant. The rooms are the dining area, converted from the living and dining rooms, and the refurbished kitchen. After Cal and Ellen 21 bought the 19th-century property, they had the “most up-to-date appliances” installed for the restaurant’s grand opening a month prior to the time of the play. The kitchen links this play with Birth and After Birth, for it is here that Ellen gives birth to her extraordinary dishes. “You luscious baby,” she coaxes a sauce to fullness. She is, as she says, a cook “who delivers” (107–108). Following this admission in act 2 of her creative power, Ellen pours the sauce on the floor and turns off the lights, plunging the kitchen into darkness and herself into immobility. Refusing to cook, she suffers the death of her power in a scene that corresponds to the one in act 2 of Birth and After Birth in which Sandy has to consider the possibility that she may not be able to have another child. There are other correspondences between the two plays. Having rejected a theatre that narrates archaic anthropological kinship myths, Howe dramatizes contemporary equivalents to them in the same situation as in the earlier play. In the social situation that brings together host, hostess, and guests, she finds the dissolution that renews. The behavior that the restaurant guests and owners manifest may not be as bizarre as that of the Freeds’ narrated rituals, but it activates the dramaturgical principle which uncovers the irrational subsurface of death in life and life in death within the human being’s rational ordering of existence. The guests’ enactment of a civilized dining ritual conflicts with Ellen and Cal’s food-delivery ritual. I will first examine the personal conflict in The Art of Dining and then the theatre-creating conflict in this 1979 play. The restaurant has guests at


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three of its tables: a husband and wife; three women friends; and a publisher and his new client, a writer of short stories. As each table engages in the dining ritual, the occupants exhibit idiosyncrasies that disrupt it. Responding to the ritual’s sexual dimension, Paul and Hannah Galt giggle over the symbolism they read into the menu. Later they toast each other with postprandial brandy, stopping only when Paul’s toast, spoken so loudly it attracts attention to their table, to his wife’s “snowy white thighs” (103) embarrasses her. Confused by the list of French wines, the three women botch their selection. When their meals arrive, they argue over who ordered what, grabbing entrees from, and rotating them to, one another. The writer of short stories, who appears to be awkward in any social situation, is so nervous having dinner with her suave publisher that she spills her soup and then when given a fresh bowl proceeds to drop her lipstick into it. She cannot eat, either hiding her face in her cupped hands or laughing hysterically. In the preface to the volume which includes The Art of Dining, Howe calls the play her favorite “because of the chaos it whips up.” Not only do the women and Cal sling language around in the fractured-French wine-ordering scene, the characters sling their limbs in frenzied physical action. A little tipsy, Hannah proffers her glass in a toast to her husband’s kneecaps, only to snatch it back when he toasts her thighs. The women grab and rotate their entrees around the triangle they form at their table. After Cal and David, the publisher, pat dry the soup-soaked dress of Elizabeth, the writer, she receives a fresh bowl, which she passes to David, sloshing it as she does and backing him away from her trembling hands. Bowled over by his professional and personal compliments, she careens around the dining area and the kitchen in search of the rest room, located on the second floor. The frenzied scenes uncover the guests’ personal disjointedness, the fears and anxieties that they have repressed under their civilized, rational surfaces. Toasting each other’s sexuality, Paul and Hannah have to consider the possibility that the partner is unfaithful. As they dine, sometimes with gusto and other times sneaking little bites if no one is noticing, the women admit their unhappiness with their bodies, especially their breasts. Elizabeth relates a tale of growing up in a household in which she dreaded the dining experience because the cook prepared so much food that she and her mother could not eat. After the cook resigned, she dreaded the experience because her menopausal mother, who could not cook, managed to cut herself in the daily ordeal until she became suicidal. As the guests’ idiosyncrasies interfere with Cal’s ability to perform his role in the ritual, he compensates for having to linger at tables by accelerating in and out of the kitchen. His frenzy, however, takes place in the kitchen. He is a compulsive eater of anything and everything. Before the

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first guests arrive, he has eaten half the desserts. He eats all of the grapes, forcing Ellen to substitute canned peaches with the duckling. When she catches him gulping down the Hollandaise sauce from the pan, she pours it on the floor and turns off the lights. The frenzy reveals his fears and anxieties. He gave up a law practice and borrowed seventy-five thousand dollars to open the restaurant. As he races about, computing aloud the number of dinners they must serve a night to be free of the debt and show a profit, he consumes whatever is in his path. Under pressure herself, his wife feeds his compulsion. A consummate cook, she keeps asking him to taste her creations for assurance that they are the gourmet dishes she wants them to be. Just as Ellen pressures her husband, he does her. He persists in squeezing in more reservations than the restaurant can accommodate, forcing her to cook faster, thereby rushing her art. Since he is not the chef she is, he forces her to substitute—canned peaches for fresh grapes—thereby compromising her art. Panicking under the frenzied conditions that she feels he causes, she closes down the center of creativity rather than release a work that may not meet her exacting standard. The fear the disjointedness exposes is that having encouraged Cal to give up his practice, she lacks the ability to cook for an audience of more than one. “I can cook. I can really cook!” (83) she exhorts herself. Unlike the Freeds, who are content to replicate the past, the restaurant owners and guests want to discover themselves so that they can enjoy fuller lives. Yet in their desire to be participating individuals, they repress their fears and anxieties—their true natures—under a civilized, rational surface until they are fixed or formed in public selves. They are so fixed in themselves that they cannot participate. One paradox is that as they allow the process of self-discovery to solidify, they convert the civilized dining ritual into a mechanism for replicating the past. Unable to eat dinner as a child, Elizabeth cannot eat dinner in the restaurant. Refusing to eat because she is on a perpetual diet, Tony, one of the three women, ruins dinner for her two friends. Absorbed in their unhappiness with their bodies and consequently isolated from one another, they sneak food “as their real hunger and shame sets in” (118). A second paradox is that the restaurant collisions are beneficial in that they uncover the fears and anxieties, dissolving them and the formed selves in a primitive communal experience from which new individuation is born. Since Howe opposes the replicated ritual with a vital ritual—a birthday celebration in Birth and After Birth—we turn to the theatre-creating conflict. “Smacking his lips,” “gobbling,” and “slurping” (61–62) are three verbs in the opening scene that describe Cal’s eating habits. When Ellen catches him with his face in the sauce, she calls him an “animal drinking out of its


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trough” (109). When he tries to explain that he eats her cooking because it is so good, she accuses him of “eating it raw” and “swallowing it whole” (120). Her pouring the sauce onto the floor with the command to “lap it up! Lower your muzzle into it…and drink!” (109) is her refusal to attempt to maintain the civilized ritual in which she, the cook, creates her individual dishes for discriminating palates and diners order to satisfy their individual palates. From her point of view, her husband has violated the ritual. She has too. The opening stage directions for the converted townhouse describe the dining area as a room suffused by a “surreal nostalgia…. Things are on the verge of lifting off the ground or disappearing entirely. Nothing is quite what it seems” (59). Nothing is fixed in individuation in the restaurant except Ellen’s pride in her standard. In the opening scene, she argues with Cal that she cannot serve a particular dish without watercress because it is “essential!” (62) The civilized ritual has become fixed for her because it conceals her fears and anxieties that she cannot create new dishes. Ellen is doing what the Freeds do. Afraid to take risks, she reinserts the same contents such as watercress into the fixed form to replicate the past. Hence when Cal interferes with the ritual, she refuses to participate. In the first paradox, her expression of individuation has congealed. In the second paradox, the collision of her expression with Cal’s expression whips up the chaos which uncovers their fears and anxieties so that they can be dissolved in an experience in which the couple can create anew, both dishes and marriage. Thwarted by Cal’s devouring of everything in his path, Ellen pours the sauce on the floor, turns off the kitchen lights, and sits on a counter. Her refusal to cook unfixes the ritual, but she feels powerless to begin a new one. She can only watch as she imagines the stove “broken free” from its mooring and “heading out into places unknown” (110). It is Cal who begins the new ritual, perhaps because he realizes that unless he changes, he will lose his wife with the restaurant. One of the strengths of Howe’s theatre is the recognition that creating is not a solitary act; rather than isolating, it should be a sharing experience. Act 1 closes with Ellen’s confession that she “can’t do it all by” herself. She needs her husband to “help” her (85). He does in act 2. The destination to which the darkened kitchen takes the couple is creativity’s source in generation, whether for new dishes in a restaurant or new rituals in a new theatre. When the theatre that Howe rejects in Birth and After Birth originated, it was fluid. It had to be to originate. In time its form became fixed. But if traditional theatre becomes fixed, every form can become fixed as a civilized, rational ritual. The union of feminist theatre with Theatre of the Absurd’s dramaturgical principle can become fixed. Thus the form must be unfixed.

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The places unknown to which Cal and Ellen voyage are not uncharted geographically but metaphysically within one’s unconscious, the realm of the psychic apparatus below the level of consciousness. The formless subsurface uncovered by the couple’s collision, its contents are the raw ingredients of existence, or images, shared by all who descend into it by virtue of the participation mystique in which “stone, plant and man, animal and star” 22 are “bound together in a single stream.” Surrendering to the flowing of this undifferentiated chaos, one loses identity only to discover it as differentiating consciousness forms images from the flux according to the principium individuationis. Immersion therefore is a condition of creating because the forms that inhibit rituals must be dissolved back into the flux of existence, which is a death of the old self and form before new selves and new forms of art can be born. Once Cal realizes that his devouring her cooking has depleted his wife’s energy, he takes the ingredients that he can find in the candle-lit kitchen and invoking the “power of invention” (123) creates a dish which he names “CREPES CAROUSELS” (125) in honor of the restaurant. Once Ellen realizes that her husband can change, she does too. She becomes a waitress, bearing the dish into the dining area and transferring the crepes to a platter from which the diners serve themselves free of charge. For the first time that evening, all of them share in the ritual. The play’s closing stage direction reads, “Purified of their collective civilization and private grief, they feast as the curtain slowly falls” (126). The closing scene illustrates the complementary realities of participation mystique and principium individuationis. All of the diners discard their inhibiting public identities and private fears and anxieties as they gather around the flaming platter. Ellen, however, who with Cal dissolved the rigid form of ordering items from a fixed menu to be ingested at separate tables for a spontaneously communal experience, rises above them. She recovers her name and discovers a new self. Although Howe does not name the deities associated with the aesthetic principles, she goes further than Gurney. He threatens to dissolve drama’s form. She does dissolve it, and by dissolving it, she invokes the complementary god of art and civilization. Her diners are a Dionysian chorus undergoing transformation while Ellen has evolved into an Apollonian artist. As she churns the creative flames, her face glows. In the language of epiphany, she glows “with a fierce radiance” (126), the noun invoking the sun and the adjective the deity. The scene’s imagery is that of a primitive ritual, yet Howe is not implying that the descent into creativity’s wellspring is a journey to the beginning of time in prehistory. As Elizabeth qualifies the experience, “It’s like the beginning of time” (125). The experience regenerates cooking and theatre-


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creating. From the ingredients for each art, the artist creates a form in which the guests or the audience partake or participate. They surrender their isolating self-consciousness for a communal experience. The artist surrenders even more of herself. She descends into the irrational within herself. She descends into the beginning of time—creativity’s origin—within herself. The kitchen develops the image of the hearth in Birth and After Birth. An image of a woman’s self, both the conscious and subconscious minds, it is stocked with the ingredients she seizes to heat and shape into the products of her craft, which she then serves to her audience. The risk that Howe, a creator of the relatively new art of women’s theatre, takes in this play is in emphasizing the man’s role in stimulating the woman temporarily depressed by her doubt about her creative ability. From the storehouse of ingredients, Cal reinvents, enabling Ellen to realize that her mistake was insisting upon rigid forms. Freed from the self-imposed limitations of conforming to an inflexible standard, she too invents anew. She delivers another gift to her public. In 1995 Theatre Communications Group, which in 1989 had published the collection of plays which includes The Art of Dining, published a second collection. In the introduction Howe connects the host and hostess of One Shoe Off with the host and hostess of Birth and After Birth after their son grows up and leaves home. Had she had more space and been disposed, she could have continued making connections between plays. Since she did not, I will as an introduction to One Shoe Off. Like Birth and After Birth, the play is a variation on The Bald Soprano. A couple await the arrival of their dinner guests, another couple. An unexpected guest, who canceled earlier, arrives after them with a bizarre story. His behavior forces the host couple to confront the reality of their marriage. According to the author’s note written for the acting edition of One Shoe Off, the house symbolizes the state of mind of Leonard and Dinah, and it is “sinking into the ground.” The ground is the subsurface which dissolves the old, formed self as a prerequisite for creating anew. In the acting-edition author’s note, which is not carried over to the anthologized edition, the outdoors is simultaneously “moving in.” Yet although the encroachment is “frightening,” it “has its positive side”; although the evening becomes “des23 perate,” the characters are “celebrants.” The act-1 stage directions, identical for the acting and anthologized editions, give the downward movement and the counter movement. While the house-state of mind is sinking, “grass, weeds and tangled shrubbery are encroaching indoors.” The ground, then, is not simply a passive receptacle. It actively encroaches, overspreading sinking 24 consciousness until the set has the “look of a surreal ruin.” The surreal image recalls the opening description of the restaurant in The Art of Dining.

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Another image connects One Shoe Off with The Art of Dining. The restaurant diners conduct their ritual aware that the weather outside is the most severe in memory. It encroaches until by the closing scene, the wind is in a “fury.” What holds the howling outside in check is Ellen’s bonfire inside, which “burns brighter and brighter as the diners gather close to its warmth” (126). With his attention not taken by restaurant owners sampling the evening’s desserts, the spectator of One Shoe Off is aware of the howling wind immediately. The owners of the sinking house themselves stop in their effort to dress for the evening to listen as it rattles the windows. The stage directions provide the first clue to the range of meanings of this ambiguous image. Leonard and Dinah “stand motionless, lost in their own worlds” (145). In Howe’s theatre howling wind aurally images isolation, savagery, irrationality, disaster, catastrophe—anything that disconnects a character from the human community. Ultimately therefore it aurally images death. Since the wind howls outside the restaurant and house, it invokes a range of realities, culminating in death, parallel to the range of realities the quester discovers within the house. That is, the ground inside and the howling wind outside are constantly encroaching, but the ultimate reality that each uncovers can be different. The absurdist dramaturgical principle uncovers death within the house, the character’s acceptance of which is initiatory, enabling him or her to create a new self or art. When the wind blows the house down, the death is annihilating. Thus it behooves Howe’s characters to uncover irrationality, culminating in death transformed into life, within themselves before the wind claims them. When Leonard and Dinah stop to listen to the wind, they are absorbed in dressing but not for the other couple, even though they are new to the area and invited for the first time. That morning the host couple received a phone call from a friend, a theatre director turned film and television director, whom they have not seen in years. It is for him that they are dressing. It is his anticipated arrival that makes them hear in the howling wind the paradox of individuation’s disintegration as it is being affirmed. A costume designer for the theatre, Dinah tries on many different outfits she has designed for productions but cannot decide which one expresses her. She does not know who she is. Neither does her husband, who does not know what to wear, know himself. Leonard is an unemployed actor who has not worked since the director friend, Parker, left for Hollywood and who suspects that his wife had an affair with him when the three worked together. The other couple’s arrival allows for some preliminary language slinging in that the husband, an editor of children’s books, when not reciting nursery rhymes slips into malapropisms. Their arrival allows for some increased physical activity too in that the wife, an actress, does a belly dance when


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Dinah, who continues to change costumes, dons a harem outfit. Parker’s arrival, however, turns up the action full speed until individual expressions begin to collide. The five play a finger-snapping, hand-clapping game in which each in turn and rhythm must name a real or literary ship. Parker and Leonard recite lines from plays they did together. Parker, Leonard, and the film actress, Clio, form an imaginary band and parade around the room until Dinah stops her husband because he is making her dizzy. The editor, Tate, recites nursery rhymes until the others order him to shut up. Parker brings death with him. A discussion of his most recent film, a chiller in which parents murder their children, precedes his arrival. His phone calls also precede him, causing wild mood fluctuations in the host couple as he alternately builds and dashes their hope of a reunion after a sixyear absence. When he finally enters the house, he shakes a “blizzard of snow off his head and shoulders” (170). Removing his coat, he reveals a bloodstained shirt and undershirt, the result of holding in his arms one of the victims in the highway carnage that delayed him. He witnessed a freak accident in which a mobile home, breaking loose from its trailer, went on a rampage smashing into cars and killing people. The bearer of death, the friend from the past provokes the uncovering of the irrational subsurfaces beneath the characters’ civilized surfaces. Anticipating his arrival, Leonard confides in Dinah his suspicion about her and their former colleague. From innuendos he makes almost from the time he and Clio arrive, Tate is uneasy about his wife’s behavior when on a film assignment. When he observes her yielding to the director’s embrace during the parading, he separates the two. By act-1’s end his innuendos have become barbs. Nursery rhyme’s Old King Cole, he opines, was merry because he did not have to worry about what his wife “was up to all the time” (183). If Leonard and Dinah are the Apples of Birth and After Birth years later, Parker is Jeffrey Freed of that play years later, the man who has little interaction with his wife. Parker is isolated from his wife, who communicates by leaving messages on his answering machine. His eyes are on Tate’s wife, who reciprocates with unmistakable body language. When she excuses herself to use the bathroom, he times his excusing himself to collide with her in the darkened hallway, where he makes his declaration of infatuation. He replicates the past. Although he purports to champion change in that he switched from directing theatre to directing films and he faults Leonard for rejecting opportunities he felt were beneath him, he does not change. After the three guests depart, Dinah reveals to Leonard that the hallway declaration, overheard by the others, was the identical declaration Parker made years earlier to her.

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Their former colleague is death because he is individuation affirmed with no regard for others, the self whose gratification withers communal values. The host and hostess appeal to him on his terms. The host dances a flamenco and recites lines from plays in which they worked together. The hostess prepares her Thanksgiving turkey dinner with all the trimmings, prompting Parker’s remark to Clio and Tate, “It’s the only meal she ever makes” (181). They fail to impress. Leonard’s performance evokes nostalgia, not a contract, and Dinah is so excited by the director’s presence that she forgets to turn on the oven. She is so paralyzed by embarrassment that Tate volunteers to put something together that they can eat. Their disintegrating selves are further insulted by Parker’s ignoring them to flirt with Clio until “with sudden rage” (190), Leonard verbally lashes his former colleague for abandoning him. Dinah’s rage is more dramatic and visual than her husband’s. Conscious that she failed her exacting standard of turkey dinner, she prepares an enormous salad in the kitchen, Howe’s theatre’s inner sanctum. When she returns to the dining area, however, with her improvised creation, a vat she filled with the contents of the encroaching ground, and sees Parker with his hand on the breast of Clio, who is encouraging him to feel her excited heart, she tosses the salad at him while enumerating the contents and the areas in the house in which they grow. In her rage she demands that he acknowledge her. The director pushes her to the floor to get her to stop throwing salad at him, but his interest is elsewhere. She too feels abandoned. The couple’s forms of individuation fail them because they are forms from the past that no longer express their realities. In their desire to impress their friend from the past, they insert themselves into fixed forms that replicate the past, as Parker does in the hallway declaration. Leonard has not acted professionally in years, and costume-designer Dinah is not simply the preparer of a single meal. Releasing their emotions dissolves the fixed forms, already disintegrating, immersing them in the Dionysian flux, the ground of their being from which Dinah tosses off its bountiful contents. Parker does not acknowledge her, but her husband does. As she picks herself up from the floor and Clio leaves the table for the hallway rendezvous, Leonard calls out the nickname of their daughter, which his wife echoes. Waving to her, he calls to her, and she responds by waving and calling to him. To each other they admit they are no longer enjoying the evening. Recovered, Dinah brings out dessert. It is a collaborative effort, a “home grown” pumpkin pie she made with honey nougat meringue, “compliments of Leonard’s bees” (198).


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The scene should correspond to the closing scene of The Art of Dining with Ellen’s serving crepes carousels to the guests gathered around the fire in a communal celebration. It does not. Tate samples, but only Leonard eats the pie. Parker is involved with Clio, who after slipping him her phone number departs with her husband. The director follows despite Dinah’s and Leonard’s pleading with him to stay. The communal experience that checks the howling wind occurs after Parker leaves because now, for the first time, Dinah reveals what happened between her and their former colleague years earlier. When he declared his infatuation for her, she did not succumb. Standing before her husband, she cries, “I wanted him” (210), while admitting that she could not give herself. She was unable to. And now, based on his behavior this evening, he no longer wants her. He can horseplay with her, but his interest is elsewhere. Parker is Howe’s variation on Ionesco’s Killer, before whom the couple confront death. The host confronts his death in the loss of his wife’s affection to another man. The hostess confronts her death in the loss of her ability to create a self that interests a man. Together they discover each other’s strength and the love that unites them. Leonard knew that she was attracted to Parker but never realized that she had resisted the attraction. Dinah, who believed him to be unable to bear the stigma of betrayed husband, realizes that he has suffered the stigma in his mind for years, false though it is. Revealing their fears, the two find a footing. Admitting he has been “lying low,” Leonard praises Dinah for holding her “ground all these years” (210). Not only can she create a self, she is the stronger of them. Having confronted death in themselves, the couple shout down the encroaching nonhuman outside themselves. Dinah opens the door after the wind starts to howl at their embrace. “I’M NOT ASKING, I’M TELLING YOU. IT’S TIME FOR A CHANGE!” (211) are her concluding words. One Shoe Off closes with an image in contrast with the play’s opening image of the disintegrating husband and wife isolated from each other in their own worlds. Now they do together what he just praised her for doing alone. “They hold their ground against the gale which finally starts to subside.” Howe’s verb for the action that brings them together, “joins” (211), suggests the renewal of their commitment to their marriage. The couple create a marriage because they dissolve an outmoded form to allow the contents of their relationship to rise to the surface to create a new form. Dinah is the stronger one. She earns an income by designing costumes for theatre productions. She supports them, yet she and Leonard collaborate to make the marriage work. Parker and his wife and Tate and Clio maintain a fixed form for their relationships yet betray the contents by cheating on

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each other or ignoring each other. Their marriages are barren, like the Freeds’ theatre. Howe’s theatre is fertile because she dissolves received form to activate creativity’s ground. The seeds that sprout in the farmhouse are the raw contents of creating in more than a single sense. They are the raw contents of the encroaching unconscious that the conscious mind must seize and assimilate for the self to grow, but they are also the garden’s raw vegetables that the chef must cook to make a meal. The interior of The Art of Dining is the storehouse of images from which the mind creates a self and a couple create a marriage and also the pantry of ingredients from which the restaurant chef creates a dish. Howe’s theatre is multilayered. In the hearth the hostess, with the host’s collaboration and support, prepares a meal to serve guests and gestates a fetus, creates a self and relationships with others, and conceives a play. Crepes carousels, pumpkin pie with honey nougat meringue, and salad are the metaphors. They combine many contents, and two of them are collaborative efforts. Howe’s theatre, like Gurney’s theatre, does not reject the contents of Greek theatre as a source of inspiration. The two playwrights differ in their attitude toward its form. Gurney’s dramaturgical contribution is in the multiple uses to which he puts increased Dionysian contents within an expanded Apollonian form. That may not be apparent in The Cocktail Hour but will be in his Later Life, discussed in the book’s second section. Howe rejects the form because it is fixed, solidified, Apollonian. Her dramaturgical contribution is in generating increased Dionysian contents, which create a form. She mixes traditional and experimental contents, encroaching internal mental images and encroaching external sensory objects, symbolism and naturalism in new and startling combinations. In the author’s note to the acting edition of One Shoe Off, set in a Greek-revival farmhouse, she writes that the “play is equal parts a comedy of manners, a meditation on 25 marriage and a love poem to the theater.” Within the play the characters, who were or still are connected to the theatre, reminisce about the good old days when actors performed different genres on different evenings. Monday was reserved for Greek tragedy, with Tuesday reserved for Restoration comedy, and so on. Dinah then asks, “God, what happened?” (189) In the introduction to the anthologized edition that contains One Shoe Off, Howe attributes the change to women playwrights, who do not segregate the genres but blend the “tragic, comic, noble and absurd” (x) as the play illustrates. In period costumes the characters recall scenes from different theatres, all of which blend into the action. They recite noble speeches from Shakespeare’s plays while pretending to be a band parading around the room. Parker is blood-stained in an absurd accident. Like the death of the


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boy he held in his arms, his moral isolation, traditionally a subject of tragedy, is treated comically. Greek tragedy is revived, not in front of a palace, but within a rural farmhouse sinking into the ground and not tragically. The images that best express this new theatre are crepes carousels, pumpkin pie with honey nougat meringue, and salad. Their creator slings together the bountiful contents she brings to her theatre to whip up the new dishes. Individuation’s death generates the rebirth of communal experience. Traditional theatre’s death generates the rebirth of experimental theatre. The union of old and new that ends Approaching Zanzibar summarizes Howe’s theatre. A nine-year-old girl and her grandaunt bounce on the bed in the latter’s bedroom. The play is a journey to death transformed into life, for the girl, Pony, has been frightened to the point of hysteria at the prospect of meeting the dying artist, Olivia. Once alone, however, with her grandaunt, who is momentarily rejuvenated, they switch roles, Pony donning the other’s wig and Olivia, the girl’s glasses. They bounce until the old woman weakens, leaving the girl, strengthened from the confrontation with death, to perform spins in midair. As they begin bouncing, Pony proposes that they play a game called Geography in which each player must take the last letter of the place the previous player named to form the new place. Baghdad becomes Detroit, for example. The game epitomizes the journey in that the end becomes the beginning. Not only does Olivia know the game, the play implies that she taught it to her niece, Pony’s mother. As she relates to the girl, when she was twenty and traveling by herself, she was transported to Zanzibar by a man, by whom she was entranced, who taught her how to visit the “wonders 26 of the world without taking a step.” Zanzibar is the imagination, which creates theatre. It transforms death into life by dissolving form in the flux from which the theatre artist generates the contents for new forms for old and new myths and rituals. Although Gurney’s phallic dance suggests an ancient anthropological ritual and Howe’s anthropologists allude to the Io children, neither playwright recreates a specific myth or ritual in the plays examined. A playwright whom Howe cites as one of her models when she began her career27 does in his plays. Throughout Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the characters, sometimes individually and sometimes in unison, sing the words of the title. Yet although the jingle draws laughter, as the audience is told it did when it was first sung at a party that preceded the opening of the play’s action, one can argue that the substitution of “Virginia Woolf” for the jingle’s correct words, “the big bad wolf,” conceals a fear on the singer’s part to name the animal. Putting aside the internal evidence until we can examine

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the play, the closing line supports that interpretation. With the truth uncovered, one of the four characters finally admits that she is afraid. She is not alone in Albee’s early plays. The protagonist of “The Zoo Story” is afraid of the carnivore, albeit in its dog manifestation. Since the dog-wolf is a cohering image in the two early plays, we should ascertain what the animal invokes that causes the fear. Understanding the fear, we can understand the need for an exorcising ritual. “The Zoo Story” is a one-act play. On a Sunday afternoon in New York’s Central Park, a man, Jerry, badgers another man, Peter, until he puts down the book he is reading and gives him his undivided attention. The protagonist tells a tale of alienation. At the center of the tale, which he entitles 28 “THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG!” is his experience in the brownstone roominghouse where he lives a solitary existence in a small room on the top floor. The first floor belongs to the landlady, a hag, and her male dog, a “monster of a beast” (30), black with red eyes. Despite his protestation that he is not “up” on mythology, by attributing the dog’s ability to recover from poisoning to his being a “descendant of the puppy that guarded the gates of hell or some such resort” (33), Jerry identifies him as Cerberus, the triple-headed dog with the serpent’s tail who guards the entrance to death’s domain in classical mythology. Of the four harrowings of hell that are cornerstones of Western literature and that might serve as sources for the tale within the play, we can eliminate the oldest. In book 11 of The Odyssey, Odysseus narrates his journey to Hades’ kingdom, where the shade of Teiresias instructs him on what to do in order to reach home. After seeing and conversing with many shades, Odysseus learns from the shade of Heracles of his most dangerous labor, the bringing of the dog up from the underworld, but the visitor does not himself encounter Cerberus. We also can eliminate the newest harrowing, the Inferno cantica of the Commedia, because although Dante the pilgrim encounters Cerberus and his guide Virgil stuffs his ravenous maws with earth, the medieval epic does not connect the dog with the hag as does Albee’s play. Of the remaining two harrowings, that by the Latin poet Virgil, the Aeneid, is the better source, especially since it is alluded to, even recreated, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia 29 Woolf? Let us look at how the one-act Albee play connects the beast and the hag. When Jerry tells Peter that the landlady and her dog are the “gatekeepers” (27) of his dwelling, he not only connects them, he locates the underworld under his fourth-floor room, in the hag’s first-floor room. When he describes her eyes as looking “like the dog’s eyes” (33), he identifies her as Hecate, the snake-entwined goddess of the underworld.


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Robert Graves’ writings illuminate passages in Albee’s theatre. Graves connects the dog and Hecate as crone, the incarnation of the moon in the third of its three phases, when he writes that Cerberus “seems to have originally been the Death-goddess Hecate, or Hecabe…; she was portrayed as a 30 bitch because dogs eat corpse flesh and howl at the moon.” I do not have to quote Graves to make the connection. I do so to prepare the reader for quotations from his writings in the analysis of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The Aeneid makes the connection. Homeless following the destruction of Troy, the Trojan survivors wander for years, led by Aeneas, son of the mortal Anchises and the goddess Venus. In book 3 of Virgil’s Roman national epic, the wanderers meet another survivor, Priam’s son Helenus, who tells the leader that before he can bring his followers to their new home in Italy, he must go to the haunted lakes at Cumae, Italy, and there consult with the Sibyl, a prophetess of Apollo. In a dream, in book 5, Aeneas is visited by the likeness of Anchises, who tells him that he must descend into the depths of Avernus to seek a meeting with him, his father, who dwells in Elysium. The Cumaean Sibyl will guide him. With the golden bough plucked, in book 6 Aeneas and the Sibyl perform the necessary sacrifices to Hecate, “supreme both in Heaven and in 31 Hell.” The howling of dogs signaling her approach, the goddess comes from within the gloom to open the way, and guide and hero plunge into the yawning cave and monstrous forms before the entrance to Dis’ kingdom. Once across the river Styx, they encounter Cerberus, snakes bristling on the necks, but the prophetess drugs the beast with a medicated cake so that they can proceed. Past wailing souls they come to a fork. To the left are punished the wicked, some of whose crimes and torments the Sibyl elucidates. To the right lies Elysium, the reward of the virtuous and the residence of the shade of Anchises. The father gives his son, widowed during Troy’s destruction, reason to return to life. Taking him and his guide to a vantage point from which they can see the future, Anchises identifies the descendants, Alban and Roman kings, who will issue from the hero beginning with Silvius, the yet unborn son of his union with the princess Lavinia. He also prophesies the wars Aeneas must wage for the future to be actualized. The pageant completed, the two visitors leave the underworld. From the summary of the classical model, we can see that Cerberus, as carnivore and as theriomorphic form of the goddess Hacate, invokes death. It is not, however, annihilating death that causes Jerry’s fear in “The Zoo Story.” Cerberus invokes the descent into the death within the self. Confronting the shades of the past is the test the quester must pass to be reborn into a new self.

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When Aeneas first appeals to the Sibyl for guidance, she warns him that “‘easy is the descent to Avernus:…but to recall thy steps and pass out to the upper air, this is the task, this the toil!’” (6.126–29) Jerry does not have the task to complete because he rejects the descent that leads to it. The audience can only speculate about his shades. To enter or leave the building, he narrates in his story, he has to cross the first-floor hall. When the landlady, standing guard by her room, presses her gin-sotted body against his, endeavoring to lure him inside, he outwits her by pretending to be satiated from the previous penetration. The other gatekeeper required a different stratagem. Since the dog caught him once as he bolted past the room, ripping his pants leg, he decided to win its affection by strewing the hall with hamburger meat. When after eating the meat the animal continued to attack, always on his entrance into the building and never on his exit from it, he decided to kill the beast by feeding it poisoned meat. The poisoning was not meant to effect passage to the interior of the hag’s domain, the purpose of the Sibyl’s medicated cake, but to effect passage away from the interior journey. Despite his protestation about mythology and despite the animal’s male sex, Jerry’s identification of the dog and description of the hag indicate that he understands the significance of the epic descent, the goal of which is knowledge of the quester’s self and tribe. Referred to as an initiatory death, the descent initiates the quester into the death of the old self and the birth of a new self awaiting him and the tribe upon his return to the upper air. The boon he brings back from the underworld is the triumph of life over death. Assimilating the past, he and the tribe can alter the future. Like Odysseus, he can slay the suitors and reclaim his estate. Like Dante, he can ascend Mount Purgatory and reunite with Beatrice. Like Aeneas, he can defeat Turnus, marry Lavinia, beget Silvius, and found a homeland for his people. Albee’s protagonist knows that he failed the test by not taking it. The dog, who did not die but recovered, ignores Jerry, who realizes that the animal’s attempt to fasten its teeth to his pants leg may have been an act of love. Now that access to the first-floor hall is uncontested, he has “gained solitary free passage” (35), yet he knows that the gain really is a loss, for the passage takes him to a lonely room on the fourth floor. He is unable to make contact with people or animals, either at the roominghouse or the zoo, where he went before the park. Abandoned by his mother, orphaned by his father’s death, left homeless by the death of the only other family member, an aunt, he has been wandering ever since, unable to form relationships. Since he spurns the journey that leads to rebirth and since he finds life existentially intolerable, he does not discover a new self or role to grow into in a


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new homeland. The only alternative to the living death he has been suffering is the numbing death that nullifies life. Yet Jerry has one more stratagem. Perhaps he can counter the annihilation of a pointless death by sacrificing himself to rouse someone he perceives as sinking into stagnating alienation. He starts badgering his listener again, this time physically. He pushes against him, threatens him, even forces him to defend himself with a knife which he throws at his feet. When Peter picks up the knife, Jerry charges him, impaling himself on it. “The Zoo Story” was first produced in 1959. The play that invokes the fear and completes the task Jerry rejects was first produced in 1962. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a three-act play. Act 1 opens at two o’clock on a Sunday morning after a night of partying at the home of a college president. As they stumble into their own home, the president’s daughter Martha tells his son-in-law George, a faculty member in the History Department, that she invited a couple, a new member of the Biology Department and his wife, to come to their place for a nightcap. George objects because of the hour, but Martha reiterates Daddy’s desire that members of the college community make newcomers to the campus feel welcome. These few minutes present husband and wife as they are with each other when by themselves. They know how to relate to each other. Quick-witted with an appreciation of absurdity, each knows how far he or she can go with the other before provoking merciless retaliation for failing to meet the expectations of the marriage. As she reminds him that his lack of a partying personality makes him a nonentity, he reminds her that her partying personality can make her vulgar. “There aren’t many more sickening sights than you with a couple of drinks in you and your skirt up over your head, you 32 know…your heads, I should say….” Many drinks later, midway through act 2, he grabs her by the throat, vowing to kill the “SATANIC BITCH” (137), which would be no mean feat, since as the daughter of a “god” (26) she thinks of herself as a goddess: the “Earth Mother” (189). Images such as these establish Martha as triple-headed Cerberus who, according to George, would sit outside his window when they were courting and “howl and claw at the turf” (81). The bitch, the female of the dog, is the animal form of Hecate, the triple goddess who, according to classicist Lillian 33 Feder, was “originally an earth goddess.” Like Jerry, George encounters Cerberus, but the significance of the throat-grabbing has to be delayed until the scene can be placed in the context of the fourth harrowing. We first must examine what happens to make him grab the bitch’s throat. The strategy George and Martha adopted for keeping in check the disappointments of an unfulfilled marriage is creating myth, or game-playing, as the activity is called in act 1, which is entitled “Fun and Games.” Perform-

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ing a ritual to actualize a myth is a shared activity that holds them together as husband and wife. Although toward play’s end they call each other liar, “illusion” (201–02), the word they use in act 3, is a better description of the myth than is lie. Like the necessary illusions in O’Neill’s later plays—the concluding scene of The Iceman Cometh, for example—the myth works only if the participants in the creation make it work. If George and Martha feel hateful toward each other, they can refuse to agree that the myth explains their failures; they can demythicize between themselves. If they feel compassionate, they can pretend that neither was to blame; they can collaborate in the mythicizing. Toward the end of act 1, as Martha begins to summarize why her father had to change his opinion of his son-in-law as heir apparent to the presidency, George warns her to stop. “I’d thought you were telling the story of our courtship, Martha…I didn’t know you were going to start in on the other business.” Game-playing about their courtship in front of the guests is permissible, but not about his professional adequacy. When Martha violates the prohibition against airing a private myth in public, he is hurt to the point of “almost crying” (82–84). In a play in which the truth is constantly shifting, pinpointing fact somewhere between mythicizing and demythicizing is difficult if not impossible. Fortunately we do not have to pinpoint. It is enough to sketch in the bitter reality which they sought to ameliorate through game-playing. The daughter of a college president, Martha was hostessing for her father at the college’s functions when she met the man she would marry, who was interesting to her because he was younger and one of the few single faculty members. He became department chairman during the war but was neither renewed in the position nor promoted to a higher position such as dean, apparently because he failed to impress. In the opening scene, his wife criticizes him for merely talking at parties, the implication being that he fails to circulate, charming those in power who could support his candidacy for a higher office. Neither has he published a book, which would give him a reputation outside of the college, enhancing his credentials on the campus. His rank after twenty-plus years in the History Department is associate, not full, professor. Martha is disappointed with George. She feels that by virtue of his marriage to her, the president’s daughter, he had an advantage he failed to capitalize on. She is right if her relationship with her father is as she says it is, that they were closer than most daughters and fathers ever since the mother “died early” (77). She is wrong if the relationship is not as she says it is. In act 3 George claims that the father, who remarried a woman from whom he


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inherited wealth, “doesn’t give a damn whether she [Martha] lives or dies” (225). The truth is probably somewhere in between. When she was young, she married a laborer, apparently as an act of rebellion. The father had the marriage annulled, but the implication is as much for his and the college’s images as for her sake. Given the androcratic environment in which she was reared, it is reasonable that she would see in her husband’s success a validation of her new status as equal, contributing partner to the success. As he advanced, she advanced in self-esteem, and conversely as he failed to rise, she became trapped in an intolerable reality. George is disappointed with Martha because she is dissatisfied with him as an associate professor. He also is disappointed with himself for failing to be the man she expected him to be. In this regard too, the play resembles O’Neill’s later plays in which characters are tormented by the knowledge that they betrayed the expectations of those who loved them. So the couple began to play ameliorating games. They found the first of two myths for transforming their disappointments in the Aeneid, an obvious choice since the college town in which they live is New Carthage (40 and 104) and since George kiddingly refers to the time when he was a teenager as that of the Punic Wars (94). In book 1 of the Aeneid, his storm-tossed ships having reached the safety of the North African coast, Aeneas is visited by his mother, Venus, who tells him the story of Queen Dido, who fled the Phoenician city of Tyre to found the Phoenician colony at Carthage. To distinguish this city from the older colony at Utica, Phoenicians referred to it as new Carthage. Hence when Aeneas approaches the rising citadel, he approaches “novae Karthaginis” (1.366). In book 4 when the queen realizes that the man to whom she gave her love is leaving her to found a Trojan colony in Italy, she immolates herself after calling upon an avenger to right the wrong done to her and her people. Scholars identify the avenger as Hannibal, leader of the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War with Rome. In the contemporary reinvention of the classical myth, George is Aeneas. He is not goddess-born as the Trojan hero is, but his relationship with his parents is kept vague allowing for the possibility, depending upon the mood of the players, that he may have killed them. Like Aeneas, who complains to his mother that her divinity prevents him from having a human relationship with her, George has little to say about his mother. Like the hero, whose father dies on the journey, George seems to have lost his father subsequent to the loss of his mother. Martha is Dido, daughter of the king of Tyre who fled that kingdom for North Africa following her husband’s murder in royal intrigue. Her marriage

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was terminated by annulment, not death, but the result was that she was “revirginized” (78) for a second marriage. New Carthage is her town in that her father is the reigning power. George came to her town seeking a new home: tenure as a faculty member. She offered herself, which he accepted, and the opportunity to reign with her, which he failed to take advantage of by not succeeding her father. There is no counterpart to Martha’s father in the Aeneid, since Dido’s father is only mentioned in passing. Yet George and Martha must account for him for psychological reasons. To ameliorate her unhappiness with her husband’s failure to succeed, Martha thinks of herself as having married beneath her, even though George is educated and a professor. She can be on another plane of existence, however, if she is a goddess and he a mere mortal. But to be a goddess, her daddy has to be a god and he has to love her, has to have a closer relationship with her than fathers normally have with daughters. His simply being a college president is not enough if he does not perceive in her a special worth. Yet Martha also wants George to depose him because she secretly resents being peripheral in her father’s orbit, and her husband’s ascendancy would enhance her worth as queen. George accuses her of living in a “fantasy world” (155), but the accusation comes in act 2. In act 1 the father is a “god” (26), “over two hundred years old” (41), dwelling on Parnassus (30), which makes his daughter a 108-year-old pagan goddess who “paints blue circles around her things” (73). How long they could have played the Aeneid game by itself is an issue that provokes the same speculation on the audience’s part that Jerry’s shades do in “The Zoo Story.” My guess is that their inability to have children necessitated a new myth, but the second does not supersede the first; they play either or both depending on how they feel. The second one they reinvented is the one elaborated by Graves in The White Goddess and The Greek Myths. I believe that the poet-mythographer’s writings influenced Albee if only for the reason that they clarify otherwise cryptic details in the play. We must bear in mind that the couple must assign her father prominence in the constellation, even though both resent him, the one openly and the other secretly. George describes his father-in-law as a red-eyed white mouse (75) whose home is Parnassus, the mountain sacred to Apollo, although he does not name the god. That this is not the sole instance of the description is evidenced by Martha’s repetition of it when she is alone (185). In The White Goddess, Graves writes that the “Greek god Apollo…seems to have begun as the Demon of a Mouse-fraternity in pre-Aryan totemistic Europe: he gradually rose in divine rank by force of arms, blackmail and 34 fraud until he became the patron of Music, Poetry and the Arts….”


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Graves’ argument was summarized in the examination of Howe’s Birth and After Birth. Greek mythology records the patrilineal overthrow of a matrilineal culture centered in a divine power manifested throughout the fabric of existence. The dispenser of life and death, the White Goddess was goddess of the sky, earth, and underworld, worshiped in human, plant, and animal forms, especially those that symbolized her: the horned animal or the chalked face or, in Martha’s case, “blue circles around her things.” In this pre-patriarchal culture, the goddess and her priestesses took lovers from among the tribe’s males, all of whom were sons. The candidate to be the goddess’ consort was offered immortality as the sacred sun king following his ritual slaying, the sequence incarnating the cycle of the sun god. “Early Greek mythology is concerned, above all else,” Graves introduces The Greek Myths, “with the changing relations between the queen and her lovers, which begin with their yearly, or twice-yearly, sacrifices; and end, at the 35 time when the Iliad was composed….” For George and Martha, the moon-goddess myth would have evolved naturally from the Aeneid myth. Some scholars see in the tale of Dido, also named Elissa in the Aeneid, elements of Phoenician myth, suggesting that Dido herself is a moon goddess. To a history professor, Dido would be associated with the Near Eastern deities, Astarte and Ishtar, and the Greek and 36 Roman deities, Artemis-Diana and Hecate. After stacking the pyre but before immolating herself, the Carthaginian queen calls on “thrice a hundred gods…and threefold Hecate, triple-faced maiden Diana” (4.510–11). Martha did not call upon Hecate to witness her doom. She became the threefold goddess. Described in the Aeneid, in a passage quoted earlier, as “supreme both in Heaven and in Hell,” Hecate also is supreme on Earth in Martha in the second myth. The moon-goddess myth does not change the couple’s relationship from the Aeneid myth but refines it. Martha is a goddess, and George is a mortal who failed as heir apparent to sacred kingship. A cluck, he lacked the aggressiveness to succeed his wife’s father, who in this sense has the overtone of her lover too. The second myth explains her taking lovers such as guest Nick and their reduction to houseboys after serving their function. It also explains George’s insinuation that Martha wanted to be more than a mother to their son, by giving him ritual baths when he was 16, for example. Finally, though the couple’s creation remains an illusion, the shared activity is more genuinely mythicizing than it is with the Aeneid game-playing in that it creates a divine being who appears and disappears to satisfy his creators’ needs, needs which diverge as dawn approaches. Described as “blond as the sun” with “bow and arrow he kept under his bed…” (218–19), he is sun-god Apollo, or the contemporary equivalent, “sunny-Jim” (228). Miraculously

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begotten in his parents’ imaginations, he will be sacrificed, not by his mother, but by his father, and not to continue her reign, but to end it. The strategy the couple originally adopted for keeping in check the disappointments of an unfulfilled marriage imprisons them as they play into the early hours of the morning a game intended only for themselves in front of a couple who become pawns in it. George and Martha increasingly use the new instructor, Nick, and his wife, Honey, to get at each other. Thus after the opening scene, the game becomes intense because the host and hostess are conscious that they are playing to guests who know nothing about them. It becomes vindictive when the hour, the drinking, and the guests’ being witness to demythicizing which humiliates cause the simmering disappointments to boil over. As Martha says to her husband, while watching him at the party that preceded the play’s action fade into insignificance among younger men moving upward, “It finally snapped! And I’m going to howl it out, and I’m not going to give a damn what I do…” (158). Actually the strategy has imprisoned them for some time with each blaming the other for the reduction of their roles. Martha is reduced to playing the goddess in her infernal phase. Moments before the passage in which she recounts to George how their marriage snapped at her father’s party, she tells him that she has been whipping him for 23 years and he enjoys the whipping. The whip is one of Hecate’s symbols as life-devouring 37 Terrible Mother. In this scene George uses the same word, “monster” (157), that Jerry in “The Zoo Story” uses to describe the roominghouse dog. And in “howl” Martha repeats her husband’s verb in act 1 for the sound she made while courting him outside his window. Midway through act 2, entitled “Walpurgisnacht,” George grabs the “SATANIC BITCH” by the throat. Heracles’ clutching Cerberus’ throat is the climactic event in the fourth harrowing of hell, versions of which are 38 found in Apollodorus, who gives a full treatment of Heracles’ life, and Euripides, who condenses the labors, the twelfth of which is the bringing up of Cerberus from the infernal regions, in Heracles. The particular literary version is irrelevant, however. What is relevant is the interpretation. For Graves, the clutching is a decisive event in Greek mythology because it signifies the hero’s deification. Refusing to die for the goddess, Heracles dislodges her in her theriomorphic form from her domain. Casting off matrilineal tutelage, he becomes god by overcoming death.39 In the corresponding scene in the play, Nick forces George to release his hands from his wife’s throat. He does not grab again because by act-2’s end he resolves to oppose her in her domain but not to deify himself; he harrows hell to recover their humanity. As George stares in disbelief at Martha’s statement that she has been whipping him for 23 years and he enjoys the


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punishment, he realizes how differently the two perceive their marriage and their game-playing. His insight is that the rituals have become sterile. Martha is not the triple goddess, the dispenser of life and death. Reduced to the infernal Hecate, she has become as dead as the rituals, and he too is dead by acquiescing to her values. By confronting the shades of his past—his submission, for instance—even before act 2 ends, he begins the journey that Jerry rejects. Confronting death within himself, he resolves to guide his wife to her confrontation. He initiates a third ritual for them: the epic descent. “We’re going to play this one to the death” (209), he informs her. George does two things to reverse the descent and complete the task of returning to the upper air. When he tells Martha that since her mouth is filled with “blood” (208) her turn is over, he asserts his values. He ends Cerberus’ domination of him and restores love to its rightful dominion. By Martha’s own admission, of the two he is the one capable of “loving” (191). In a Christian burial service, George puts their son to rest. He intones a ritual from a religion that anathematized goddess worship and still is a living tradition in that its practitioners form a larger community than do the practitio40 ners of the supplanted religion. The couple have to come back into a living community. The Requiem-Mass ritual is their vehicle. It is a corrective to Martha’s perverted American Dream. In the 1960 preface to “The Zoo Story,” Albee related that he was writing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? along with the shorter “The American Dream.” Since the latter play premiered between the other two plays, the three can be seen as connected. The middle play is allegorical. Grandma names the young man who comes to the apartment the American Dream. Actually she could have named him the Perversion of the American Dream, for he embodies a superficially pleasing exterior over an empty interior. He is a perversion in another sense too in that through no fault of his, he is separated from his twin brother, who died. Separated from the reality of death, he aspires to immortality through the acquisition of money because he has no talent other than his pleasing exterior. For Martha, pleasing exterior is not so much muscle tone as ability to sell oneself. With Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, she believes that in a brutally competitive world in which only the fittest acquire power, selfhood is the ultimate reality. It becomes divinity, the means by which one acquires power by devouring other selves such as houseboys and therefore the means by which one evades death. For her, her husband’s moral principles are a mask behind which he hides from himself his failure to succeed. George does not insist that she face the truth of her relationship with her father or other people any more than she insists that he face the truth of his relationship with his parents or colleagues. What he does demand is that

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together they face the truth about the son they invented, for that acceptance will enable them to accept the emptiness of their lives hidden behind fabrications. He believes, and correctly so, that confronting the shades of the past liberates. For him, since she inhabits a “fantasy world” (155), the cure is not to pull her into the upper air but to show her the way to shed the false past-dream-self as a prerequisite for rising from the stagnation. He admits he is not a god (233). She must admit she is not a goddess, but to do that she must confront the real goddess. The ending of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is positive. Martha’s admission that she is afraid of the wolf, or the goddess in her theriomorphic form, is the beginning of the interior journey that George makes during the play’s second half. The irony of Albee’s play is that by denying death, the couple denied life; they became dead, endlessly replicating the past. By accepting death, they change, and change is life. In this chapter we have seen that the traditional form of drama can expand to accommodate new, contemporary contents; that it can dissolve to generate new, contemporary forms; and that a new, contemporary form can reinvent classical myths and rituals. In the next chapter we will see the contemporary reimagining of classical comedic forms: namely, Aristophanic and Menandrean comedies.

() &' C H A P T E R T W O

Charles Ludlam and Harry Kondoleon “I’m really a classical author,” Charles Ludlam, the founder in 1967 of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, classifies himself because as he explains, his subject matter is not personal experience but “mythic subject matter” and “archetypal plots.”1 That part of the meaning of “classical” he usually makes clear in the paragraph in which he uses the word. When, for instance, he writes that he built every one of his plays on a “classical model” (50), he gives examples of authoritative archetypal plots. There is a larger meaning, however, running throughout his commentary on his aesthetic principles. Fortunately for all students of theatre, two years after his death, Steven Samuels edited his complete plays and three years later his non-dramatic writings. Ludlam’s commentary on aesthetic principles defines playwriting as the “interplay of a fixed element and a variable” (3). The fixed element is the plot. Although the playwright does not use the term Apollonian for the fixed form, I do for a reason that will become apparent. The variable is the expressive elements, or contents, within the form. These he indicates throughout his non-dramatic writings. They include literary allusions, acting styles, discarded theatrical conventions and traditions which his theatre revives, and man’s innate characteristics such as sexual markers. The term he uses for the dissolving principle that releases the irrational contents, which expand because their being in opposition to one another dynamically charges them, is Dionysian (21 and 98) after the “amoral god, primordial, libidinous” (251) in whose festival Greek theatre originated. Thus Ludlam considers himself a classical author because he releases expanding Dionysian contents within a fixed Apollonian form. The breakthrough came when after experimenting with the epic structure, he discovered the archetypal plot. He realized that he could be an expressive as his nature dictated but within a classical mold.

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Another distinction he makes is between theatre and drama. The former is self-presentation; the latter is representation of a conflict. He sees himself as creating drama from the conflict not only within the contents in flux, such as forcing together styles or traditions “that don’t usually mix” (99), but between the inner contents and the outer form. Perhaps the most pervasive conflict in Ridiculous Theatrical Company productions is the conflict between internal sexual preference or orientation and external gender characteristics. As an actor Ludlam won accolades for his portrayal of a hairychested Camille. As a playwright he expands the conflict to that between sexual preference within characters and sexual mores within their society. Because the charged elements expand within a fixed form, the conflict seeks a “resolution” (47). Yet since Ludlam’s theatre, like most contemporary theatre, rejects pat resolutions, the non-dramatic writings use other words too. “Synthesis” (34) is one, but since the word can suggest a new fixed form, the one I prefer is “harmony,” as in his comment that a problem for “modern comedy is to restore harmony at the end…” (76). Here the implication is that the elements are now balanced or integrated. Another implication is that they can fall out of balance and into conflict again. The reconciliation does not become a permanent resolution. Although Ludlam experiments with tragedy and other genres, he is primarily a creator of comedy, probably because the genre that achieves reconciliation and integration suited his temperament but also because of his belief in theatre as an instrument for social change. His statement that “we must find harmony with the order of the universe” (249) encapsulates his aesthetic principles. The resolution to the multiplicity of contents within the theatrical universe is not to reduce the number of styles and traditions, for example, but to bring them into harmony. The aesthetic principles translate into the moral and political principles. The resolution to the multiplicity of styles and traditions within the universe of people is not to reject some but to bring diversity into harmony within a pluralistic society. Theatre, which is a multiplicity of contents—or selves if we think strictly of acting roles—is society in miniature, and society is the individual writ large. The evidence for a plurality—or at least a duality—of selves within the person is most obvious for Ludlam in the presence in each person of both sets of sexual characteristics in opposition to each other as that person comes of age. Just as the healthy individual reconciles them, so does the Ridiculous Theatrical Company put sexual determinants as well as all the other opposing forces within the Dionysian flux in conflict with one another and with the Apollonian form to bring them into harmony. “The ability to recognize opposites in ourselves is the basis of art, definitely of drama” (165).

Charles Ludlam and Harry Kondoleon

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The ability to reconcile the opposition ridiculously is the achievement of Ludlam’s art. When the hero of Turds in Hell, the 1969 play that Ludlam wrote with 2 Bill Vehr, cries out, “Then who am I? Who the hell am I?” he initiates the quest for self-knowledge that heroes always have undertaken. The hero is Orgone, and since parentage is a determinant of one’s identity, he cries out upon learning that the gypsy who raised him is not his mother. Abandoned in swaddling clothes on a mountaintop by his unwed mother, he searches for her in the hope that she can explain why he is a hunchback, pinhead, and sex maniac with goat’s legs and “enormous cock and balls” (55). Yet when he finds an invitation to her wedding, he shifts the quest’s focus. The journey has taken him to the extremes of spirituality and carnality: from gambling casino to convent, monastery to brothel. It has taken him to the extremes of repulsion and attraction. When the woman to whom he is attracted, Vera, first sees him, she screams “in horror” (61), unlike the whores, who scream “in ecstasy” (68) at the sight of his giant genitalia. Hence when he finds the invitation, he launches into a speech that is faithful to, while parodical of, bastard Edmund’s act-1 speech in King Lear begin3 ning, “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” (1.2.1–22). Pledging allegiance to the same natural law—“Thou, nature, art my goddess”—rather than to the conventions of a society which marginalizes him, the contemporary bastard concludes by calling upon the gods to stand up for his sexuality—“for hunchbacks, pinheads, and sex maniacs!” (71) Though parentage remains a determinant, the hero’s quest takes him into the other determinant of identity in Ludlam’s imaginative world: into nature, specifically sexual nature. It is the acceptance of the sexuality which is dramatized; it is the acceptance which reveals the parentage, both within the play and within the history of Western comedy. In a brief life of the playwright that prefaces the collected edition of his plays, Steven Samuels writes that “one is tempted to say Charles Ludlam’s father was Aristophanes, the ancient Greek satirist…” (x). We can see the surface resemblances between the two artists’ works in satire; bawdiness, particularly the padded genitalia; scatological humor; colorful costumes; and rapid costume-changes. But to uncover the ground beneath the surface common to the two, we have to understand nature in the American playwright’s work: the nature Orgone invokes. Once we do, we can examine the debt in the 1982 Secret Lives of the Sexists to the Greek playwright’s Thesmophoriazusae. Then we will appreciate how the man born in Floral Park, New York, was a descendant of the creator of old comedy. The quest into sexuality takes us into nature in the contemporary playwright’s work. This quest is more theatrical than the quest for parentage

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would be were it divorced from sexuality, and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company is nothing if not theatrical. Orgone, wearing a Santa Claus outfit, follows Vera, in nun’s garb, to a convent, where he not only rapes her but dons her habit, leaving her naked in a pig mask. Of course, neither quest can be divorced from the other, for in Ludlam’s imaginative world the human being is a divine spirit in animal matter and consequently subject to multiple impulses. Visually the impulses are realized in sex-role switching and cross-dressing. Verbal shifts accompany the visual shifts. “Why brand they us with base? with baseness? with bastardy?” Orgone agonizes in his King Lear speech. “Why base? Why basement? Why not try the roof?” (71) A speech that commences faithful to Edmund’s words becomes parodical because by acting on one impulse, Orgone opens the switch for its opposite impulse, reversing the electric current’s direction. Metaphysically and sexually, Ridiculous Theatrical Company characters are not unitary. Without elaboration, however, “bisexual,” which appears in Ludlam’s prose writings (49), does not convey the range of sexual attitudes and behavior of the characters, who oscillate between masculine and feminine psyches in male and female bodies or the clothing worn by the different bodies. Exulting that he is a “man” (63), Orgone rapes Vera, following which act his “good side” asserts itself, making him feel guilty until Vera suggests that he rape her again, at which time, dressed in her nun’s habit, he becomes “Mona Lisa in drag” (64). He sums up his nature when he admits that both currents of life’s energy flow through him: “I’m AC and DC” (63). “Polysexual,” also from the prose (54), is a more accurate description than “bisexual.” In the rape scene, Orgone is even willing to be “trisexual” in his desire to “try anything” (63). If Orgone swears fealty to nature as his standard and he is AC and DC, human nature ranges through polysexual experiences between the polarity of AC-DC genders with the integrated person the one who harmonizes his/her impulses. The Ridiculous Theatrical Company developed a performance style isomorphic with the individual human being’s oscillation through the multiplicity of experiences on the journey to harmony. A play tosses together a multiplicity of elements and then varies the stimuli to send varying currents through the cast’s characterizations. With the conflicts in motion, the style, to quote from a production’s playbill, “synthesizes wit, parody, vaudeville farce, melodrama and satire, giving reckless immediacy to classical stagecraft.” I want to focus on farce because it is the designation Ludlam gave to the play about to be examined and because the playwright to whom he is indebted in it, Aristophanes, integrated farce into his imaginative world. The play is Secret Lives of the Sexists, subtitled The Farce of Modern Life. It is “the”


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modern farce because the age sends contradictory sexual signals—that is, contradictory identity signals. The play opens with Buddy Husband in the home of his brother, Izzy, and sister-in-law, Fanny, where he is studying for the oral examination for his graduate degree in anthropology, specializing in the sexual behavior of mankind, specifically that of early hominids which enabled one kind to evolve while another became extinct. He too is trying to adapt to a difficult environment. His wife, Nadine, who stops by to see him, suggested that they separate so that she can write on sexism without his presence an interference and also so that they can date outside of marriage. Neither wants to, but in an era of sexual revolution, she feels that they should be liberated. In this instance society causes the problem. It causes Buddy’s and Nadine’s problem in that they feel pressured to conform to liberal attitudes in conflict with their conservative instincts. Either one reacts with jealousy at the thought of the other’s dating. Nadine is particularly jealous when her husband tells her that she must leave because he is expecting a female guest. Society also causes a reverse conflict. The guest is Zena, Nadine’s mother who is unknown to the daughter. To support her child, Zena did what was natural for her. As a stripper, she danced naked. Conservative society, however, judging her an unfit mother because of her liberal attitude, took the child from her, forcing her either to stop dancing or put Nadine up for adoption. Feeling that she had no choice, she took the second option. Now, years later, she wants to be reunited with her daughter but not until she has changed her image, or self. Only then will she feel confident enough to identify herself to Nadine. To that end, Buddy is helping her start a respectable business but cannot divulge the information to his wife, who feels ambivalent toward the mother she does not know. So far society and not nature is the culprit, confirming the Queen of Saturn’s explanation, in Conquest of the Universe, for modern life’s pervasive sexual ailments. “The vast majority of men as well as women are sexually disturbed as the result of a training which inhibits their sexuality; that is, they are not satisfied in sexual intercourse” (47). According to this interpretation, society’s confusing mores cause the sexual ailments by conflicting with human nature, frustrating a character’s ability to love, to express the spirit through the body. Sometimes nature causes the problem, as it does with Izzy and Fanny. Their marriage is jeopardized by Izzy’s failure to have intercourse with his wife. He cannot, he claims, because the more aggressive a woman becomes the less able is he to perform sexually, and since they will inherit money as soon as they have a child, she is aggressive. Yet the couple’s problem would

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exist without the society’s pressure to procreate, as revealed by the Ridiculous Theatrical Company’s style. Each of the company members developed his/her talents within the company’s acting style of racing back and forth between performer and actor or between facets of the characterization enacted. Even though Everett Quinton created many roles through the years and has inherited Ludlam’s roles since the founder’s death, his forte is playing the naif startled by the behavior around him. His appearance as Izzy in Secret Lives created an immediate audience response. To spectators his role as husband was a contradiction because he was forever startled by his wife’s appearance. His name is meant to suggest the contradiction. Is he a husband if he does not have intercourse with her? Since Quinton is a consummately ridiculous performeractor, he had every right to be startled by his wife’s appearance. Though dressed in women’s clothing, Fanny was taller than he and played by a man. No wonder he was intimidated! According to this interpretation, nature causes the conflict, which society aggravates, in the wife whose masculine nature dominates and in the husband whose feminine nature dominates. If you don’t like aggressive women, Buddy asks his brother, “why did you marry one?” Izzy has no problem answering. “She swept me off my feet” (641). The ambivalence in each of the three creates an act-1 culminating scene. Izzy asks his brother to substitute for him and impregnate Fanny on condition that they not have an affair because he, Izzy, would be jealous. He does love his wife, he insists. Shocked, Buddy agrees only after Izzy offers to split the inheritance with him. As the latter ducks into a closet, Fanny enters the room. Frustrated by her husband’s ignoring her, she is reading a sex manual in the hope of discovering a technique that will excite him. With Buddy in front of her, she has an idea. Her brother-in-law can substitute for her husband in a practice session. A ridiculous scene follows with Buddy, reluctant yet aroused, being himself, his brother, and his sister-in-law with Fanny, afraid to go too far yet aroused, being herself and her husband, because she and Buddy keep switching roles and positions, while behind them Izzy in farcical gestures orchestrates the foreplay yet aware that the couple are his wife and brother. By act 2 the confusion of sexual identity, whether the ambivalence originates in society or the individual’s nature, creates ridiculous scenes involving all the principals, now numbering six. The new principal’s ambivalence originates in society. Phil Landers is a philandering man who has to pretend to be gay to get a job, which he needs to pay debts, at Zena’s spa and health club, to which Nadine and Fanny come as clients. Since Zena tells them that he is gay, they do with him what they would be embarrassed to do


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in front of a man they assumed to be heterosexual. They perform exercises such as spreading and stretching. Nadine’s ambivalence originates in her nature. Even though she believes Phil to be gay, she is so distraught by Fanny’s revelation that Zena is the woman who visits Buddy that to get revenge on her husband, she strips the director’s clothes from him to seduce him as Buddy arrives and draws a gun. Despite his protest of innocence, Buddy forces Phil to climb in his undershorts onto the ledge outside the window, leaving him and Nadine to alternately accuse and recriminate, protest their love and their revulsion for each other next to Izzy and Fanny, who go at each other with verbal wit and physical horseplay. Before Buddy can disclose Zena’s identity, thereby dispelling Nadine’s jealousy, the two wives depart to denounce at a radical feminist rally the older woman as a traitor to the cause of women’s liberation and a husband-stealer. When Zena, whose strip act is a feminist target, departs to defend herself at the rally, the men decide to follow. They do so not as men but as Aristophanic women. The classical comedy to which the contemporary comedy is indebted is Thesmophoriazusae. In the confusion of sexual identity in the opening scene of Aristophanes’ play, the spectator encounters the first of many farcical disguises. The actor portraying the tragedian Euripides enters followed by the actor portraying his relative Mnesilochus. When the entering playwright locates the house he is looking for, he bids his weary companion observe the house’s occupant, fellow tragedian Agathon. Mnesilochus is bewildered because not only is he incongruous visually by being clean-shaven and dressed as a woman, he is incongruous aurally. In falsetto voice the occupant proceeds to sing the alternating parts of chorus leader and chorus of maidens. His explanation when he discovers that he is being observed is that in order to create for the theatre, he must imaginatively become the roles. Agathon is not the sole Aristophanic woman in the scene. At the time of the play, the Thesmophoria was a three-day festival honoring the goddesses Demeter and Persephone which the women of Athens celebrated by setting up tents on the Pnyx, the hill across from the Acropolis, and per4 forming religious rites. Having learned that they plan to condemn him to death for slandering their sex in his plays, Euripides has come to Agathon’s home to ask his fellow playwright to go to the festival, from which men are excluded, because the women will not see through his disguise and there speak in his, Euripides’, defense. When the tragedian declines, Mnesilochus volunteers to go. Prefiguring the action to come, Aristophanes’ humor moves from sly innuendo, about Agathon’s masculinity, to bawdy slapstick. The relative must have his face shaved and his buttocks singed in a scene that requires him to

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bend over so that Euripides can apply a torch to his bottom and an obscene joke to his dignity. Properly groomed, Mnesilochus departs for the festival, in its second day, but not without a promise from the man whose reputation and life he plans to rescue to rescue him should the plan go awry. The comparable scene in Secret Lives of the Sexists occurs when the three men, fearing for Zena’s safety, decide to follow her to the feminist rally, from which men are excluded. Persuaded that Phil is gay, the two brothers follow his instructions for dressing in drag. First, though, they must have their legs and bottoms shaved, not with a razor and torch, but with hot wax in a scene in which Buddy and Izzy lie on their backs and lift their legs so that Phil can pour the liquid and then when it is hardened strip it with the hair attached from their bodies. The two men scream in rising octaves until they are groomed for their new roles. The plot correspondence continues into the two assemblies though more loosely than in the grooming scenes. When the women in Thesmophoriazusae, who defend their sex by citing its virtues and values, learn that a spy is among them, they institute a search that exposes Mnesilochus, already suspect because of his enumeration of feminine duplicities that the alleged slanderer could have disclosed had he chosen to. Physically restrained in his female impersonation, he must await deliverance by his rescuer, who arrives disguised in roles he created for the theatre. Euripides is Menelaus to Mnesilochus as Helen and Perseus to his relative as Andromeda. The episodes, which parody scenes in the tragedian’s plays, culminate in Euripides’ appearance as a woman himself, chaperone to a dancing girl who distracts the Scythian policeman guarding the prisoner. Reaching a rapprochement with the women, he and Mnesilochus flee the festival, leaving them to celebrate their Thesmophoria. When the two sisters-in-law in Secret Lives, who defend their sex by attacking the “two-sex system” that promotes inequality (657), learn that a spy has infiltrated the rally, they accept the invitation of Zena, whose hope is a rapprochement with her daughter, to adjourn to her hotel room. The disguised men, whose sexist anecdotes recall Mnesilochus’ testimony, also are invited and join the three women in drink and role-doubling. With the encouragement of Izzy, disguised as Angelina, a drunken Fanny offers to cure Phil of his homosexuality. Disguised as Phyllis, the latter beckons to Izzy’s wife from the next room to come meet the guest; as Phil, a straight man pretending to be gay, he awaits her coming. Zena meanwhile takes the blame for obscenities shouted at the window by a drunken Nadine by taking her place at the window. The arrival of policewomen halt the confusion. They expose the deception by removing Phil’s wig.


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Though the details do not match, the patterns of the two plays are similar. They are the plot of farce. Characters have their identities stripped from them as they are whirled into undifferentiating confusion and a frenzy of role-playing, all possible selves, until differentiating selves adhere to them, stabilizing the plunge into disorder. Exhilarating and terrifying, farce also is serious. Aristophanes’ theatre tests natural and moral order in the cosmos. When a disruptive force intrudes, the farce subjects both the order and the force, the two parties in the agon, to disintegration before restoring the former. “In fact,” writes Kenneth McLeish of Aristophanes’ theatre, “a consistent philosophy can be traced throughout his work. Happiness and security are to be found when the natural balance of life is maintained; whenever natural order is upset (whether by corrupt politicians, blinkered jurymen, sophists or pedlars of oracles), unhappiness results.”5 The following passage is especially applicable to Thesmophoriazusae. “The harmony at the end of each comedy—harmony of man with cosmic order—is in direct contrast to the alienation at the beginning. The celebration that ends the play reasserts the positive in human life, just as the beginning of the play con6 cerned the negative.” Once Euripides and the chorus reach a rapprochement, he and Mnesilochus leave, restoring the festival to normalcy: a Thesmophoria celebrated by the Athenian women. In Secret Lives the farce achieves the normalcy that the estrangements at play’s opening prevent, for after spending a night in prison as a transvestite, Buddy speaks for the other characters when he verbalizes his “craving for normal” (667). The two couples are reconciled, and Izzy is at last able to have intercourse with Fanny. Buddy divulges Zena’s identity to Nadine. With mother and daughter reunited, Zena plans to leave with Phil, who has dropped the guise of a gay man. Neither play sanctimoniously serious, each closes with a farcically funny scene. Aristophanes’ Scythian policeman is distracted by the dancing girl whose callipygian body contrasts naturally with the unnaturally singed body 7 of disguised Mnesilochus that began the disruption. The policeman is further distracted by the chorus’ contradictory signals for the direction in which his prisoner fled until the only option left to him is to run offstage. Nine months after the drunken role-doubling scene in the hotel, Ludlam’s Izzy and Fanny celebrate the birth of a son, who looks exactly like Phil Landers. Yet since each dramatist integrates farce into his imaginative world, we have to consider sexual confusion as a serious issue as well as a source of 8 laughter. In the parabasis part of Thesmophoriazusae, the chorus leader argues for the superiority of women, but the play as a whole does not. The festival participants are lampooned as much as the intruders are. The women

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do not refute Euripides’ imputations; like Mnesilochus, the First Woman even adds some that he omitted. When the cornered impostor grabs her baby as a hostage with which to bargain, he discovers that he is holding a skin of wine. In the torch-dance sequence, the chorus members accuse the 9 impostor of desecrating their “Mystery” that the Thesmophoria celebrates. But the reverse desecration comes in the parodies of recognition and rescue scenes in Euripides’ plays, for the audience sees the mystery of the tragedian’s craft exposed as ludicrous. The parodies slander the male’s tradition of creating festival theatre as Euripides’ imputations slander the female’s tradition of creating festival celebration. Only when Euripides and Mnesilochus impersonate women who need the assistance of women, who perforce are cast in the role of men, is the agon resolved. The sexes are equal in that each has its mysteries, best left to the sex because when the other sex performs the rites, they become ludicrous. But neither sex knows that until it becomes the other sex, until the farce strips away the characters’ sexual identities before restoring them. With men impersonating women, innuendos about masculinity, and the character who alerts the women to the spy’s presence a male described as a “notorious effeminate” (99), the classical play is sexually ambivalent. But sexual ambivalence is not as dynamic an element in Aristophanes’ theatre as it is in Ludlam’s theatre. In the contemporary theatre, sexual ambivalence is a variable element interacting with the fixed element providing the ambivalence is activated, which is why farce is integral to the Ridiculous Theatrical Company. The descent that farce dramatizes is the descent from a cultivated Apollonian self to dissolution in the Dionysian flux. For Ludlam, the descent is necessary to free the actor to role-play. “The Dionysian principle: you’re drawing on your own personality; you are committing an act of selfdestruction, because you are obliterating your own identity to create another one.” But, he continues, the actor must “reconstruct” himself or he will lose himself (21–22). Like the playwright building plays, the actor builds himself anew by incorporating elements from the flux of variables into the form of an Apollonian self until fresh stimuli initiate farce’s frenzied dissolution. Since Secret Lives fuses the quest for parentage and the quest for sexual identity, normalcy is the reconciliation of parent and child, husband and wife, male and female. The reconciliations are in the natural order. They are paired opposites, and so long as the individuals and the couples interact within themselves and their relationships by responding to and making choices from the different signals the impulses transmit, they will change and grow. When the aggressive wife, accusing her sexually neutral husband of driving her to depravity in the hotel, resists him, Izzy for the first time


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becomes sexually aggressive with her. Fanny in turn becomes more feminine by delivering Phil’s baby. Even when the self solidifies into an Apollonian form, the form is not single-celled. It must have a minimum of two elements or constituents to generate interaction within the self. Though the self is composed of multiplicity, I have limited my consideration to one set of paired opposites to make the conflict more sharply drawn. That set is the one Ludlam calls the primordial duality in human nature: the sexual determinants within the self (165). By concentrating on this set, we also continue examining Ludlam’s connection with Aristophanes because the contemporary playwright refers to the classical playwright when he connects one of his characters to the violation of nature. First, though, let us glance at an Aristophanes play that exposes nature’s enemy in deracinated intellectualism. Plagued by debts his extravagant son has caused him to incur, Strepsiades in The Clouds seeks aid from a sophist school, the Thinkery, run by Socrates, whose pedagogy Aristophanes ridicules in the bawdy positions his students assume while studying and in his scientific inquiry: measuring in flea feet the insect’s leaping ability. The philosopher pays the penalty for being abstracted from nature. The day before yesterday, a student confides in the applicant for admission, while the master was gazing at the sky, tracking the moon’s orbit, a “lizard on the roof 10 shitted right in his face!” The penalty becomes morally serious when Strepsiades sends his son to the school and the son, returning and hitting his parent, defends the action by invoking the specious argumentation he learned. Realizing his error of entrusting education to sophists who supplant traditional gods with new deities, the father torches the Thinkery, driving the philosopher and his students into the daylight they have long avoided. The Clouds does not end with a festive celebration, but it does rout a force that disrupts cosmic order. What Ludlam’s contemporary sophists lack in subtlety they compensate for in directness. Earlier I quoted from Conquest of the Universe the Queen of Saturn’s attribution of inhibited sexual expression to social mores which conflict with human needs. She goes on to propose as a cure a “rational sex education” (47). The sisters-in-law in Secret Lives give their versions of rational cures for modern life’s ailments. To eliminate inequality between the sexes, Nadine would change the legal status of women to men; she would make men and women one sex. To prevent the degeneration of the female sex, Fanny would have all hairy males killed so that women would breed only with hairless specimens. Izzy responds to these proposals with one of his own. “Why turn women into men? It would be much easier both philosophically and surgically to go in the other direction” (661).

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For years Ludlam’s Bluebeard, in a 1970 play named for him, has been surgically experimenting to create a unisex. Seeking an unnatural perfection, he reminds the contemporary playwright of the classical playwright’s definition of love, given in a Platonic dialogue: Bluebeard is an intellectual who really doesn’t like either of the existing sexes, so he’s trying to make a new one. To me, the third genital means the synthesis of the sexes. I like that speech Aristophanes makes in Plato’s Symposium, where he says people were once shaped like spheres, but that the gods got angry and split them into male and female, and now each person goes through life looking for his or her other half (24).

The Platonic dramatic dialogue recreates a dinner party held at the home of Agathon, the tragedian whom Euripides in Thesmophoriazusae asks to intervene on his behalf. Socrates and Aristophanes are among the guests. During the course of the party, the host and each guest speak in praise of love. In the beginning, Aristophanes expatiates, there were three sexes, not two: male, female, and hermaphrodite, though the third no longer exists. As a punishment for his pride, Zeus bisected man so that each person is henceforth a half of an original whole. Love therefore is humanity’s yearning to be reunited with the half from which it was cleaved, or in the memorable metaphor, the “desire and pursuit of the whole.”11 Ludlam’s mad scientist would terminate that quest. He is Khanazar von Bluebeard, inspired by the vivisectionist in H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau who on an isolated island experiments on animals to convert them into human beings. Ludlam’s scientist experiments on humans but not to reconvert them into animals. He is bent upon improving human nature. From his soliloquies and the accounts of other characters, we can reconstruct the direction of his experiments from the time medical school judged him mad to the present in the alchemical laboratory off the coast of Maine. As Lamia, the Leopard Woman, bears witness, she was a nightclub performer whom Khanazar enticed to the island, where he tried to convert her into a man. She refers to his early experiments as unsuccessful “sex switches” (129). When she lifts her sarong to show Rodney, the fiancé of Bluebeard’s niece Sybil who with her chaperone accompanies the young woman on her visit to her uncle, he asks, “Is that a mound of Venus or a penis?” (130) Failing in his attempt to switch sexes, Bluebeard began to experiment on creating a new genital but not to make the subject bisexual, for those on whom he has operated chant, “We are not men. We are not women” (124). His hope is that the creation of a third genital “will perhaps lead to the creation of a third sex” (131). His ambition is “to remake Man” (123). Other characters introduce their master’s unholy activities to the audience. He does not enter until the third scene, delivering a soliloquy. Though


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he has had a variety of sexual experiences, desire’s fulfillment—climax followed by slumber—disappoints. “Does sex afford no greater miracles?” he ponders. Dissatisfied with nature’s limitation, he seeks a new experience that he believes possible only with a “new and gentle genital” (118), which he hopes will restore the mystery to sex. Two angels appear to articulate positions representative of the two sides of human nature. By urging him to take “half—one sex, that’s all—for that is nature’s way,” the good angel, recognizing the existence of two sexes, speaks for traditional morality and natural law by telling him to be content with the one he is. The bad angel, also recognizing the existence of two sexes, urges him to “Be thou on earth as God is in the sky, / Master and possessor of both sexes” (119). To interpret the angels as externalizations of Bluebeard’s internal psychology is to reduce the play’s action to an exclusively psychological dimension. Ludlam’s theatre is the antithesis of reductive. As the founder explains, he does not hold a “mirror up to nature”; he holds a “magnifying glass” (99). The two angels are manifestations of the universe’s binary nature. At the same time, though, there is a psychological motivation in the scientist, revealed in his soliloquy and resolution. Bluebeard cannot tolerate the ambivalence in nature and himself. He cannot accept either angel’s position because both speak to him. He looks and acts as if he were the good angel’s single sex. He has had sexual experiences with males and females but always as the man. He never dresses in women’s clothing or nun’s habit as Orgone does. Neither do the servants think of him as anyone other than their master who uses marriage as a snare for luring women to the island so that he can operate on them. Yet when he conjures the goddess of black magic, Hecate, and she asks him why he is dissatisfied with his genitalia, he replies that the male organ is a “faint relic and shadow,” an “ornament” (136). On the other hand, he will not possess the two sexes as the bad angel urges him to. Unlike Orgone, who switches back and forth from AC to DC, he will not act on all his impulses. He will possess the sexes by merging them into one and not either one in nature but a new one. “I’ll twist some human flesh into a genital new” (119). The flesh he mutilates is the female organ. The arrival of the ship bringing his niece Sybil, her fiancé, and her chaperone to the island temporarily ends his ambivalence. “Ah, resolve me of all ambiguities” (119), he rejoices, for the arrival brings another subject for his House of Pain. In his quest for a unitary sex that will obviate ambivalence, Bluebeard operates on his niece but is once again unsuccessful. Incidentally, at this juncture through the device of the recognition token from ancient tragedy

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and comedy, his housekeeper, Mrs. Maggot, recovers her memory and her daughter, Sybil. In an ending comparable to that of Secret Lives, the two with Rodney and the chaperone depart the island’s unnatural order to “return to normalcy” (140). Its summary introduction and resolution demonstrate that by itself the quest for parentage usually cannot sustain the action of a Ludlam play, but a more important point than that emerges from its introduction. In the play’s 1991 revival, as in the original production, a man played Mrs. Maggot. The casting was not conditioned by the mad scientist’s operations because Sheemish, the butler, like Maggot a subject of experiments, also was played by a man, as was Lamia, the Leopard Woman. The result was a typical Ridiculous Theatrical situation with male Sheemish in love with male-female Lamia in love with male Rodney, the latter alternating between prissiness and bravura. To categorize Ludlam’s theatre as gay is to misunderstand it. The crossdressing and sex-role switching emphasize the ambivalence in human nature, which the company’s characterizations exaggerate. Moreover, not all roles are cast in drag. Bluebeard was the company’s first critical success. In the original production, Ludlam played the vivisectionist, and long-time company member Black-Eyed Susan played Sybil. In the 1991 revival, Quinton was Bluebeard, and Lisa Herbold was his niece. After Quinton succeeded Ludlam as artistic director, in 1987 he and Susan staged the late founder’s Medea with the two alternating as Medea and her nurse. At one performance Susan was Medea and Quinton was the nurse; at the next performance they switched roles. For Ludlam, interchangeable roles are the essence of theatre, because self is not permanently fixed, and love is the motivating force. To adapt Aristophanes’ metaphor from Plato’s Symposium, love is the desire and pursuit of the whole self of which conflicting impulses are constituent variables experienced in the body. Bluebeard wants to restore the mystery to sex, but by reducing sex to a unitary form or gender, he demystifies the actor’s body and the theatre in which the actor performs. He contracts the quest for selfdiscovery in a body and a theatre devoid of the conflict generated by opposing forces. Emphasizing colorful costumes and allusive language, for example, and believing in a social role, Ludlam’s theatre resembles Aristophanes’ theatre. The classical playwright’s theatre recovers a natural order in the cosmos. The contemporary playwright’s theatre discovers a natural order in the individual, which reflects a cosmic order. The similarities end here, however. The latter’s order is not the former’s order as the following passage indicates. Although Ludlam does not mention Aristophanes, the excerpt from the first paragraph, on the history of comedy, describes the Athenian playwright’s


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disposition as evidenced in a work such as The Clouds whereas the second paragraph contrasts his own disposition: Traditionally comedy has been the voice and the tool of the conservative or the status quo. It punished the deviant, it punished the nonconformist, it punished people who deviated from conventions. They were made fun of, and they got back in line because of a fear of being ridiculed. Basically, comedians exhibit contrary behavior. When everyone laughs, you know not to do that. In my hands, comedy becomes the tool of the deviant and the original, the unique, the forbidden. It punishes the status quo, changes the way they think about things (129).

To change the audience’s perception so that it becomes aware of cultural diversity, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company releases variables within the actors and within the production in the sets, costumes, lighting, and the like. The variables are so volatile that one will dominate for a time, altering not the form but the form’s appearance. The audience sees a hairy-chested Camille presented ridiculously but not derisively. How to Write a Play, subtitled An Absolute Farce, is Ludlam’s cornucopia of diversity. He wrote himself and Quinton into it as themselves. The playwright is under pressure to meet the deadline for a new play or return the advance but cannot concentrate because of an unending stream of bizarre characters who interrupt him with their pressing demands. They represent different racial and ethnic groups; speak different languages including fractured English and nonsense sounds; come in two sexes, some in drag; confuse identities; wear a panoply of costumes including a gorilla suit; act in different styles; and parody films and Broadway shows. The apartment is the undifferentiating flux, the antithesis of Bluebeard’s single form. The irrational underworld into which the quester must descend to discover himself, it is, however, as inhibiting to creativity as is Bluebeard’s rational realm. The two realms mirror each other in their inability to accommodate the surging images or variables. Luring characters to his island, the isolated scientist mutilates them. His peace invaded by importuning characters, the beleaguered playwright is overwhelmed by them. The scientist laughs “maniacally” (118); the apartment’s chaos is “madness” (843). The playwright does not begin to create until Quinton advises him to make the distractions the subject matter of the play. Written in 1984, How to Write a Play was not produced during Ludlam’s lifetime. When it premiered in 1993, Quinton, portraying the playwright, had all the characters form a line at play’s end to reprise their distractions. His directorial touch emphasized the notion that only when he seizes the competing importunities on his energy as his multiple selves does the artist give them order. Only at play’s end does the quester discover himself. By an act of the imagination,

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which seizes the released contents from the Dionysian flux, the quester becomes an Apollonian artist. He does not mutilate the impulses; neither does he let them overpower him. By reconciling them, he realizes the fullness of his nature and his art. The fear in Howe’s theatre that the fullness becomes fixed art is not present in Ludlam’s theatre. The other fear in her theatre is, although recognition is a better word than fear, and it enters his theatre toward the end of his life. It is the equivalent to Howe’s characters’ fear of artistic sterility: the depletion of the artist’s nature. The volume of Ludlam’s non-dramatic writings closes with a document found among his papers after his death. Written in 1987, it portends his death later that year. I think portents also can be found in two late plays. Inspired by the career of diva Maria Callas, Galas has a character who functions as a chorus and has allusions to Greek tragedy, yet the playwright, who acted the lead, subtitled the 1983 play A Modern Tragedy. Her fame as an opera star who actualizes multiple stage selves is the reason men are attracted to a woman who otherwise would be unnoticed and unloved, yet she wants to be loved, as she says, “completely and for myself alone” (760), apart from her roles. When she learns that she is not loved for her unitary self, she commits suicide. Galas wants to exist apart from her performances, but in the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, performance realizes the variables within human nature, just as it realizes the variables within the theatre production. It “brings to life” (762) the roles or selves that express the variables. When her performing days are over, Galas kills herself because she cannot realize herself in the activities a friend recommends: “Amuse yourself. Play cards. Gossip…” (760). Life is creating from multiple impulses. When the human being cannot bring them to life, life ceases. Life’s withdrawal in the natural realm reflects a withdrawal of the supernatural realm. The cosmic order that harmonizes the two realms is at its fullest at the beginning of Ludlam’s career. Turds in Hell has a prologue spoken by a devil. The action proper begins with an angel’s appearance to Orgone’s mother and ends with a Black Mass as choirs of angels “sing joyously” (81). A good and a bad angel speak to Bluebeard, who later conjures the infernal Hecate. The play Bluebeard ends with the vivisectionist’s cursing heaven for his surgical failures. Heaven does not respond, but he does not doubt its intervention in his realm. By the time of The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984), sky and earth no longer intermingle, although Lord Edgar and Lady Enid do not feel alienated. The play ends with the two looking toward “that great silence” (799) and the day when they will see and hear the departed spirits of those they loved.


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The last play Ludlam wrote, The Artificial Jungle (1986), ends with the dying Zachary’s recognition of the harmony between the world he inhabits and the remote realm above him, yet it is a different harmony from that of the early plays. A man indifferent to life who murdered, he can feel heaven’s indifference to his plight as he dies: And I look up at the stars, the thousand unseeing eyes that look back on this little speck of dust we call the world, and I ask—What was my crime compared to your indifference. I committed a senseless murder. But in its very senselessness it is in harmony with the universe, which is itself senseless and ultimately stupid. In an aeon or two, who will be left to accuse me? (905)

Despite this note of life’s indifference to death, the man from Floral Park, New York, was a descendant of Aristophanes who created contemporary American plays that celebrate life, but life in all its diversity. The supernatural realm that intermingles with earthly life in Ludlam’s early plays withdraws from the late plays. Loss is a felt reality from the beginning of Harry Kondoleon’s career that becomes catastrophic as urgency and desperation build in his late plays. The catastrophic loss can be explained by the withdrawal from modern life of a traditional center of Western culture that redeems suffering. The urgency and desperation can be explained by the encroachment of the nonhuman from the blank left by the disappearing center. The preceding summary also describes Howe’s imaginative world in that randomness, irrationality, and howling wind encroach in her plays. The difference between the two imaginative worlds is that in hers their encroachment is presented as devoid of significance beyond the fact of their existence and neutralized by human values such as love. And to fill the loss of the traditional Greek theatre as an informing influence, for example, she discovered the contemporary Theatre of the Absurd. Kondoleon’s theatre discovers human values too but at the same time that the metaphysical anguish over the loss drives his characters to seek reconciliation with the absent realm. How three late plays discover the values—how the playwright, who is neither ridiculous nor absurdist, reinvented comedy—is the subject of this half of the chapter. There are moments when the supernatural realm seems to be returning in that something that cannot be rationally explained appears in the natural realm. The sense of loss, however, is immediately apparent in his theatre. “That there was to be no pleasure, no happiness for me I accepted years ago. 12 I sat as a child with that fact in my lap…” are words spoken by a bride rejected by her groom, one of the speakers of a work produced when its author was in his mid-twenties. Unable to please the man who rescued her from loneliness only to betray her for a princess before their wedding could be

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celebrated, she becomes “two headed” (101). She becomes ambivalent, craving self-fulfillment yet realizing life’s emptiness, hoping to be loved while seeing herself as repugnant. More a poem for the theatre than a play, this 1980 work, “The Brides,” contains a mine of images and emotions that Kondoleon would prospect for the remaining years of his life and art, the richest lode of which is the image of diminution, for the rejected bride, her ego crushed, bitterly requests that the betrayer dismember her as well. Reflecting on their childhood, young adults blame the loss of self-esteem on their parents for rejecting them or, worse, for irresponsibly allowing others to transgress them. Parents blame the children’s unhappiness on the children; they have their own unhappiness to deal with. Neither is presented with unequivocal sympathy because all are adolescents emotionally, absorbed in themselves. Their lives oppressive, members of two families joined by marriage come to a JFK Airport motel in “Slacks and Tops.” For the father, who has purchased tickets for himself and the mother, Africa represents the dream of rebirth for himself and his estranged wife. There they will be reconciled as 13 “new people…come back to life.” For the daughter the motel experience is a nightmare. When she and her parents are not hurling accusations and recriminations at one another, she shoots her husband and they hang her. Yet dream or nightmare, the quest for self-fulfillment must be pursued, for everyday reality is intolerable. “Oh God, say something. I’m so unhappy” (28), wails a character in the closing line of “Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise.” This play of the 1970s, the earliest of five plays anthologized in a 1991 volume, presents the set and situation for Kondoleon’s theatre. The set in interior, and the situation brings together the members of two families with any additional roles taken by houseguests or servants. If miserable and aggressive, the stunted self seeks to acquire a new self by depleting another, within or without the family. “Don’t you know what he’s done to me? How he sucked me dry and then tried to bury the evidence?” (11) the visiting wife in the earliest play expresses surprise that the husband of the hosting family does not know about her husband. She then explains that she plans to expose her husband as a “forger and bloodsucker” (15) for stealing her material for his novels. By the time of The Vampires (1984), characters do not simply vocalize outrage but bite one another on the neck. If miserable and passive, the stunted self becomes depleted, a victim of the vampire, within or without the family. The father in “Slacks and Tops” does not want the daughter to accompany him and her mother to Africa because as he reminds his wife, “She is the enemy…she has consumed our life” (45). Retorting to his charges, the daughter reminds him that when she


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lived at home, her dates were reluctant to come to the house for fear of being “devoured” by him (47). Predator and prey have the same need. It is love. The houseguest in Christmas on Mars speaks for Kondoleon characters when he pleads for it. “We must believe in love…. I do, I must, that’s all there is on this planet and when there isn’t any there’s nothing” (99). Without love the human being is trapped in his old, worthless self which, since it is diminishing, forces him to be vampire or victim. Only love delivers from the diminution of the physical world in which the plays are set because its fullness is spiritual and consequently not subject to the laws of the physical world. That is why diminution provides so rich a lode. Imaging it invokes its complement of fullness in the absent metaphysical or supernatural world. The absent spirit becomes spirit incarnate in “Slacks and Tops.” As the daughter falls to the floor with the noose around her neck and the parents prepare to leave the motel room for the flight to Africa, “green jungle plants burst the glass windows and continue to grow wildly into the room” (51). This burst of another reality into quotidian reality implies the existence of another realm that intermittently impinges on the natural realm and that offers escape from the present reality. Characters who cannot tolerate the oppressive present try to escape, but their efforts range from the dilettantish to the bizarre. They involve themselves in a variety of role-playing activities, usually to wear the costumes of the new selves they would like to be. They take positions requiring uniforms, perform in theatricals, or attend masked balls. Although the characters’ efforts are amateurish in activities frequently no more than stunts, Kondoleon is honing his craft in these early plays for the three to come in the 1990s. The presence of masquerades in the midst of everyday reality gives his theatre a fantastic quality, suspending it between a known reality and a hoped-for reality, which is unchanging. The plays resonate with a cry to the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, who by disappearing has taken the fullness of the spirit from contemporary life, to return to mankind, for only an interceding divinity can rescue life from encroaching death. The prayer that expresses the yearning is exclaimed in the opening moments of the earliest of the anthologized plays: “The life cycle! Revival! Hope! Divine Design!” (6) This summary was necessary because the three plays now to be discussed can be thought of as a trilogy. The first two not only recapitulate the plays that precede them, they utilize an ancient structure with which to reinvent comedy. The comic spirit in turn enables Kondoleon in the third play to reinvent a primordial structure with which to give hope to life.

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In 1991 Theatre Communications Group published a volume of Kondoleon’s plays selected from a list of his works printed on the volume’s inside 14 cover. The first of the final three listed plays is the 1991 Love Diatribe, which opens with an actress appearing before the audience to identify her15 self as “love” and her activity in the play as “allegorical.” The realistic set, the cast, and dramaturgy that releases non-realistic scenes or action within the set are consistent with the plays of the 1980s. The addition of a prologue and another characteristic separates the three plays of the 1990s from the earlier ones. With the interior set and a cast of two interacting families and their houseguests, the prologue and the recognition token recreate Greek and Roman new comedy. We encountered old comedy, the comedy of Aristophanes, recreated in Ludlam’s theatre. It does not have a deity speaking a prologue. Greek tragedy does. Aphrodite, for example, speaks the prologue to Euripides’ Hippolytus, but the goddess does not return as a character in the action. Dionysus speaks the prologue to Euripides’ Bacchae and does participate as a character in the action, but no theatregoer would ever confuse that tragedy with new comedy, or the comedy of the Greek Menander and the Roman Plautus and Terence, the comedy from which developed the genre as we know it in the West. The prologue to Menandrean comedy can be spoken by either god or man, but if the former he does not return as a character. The speaker is determined by the question, How much does the audience need to know to follow the action? If the answer involves information that only a deity could know, he or she speaks the prologue. If a deity is not required, a mortal con16 veys the facts within his purview. Kondoleon’s prologue makes four points. The speaker is named Frieda, not Aphrodite or Venus, but she—that is, love—is nonetheless real, and since she is real, her love includes self-love, the “ready-resource” (5) for loving others. These two points are more in the spirit of the contemporary recreation than that of the original form, but they must be affirmed. Characters whose self-esteem has been nullified need to know that they have a reservoir of positive feeling from which to draw. The other two points are more typical of ancient models. She has come to alert the audience that given the principals’ intractable state, she must resort to the trickery for which she is renowned, but the spectators should not misunderstand her intention. She means to do good and not only for the two families but for the spectators too. “Although happiness is promised to no one,” she reminds them, “it is available upon demand to the hearty. So, be hearty and applaud me in the end” (5). The invitation to applaud is tan-


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tamount to an invitation to a celebration at which, she intimates before exiting, she will be present. By having a deity speak the prologue and then incarnate herself as a character, Kondoleon reinvents the genre’s original form as a vehicle for the affirmation he seeks to dramatize. Love Diatribe answers the prayer exclaimed in the opening moments of “Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise.” Frieda’s prologue appearance bespeaks the divine design needed to transform nature and rescue life. The activity that would have been a stunt or masquerade interrupting the action of an earlier play becomes the action of the play. It becomes a ritual, and since the deity herself will participate, it will be efficacious. Moreover, the ritual will have a happy ending, since it will be performed within the structure of new comedy. “What normally happens,” Northrop Frye abstracts new comedy’s plot structure, “is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play 17 some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will.” But the genre is not as formulaic as that statement sounds. “Within the overall homogeneity is extraordinary room for variation,” David Konstan introduces his study of the genre in its Roman form.18 Love Diatribe is a contemporary variation. A young man feels resisted but not in his desire for a young woman. His girlfriend killed herself by mixing medicine and alcohol in her depression, a depression that his sister jokingly suggests he caused and to which he grudgingly admits. Orin is the play’s hero. He and his sister, Sandy, attribute their arrested emotional growth to the parents’ resistance to them, a resistance attributed to the parents’ arrested emotional growth. The motif of the family’s “stingy emotional larder” (8) has its material counterpart in the dearth of food in the house. The mother, Gerry, invited Orin to dinner, but since she works, she does not cook, and neither the retired father, Dennis, nor Sandy knows how to. The four are starved for a sign of nourishing reality in life. Just before it arrives in the person of an exchange student, the stage directions have Orin, alone, searching the room for any scraps that may have fallen from his sister’s yogurt or his father’s snack. Neither offered to share. The first half of the action, up to the time of Frieda’s return from her brief prologue appearance, presents four dislikable characters, but the lack of sympathy accorded them by Kondoleon is intentional, for if they were likable, loving them would be easy. Orin has come home, rejoining Sandy, who left her husband after six months of marriage, and Dennis and Gerry, who are as infantile as they are. The differences between the two generations are that at least the son and daughter realize that they are emotionally retarded and they blame their parents for the retardation. By not resolving their

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problems with their parents, Dennis and Gerry were inadequate to the task of raising children. They blame America’s obsession with materialism and its social-welfare programs, but neither Orin nor Sandy—nor the audience— gives credence to their finger-pointing. This is a family held together only because forcing any one of them to leave requires energy no one of them has for anything other than complaining and blaming. The author highlights the irony in the situation by designating the single set, within quotation marks, as the “‘family room’” (4), but it is so only because it is the house’s one room that can accommodate all the whiners, who are physically and spiritually starved. Selfabsorbed, they are vampires feeding on one another. Sandy has fled the responsibilities of marriage to be “eleven again” (8) while Orin, forced to vacate his apartment, does not know where to go or “even…how to feel about” his girlfriend’s death (7). Gerry is gone during the day, and Dennis periodically absents himself for his sitz-bath treatment. The sympathetic characters are the members of the second of the two families whose interaction is the drama of Menandrean new comedy. Mrs. Anderson wants to interact. Although she blames Orin and her son Mike for the death of her other son, she shares her cooking with the four. The two young men did not kill the son, who died from contracting the AIDS virus, yet by mocking him as “‘Nemo the homo’” (11), they denied him a self by denying him his name. Mike also wants to interact with the family. He loves Sandy. She, however, is not interested, though she is not averse to taking advantage of his interest in her. Orin, who will not admit to his role in the son’s death, keeps his distance. And though the father gobbles everything that Mrs. Anderson brings into the family room, he protests that he is sick and tired of the neighbors’ presence in his home. With the play half over, there is no sign of the new society that new comedy’s resolution “crystallizes on the stage around the hero and his 19 bride.” Each of them trapped in his or her withering self, the four family members do not interact, the prerequisite for integration and union. They do not interact with Mrs. Anderson and Mike, and they do not interact among themselves. Furthermore, without Frieda the play lacks a young woman with whom the hero can interact. In the blend of realism and non-realism that characterizes Kondoleon’s theatre, Orin’s searching for crumbs is symbolic, an action disposing him, unlike the other three, to movement. At this point Frieda arrives in the guise of the foreign-exchange student whom the Andersons expect and announces to Orin, alone in the room, that the usual topic on which she speaks to high-school audiences is “love diatribe”: “how we all have to love each other and how love is a great power in the world” (28). Her return ac-


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tualizes not only her prologue intimation but an image in “The Brides,” which implies that violence is necessary to heal the two-headed bride, making her “one person again.” In the 1980 poetic drama, “maenads,” presumably from Euripides’ Bacchae, “ravage the groom” (114). Frieda is no maenad, but her intrusion into the lives of the two families is violent, for she will ravage their negative feelings about themselves and one another to heal them. She sets in motion a love diatribe with Orin and through him with everyone else except his sister. To Sandy the goddess in the guise of a student gives her ring to wear at the hospital where Gerry works and about which she and Dennis complain, the mother about the patients and the working conditions, the father about the cost in taxes of providing care for patients who do not deserve it. Visiting the hospital, where she is registered as a volunteer but has never gone, the sister is to touch each patient while saying, “‘I love you’” (34). Jaded enough to be willing to try any new experience, but not because she believes, Sandy agrees to go. Though she does not say, “I love you,” to Orin, Frieda lets him know that she is interested. By telling him that he is “cute” (30) and by encouraging him to talk about himself, thereby verbalizing his self-negation, she gets him into the discourse that is the diatribe while she prepares an infusion of flowers boiled in water that he will serve as tea to everyone except his sister. Because Sandy drinks her own tea, Frieda sends her to do in the hospital what Orin will do in the house. One by one the four other characters— Mike, Mrs. Anderson, Dennis, and Gerry—drink the tea and fall into unconsciousness. When Sandy returns elated by the positive response that she elicited from the hospital patients, she immediately repeats the ritual with the four bodies but with no response from them. “Did you cure anyone?” her brother asks, disbelieving her success in the hospital. “I cured myself,” she says (47). Curing oneself, one cures others; curing others, one cures oneself. That is the ritual Orin was to perform until Sandy’s declining Frieda’s potion made her a co-performer. When the sister returns from the hospital, she reports the love diatribe she performed there. When she is in the family room with her brother, surrounded by four unconscious bodies, the audience can see the ritual enacted. Although the tea is called an “infusion” (31), it is not the infusion that recovers the catastrophic loss of self, that fills the catastrophic feeling of emptiness. The tea renders the drinker unconscious, forcing the server to resuscitate him. Following the passing out of the second of the four, Frieda gives server Orin his instructions as ritual celebrant. He is to “revive them…. With love. By loving them” (39). Loving them, he discovers love in himself.

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At the beginning of the ritual, the server is the ritual celebrant, and the unconscious drinker is the action’s recipient. To resuscitate the recipient, the server must infuse him with a pouring of words extolling his worth as someone of value to society. To recall those words, which in his sense of his own denigration he has lost, the celebrant must descend into his “guts” (40) to plumb his nature with deepening fervor. Thus each celebrant also becomes a recipient because in talking to the unconscious drinker, the server is plumbing his/her own unconscious depths. The verbal images the server pours well up within himself/herself, filling himself/herself and the drinker, infusing and thereby releasing the latter’s congealed images. Each participant in the ritual discovers that his/her emotional larder is not as stingy as he/she felt it to be in a room that becomes symbolic of the self. Early in the play, Sandy prophetically describes the room as the place “where the subconscious and sub-subconscious meet” (18). With Sandy exhorting her brother to be “warmer, more loving” (47), Orin hugs each one while confessing his love for the person and, in Mrs. Anderson’s case, his guilt for mocking her son. At his sister’s bidding, he takes the initiative Frieda took with him to activate his reservoir of positive feelings from which to draw in his relations with others. As she kissed him, he kisses Mike and Mrs. Anderson. Since no one awakens, he and Sandy, thinking that perhaps they omitted a step in the ritual, embrace. With the two occupied, Frieda, who slipped out of the house during the scene, reenters. Her ringing of the doorbell awakens the four, who are renewed physically and emotionally. Interacting as they had not done before the ritual, the four who were unconscious form a new society with Sandy, Orin, and Frieda. “At the end of the play,” Frye continues abstracting new comedy’s plot structure, “the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and the moment when this crystallization occurs is the point of resolution in the action, the comic discovery, anagnorisis 20 or cognito.” Like long-lost family members or separated lovers, the ritual participants rediscover one another. Orin’s and Sandy’s confessions of love penetrated the tea drinkers’ unconscious states to awaken buried feelings in them, which they brought with them on the journey back to consciousness. Feeling good about themselves, they are quick to perceive good qualities in one another and share them. The final scene is a celebration of love, concretized in the acceptance of the recognition token. The recognition scene in Greek drama appears as early as Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, the second play in the Oresteia trilogy, where Electra’s recognition of Orestes’ lock of hair, footprints, and strip of weaving at Agamemnon’s grave reunites sister and brother. In new comedy, however,


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the token allows for a greater range of possibilities. With a family’s recognition of a ring or swaddling clothes or some other distinguishing token, the possessor turns out to be a native Athenian who is permitted to marry into Athenian society or the thought-dead son or daughter whose recovery restores communion within and between the two families and reunites lovers. It turns out that the two dwellings, new comedy’s single set, share the same life after all. Orin and Frieda will share the same life too. When Sandy returns from the hospital, elated with the response she received from the patients, she gives the ring, which Frieda gave to her when she left, to Orin to return to the exchange student, who when she reenters the room acts as if she is entering for the first time. The four who were unconscious and are now euphoric do not question her identity. Neither do the brother and sister. Although Orin senses that the ring is hers, he cannot demonstrate that it is so that when he offers it to her, everyone present interprets her accepting it as proof that they are engaged. That interpretation pleases the two lovers, who kiss again, vowing to spend the rest of their lives together. Frieda closes the action by reiterating to the audience that the spectators can be happy too if they make the effort of a love diatribe. Releasing repressed childhood feelings stimulates the recovery of mental health, but Kondoleon’s theatre is not primarily psychological. In quick succession the play eliminates as the cure for the catastrophic loss of self psychotherapy, discounted by Orin upon his arrival, and medical therapy, the sitz-bath treatment discounted by Sandy in her explanation of it to her brother. Love cures the deprivation, and love is religious. Love Diatribe is an allegory of the power that originates in a foreign realm yet is experienced in the psychological makeup. “If I were born in another century,” Frieda defends herself to Orin after Mike and Mrs. Anderson fall into unconsciousness, “I’d be wearing a see-through gown and have a wreath of leaves on my head and people would come to my temple to give me homage” (40). Kondoleon, however, does not confine Frieda’s place of origin to the classical world. She invokes the Judeo-Christian tradition when in answer to Orin’s questioning her identity as an exchange student because she does not have an authentic accent, she replies, “Did Jesus have an accent?” (31) The playwright wishes to invoke a time when life was believed to originate in a supernatural realm yet incarnated itself in the natural realm through love for mortals to give them hope of transcendence. With a deity as a prologue, Menandrean new comedy allows him to realize the wish in a comic mode. It also allows him to transform characters’ personal loss and unhappiness in the early plays into myth, including the Christian myth.

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Love Diatribe is a mythic recasting of the early plays. Frieda is the intervention of transcendent reality in everyday reality. Among depressed whiners, her therapy is a massive infusion of the “most powerful force in the universe” which, since it “changes the molecular structure of everything” (40), interiorly transforms the recipient. Her therapy is herself; she awakens desire in Orin for her. In the allegory love is the bride with whom the hero unites: the divine center of the new self of the new society that opposes the blank center of the old, loveless society. Indwelling, love ends the reign of vampirism’s transgression by filling the physical emptiness and healing the spiritual loss. The trilogy’s second play, The Houseguests (1993), removes the transcendence incarnated in Frieda, whom Orin calls the Andersons’ “house guest” (40), not only from the family room but from the universe. A new comedy with two families, each a couple, and two sets, one for each couple with the other as houseguests, the play physically manifests the catastrophic loss of self in the second of its two acts. Act 1 manifests the loss verbally. Since love is a massive infusion of positive feelings about oneself and others, its absence is a massive loss of 21 those positive feelings. “Could you know how much I despise you?” is the opening line, spoken by Vera to her husband John, with whom she is entertaining another couple as houseguests in their summer retreat. What might be banter between husband and wife is no game to the guests; Manny asks the host and hostess why they persist in abusing him and his wife Gale. The two couples refer to traumatic childhood experiences, but though the bynow familiar experiences help to explain the adults, they pale next to act-1’s vicious language. Vera blames the absent God for her inability to respond to Gale, who has just made a lesbian overture to her, though the hostess has the houseguest suck her toe as she scurrilously mocks her feelings. When Gale and Manny finally break down because they are overwhelmed by the depression of the weekend visit, Gale pleads with Vera to come with her to their winter home. Vera has a better idea. She will go with Manny, leaving his wife with John, who does not care one way or the other. “What else is there?” the bored husband asks (25). With no one of them objecting, the four agree to meet in six months, perhaps for a new alignment, and the act ends with an allusion to a descent into hell. “Since God has lost interest in us,” Vera prophesies, “we will amuse his brother, the devil” (26). Following the revelation in act 1 of the degeneration of the characters’ emotional capacity—for sympathy, for instance—act 2 reveals the degeneration of their physical capacity for life. Six months later the four reassemble in the second set, the winter home of Manny and Gale, occupied during the


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six months by Manny and Vera. He is deaf, and she is in body casts. When John and Gale arrive, he is in a wheelchair, his hands and feet amputated, and she is blind. If Love Diatribe dramatizes the contemporary wish for deliverance, The Houseguests dramatizes the contemporary reality without it. Though the characters never mention the virus, referring instead to accidents as the explanations for the catastrophes, the play is an allegory of love too but love in the age of AIDS, for the fact is that the physical devastation began after the switching of partners. The trilogy’s second play also recapitulates the early plays in that it pictures a universe from which God absconded, leaving mankind bereft of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity. If the four could become unconscious, they could obliterate their consciousness of the loss. But they cannot. When John is the opening scene accuses his wife of being “monstrously devoid of an inner life” (5), he uncovers the blank center of the universe that Kondoleon characters inhabit. Since they have no experience of love, they fill the void with the consciousness of rejection, betrayal, and transgression. Throughout act 1 Vera talks about God as her “identical” twin. “I would…kill repeatedly and without remorse,” she tells Gale, “as God kills!” Their mirror image, God suffers a corresponding loss of sympathy for humans. He is, like them, a “vicious host” (12–14). Without Frieda’s tea to render them unconscious so that they can develop a new consciousness, they are trapped in their old consciousness. They cannot drain themselves of their hatred for life, and they therefore cannot fill themselves with love for it. Maimed, they cannot create new selves in a new society. An exit emerges, however. So wracked by pain that they can feel nothing but the pain, so sick of their afflictions that they are surfeited with themselves, they gradually realize that they can become unconscious: un-selfconscious. By helping one another in their handicaps, they have less time to brood over their own. They discover sympathy. Famished because they cannot move about and because they have no money, what with hospital bills and law suits, they share what little they have. Having lost their jobs, they talk about ways that together they can earn money to restore some semblance of order to their lives. They agree to remain together so that they can better minister to one another. As John says, “Physical pain…is a great educator!” (41) The play closes with the four of them praying. “To whom? To what?” Gale asks (43). To love, Vera answers. The hope is that their prayer “will wake up” God (45) to help them defy death, but even without the intervention, they have changed. The play opens with two separate families and two separate sets, yet in a contemporary recognition scene, a scene that substi-

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tutes for tokens of recognition mutilated selves, the four realize that they are one family in one set united, not by genealogy or possessions, but by suffering. If love can metaphysically transform human nature in Love Diatribe, can it physically transform it? Will their health be restored? the others ask. Perhaps, Vera replies, for if they can believe in the miracle that is love, they can believe in other miracles. And if their health is not, they still must believe in the power that transforms the self spiritually because physical life is transitory. “We’re houseguests of our bodies and of God’s earth and we are no sooner here than our host wants us to leave” (45), a humbled Vera leads the others. Since the host has deserted them, they pray to the one positive feeling they have, incipient though it is. The play’s closing spoken word is “Love,” followed by closing stage directions for “thunder and lightning” (46). The rain that breaks the drought of the wasteland arrives in the third and last play of the 1990s. The Little Book of Professor Enigma was staged posthumously in December 1994-January 1995 by New York’s Theater for the New City. Reviewing the production, New York Times critic Ben 22 Brantley called the play a “dramaturgical mess…with an inspired madness.” I agree with both judgments while adding to each. The script from which I quote is a revision, but given its problems the author could not have considered the version final. Yet even with the problems, it is inspired, the trilogy’s crown. The third play dispenses with the ancient structure of Menandrean new comedy, reinvented to inform the trilogy’s first two plays, for the reinvented archetypal structure of mimetic ritual. The Little Book is set in an art colony, a bucolic retreat to which artists come by invitation to be freed of commonplace pressures so that they can create. None of the colonists, however, seems to qualify as talented or productive. Furthermore, the retreat reminds the new arrival of a sanitarium. To the credit of the team responsible for the set construction, Donald Brooks and Paul Ferri, the production looked like neither an art colony nor a sanitarium. Ignoring Kondoleon’s stage direction which calls for a representation of the interior of an old lounge, they did nothing to the performance space. It was dark: a blank. The scenic design made the surface symbolic. The script opens with a scream followed by another scream until the cast, running, are “screaming 23 and laughing, jumping out of hiding places….” Throughout his theatre Kondoleon alludes to the Dionysian dance. Although the script does not designate the movement as Dionysian, from the free-flowing, “uninhibited game” (2) the cast play, they are meant to be in the undifferentiated flux from which life and Apollonian form originate and to which the dismembered Dionysus descends to be resurrected. The production captured the


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uniformity. All wore white, the women in skirts and blouses, the men in slacks and shirts. Though they had not yet assumed their roles and could not therefore be identified, they nevertheless made an effort to conceal their faces by wearing hats or turning their faces away from the audience. The cast entered the space one by one from stage left and proceeded across it antically until all were in the area and had rimmed a semicircle extending from stage left to stage right, at which point they stopped and held the semicircle. For that instant the Dionysian dancers directed the audience’s attention to the dark, blank space between them and the audience’s first row. Whatever would appear would do so within the void. As soon as the chorus of dancers exit the space, the script has two speaking prologues appear one after the other in the space, each developing the preceding segment. The first is the newcomer, Lowell, for whom the colony resembles a sanitarium. He introduces the ritual by introducing one of ritual’s distinguishing characteristics. He plays his violin for a few moments before stopping to listen to the melody repeated without his playing the instrument. He introduces the mystery in the ritual by alluding to the mystery of his own life that may involve someone’s suicide made to look like murder. And by playing for and then addressing the audience, he adds the element of performance. The second is the colony’s manager, Noma, who appears ostensibly to ask the audience to contribute to a fundraiser to save the colony, doomed to extinction by cutbacks in federal aid, but actually to lead a prayer for intervention other than fiscal. Colonies exist, she entreats the spectators, to enable artists to “quest for the transcendent.” The appeal is urgent, she implores the silence. “Save us from ruin, from God’s wrath, from ourselves!” (4) Her contradictory name reinforces the mystery. Denoting a pathological condition, it suggests a priestess, druidical perhaps but a priestess of a hidden deity because no Frieda appears. The inscrutable darkness evokes, not Menander’s universe, but Joseph Conrad’s. (The allusion will be completed later as will the forthcoming reference to Agatha Christie.) Yet the production also captured the comic tone of Kondoleon’s universe. Lowell is a fey character reminiscent of the strange young man, Christopher Wren, in Christie’s The Mousetrap. And when actress Crystal Field as Noma reiterated the federal government’s position that the “private sector” (3) must pick up the slack left by its cutbacks in funding, she covered her crotch with her hand. Neither comic irreverence, however, nor metaphysical anguish, violin recital nor invocatory prayer provokes the deity’s appearance. The prayer for divine intercession unheeded, the cast repeat the Dionysian dance that opens the play before exiting the space. With the prologue completed, the

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space becomes the art colony, and the chorus, now differentiated, become the colonists. They become the actors in the play and the participants in the two rituals to revive their culture’s absent center. Carter, a writer who has not written in years, introduces the others to a game they will play. He found a little book, blank except for the title page and copyright. The book is a metaphor for the universe of Kondoleon’s plays. The core of existence is a blank from which emanate ambiguous, contradictory signals such as a “long enigmatic stare” (33). Since blankness is terrifying, the colonists personalize it by naming the universe’s center Professor Enigma. Since one of the signals is of encroaching darkness, they feel an urgency in penetrating the darkness to determine whether the stare is “significant” (33). If it is, are their fantasies significant? In other words, are their lives as revealed in the fantasies of worth to the professor? When Carter announces that each colonist will anonymously write in the blank book what he/she imagines the other colonists’ fantasies to be, he indicates that the game is a mimetic ritual, the basis of which is Vera’s perception in The Houseguests that she and God are “identical twins.” They have no other choice. No Frieda intercedes for them, and the prayers that close The Houseguests and open The Little Book go unanswered. And they are artists, accustomed to using their imagination. Because the blankness is “unexplainable” (49), it defies rational, linguistic analysis. Thus each artist is asked to imagine the other artists’ fantasies: their images hidden from the light of day and rational, linguistic analysis. Acting on the belief that a correspondence exists between the void in themselves and the void they inhabit in the contemporary world, they conjure hidden or repressed images within themselves. The hope is that these images will awaken images in the void, conjuring the vanished center. Mimesis is the right approach. This first model is wrong. A pivotal scene prefigures the divergence of this model from the goal. It is also a problem typical of a script, the intent of which is clear, but the development of which is inchoate. Colonist Sussman presents a slide show consisting of two sets of images. One set pictures God with Adam in the Sistine Chapel, for instance; the other set pictures nude males. The first set is projected upright; the second set, upside down. As Sussman talks about the devil and hell while projecting, the inversion in the fantasies they are about to perform leads away from the deity they want to invoke and into the underworld prefigured in the opening Dionysian dance. Once again the production team for Theater for the New City deserves commendation. No beds were brought into the space. A headboard with a spread tossed in front of it gave the impression of a single bed. The design was fluid, in keeping with the shifting, transforming nature of the darkness


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in which the surface realism dissolves, for the Dionysian flux is the realm of the irrational; it dissolves individuality and merges identities. The characters begin piling into the bed, passing the book from one to another yet without acknowledging one another. Those not in the bed appear in costumes which mask identity to enact the fantasies, the pace accelerating as those in the darkened bed slip offstage to don costumes and join in the frenzy. Except for Noma as a roasted chicken, the fantasies are banal. One colonist becomes a transvestite; another wears a padded phallus. A male in jockstrap does a faun’s dance whereas a female in leather and carrying a whip is a dominatrix of cunnilingus. A twosome becomes a threesome. Yet the sexual fantasies are meant to reveal the characters’ limited comprehension of the mystery of existence because the only experiences they can concretize are their own. Marin says it best when, handed the blank book, she struggles to image the mystery. “When I have ventured into the darkness [in search of God] I’ve only seen human weakness, mostly in the form of lust” (32–33). So long as the colonists imitate their experiences, the fantasies are sterile. Not only do they fail to revive, they produce the opposite effect. At the height of the orgy, the threesome—Marin, Noma, and Sussman—kill a fourth colonist, a woman named Jane. The reason they articulate, that she was observing them, is irrational and savage but appropriate to the Dionysian frenzy, which is a realm exempt from rational and moral concerns. The slaying, however, is absolutely right for another reason, which is why Kondoleon’s dramaturgical mess, despite its confusion, is worth seeing. To appreciate the drama’s design, we have to backtrack. After meeting his colleagues, newly arrived Lowell muses on the fact that his wife Alison, with whom he is not intimate because he is gay, is a double for hysterical, suicidal Jane, a poet whose term is up at the colony but who has nowhere to go and whose love for Carter is unrequited. He wishes he could think of a practical joke, he tells the poet, that takes advantage of the resemblance. The audience has to accept the resemblance as a given of the play with the two roles taken by the same actress. The play needs the double in the cast, but initially the idea does not work well. As Lowell writes, his wife appears onstage, presumably because he is putting her into the fantasy he is describing. Yet the audience does not recognize her because the actress playing Jane appears, and up to this time, Alison has only been referred to and only by Lowell to Jane. Even if the spectator detects a difference based on the actress’ speech, he has to think about the following scene before he gets any insight. Moments later Alison appears again but behind a screen, apparently to indicate a distance from the colony, doing a sexy dance, apparently for her lover because

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when Lowell phones her to come to the colony, he has to ask the person who answers to please call his wife. She then addresses the audience to explain why she consents. She loves adventure, and her husband’s fantasy is “naughty” (37). Between Alison’s first and second appearances, Jane hangs herself, but Lowell cuts her down. Jane is hysterical and suicidal. She is also different from the others in that she is the one colonist who loves. She is no goddess of love, but, like Frieda, she incarnates the mystery of existence that suggests another realm impinging on the natural realm. The thunder and lightning that close The Houseguests make their first appearance in The Little Book when she announces to the audience that she plans to hang herself, and the heavenly signs are repeated as the slide-show scene dissolves into the bedroom scene and as the three kill her. The perfect victim in that she feels she no longer has any reason to live, she enters the orgy dressed as a “maiden of spring” (43) yet moves slowly, her walk showing the effect of the attempted suicide. Jane epitomizes the mystery’s contradictory signals and the shift from sexual fantasy to sacrificial ritual, from profane history to sacred myth. She terminates the first mimetic ritual, for the participants disperse following the slaying, while her entrance into the scene prepares for the second mimetic ritual. She is bedecked in “blooming” flora, flinging “petals” from her hands (43). Symbolizing the death of nature and the promise of its renewal, she is a figure of the dying and reviving god of myth. Though the script is flawed, Kondoleon’s sense of drama never failed him. If the ritual is over—if it is not succeeded by another one—it is devoid of significance, and the play degenerates into a murder-mystery investigation conducted by the police. The response that commands attention is Marin’s to the existence of the little book found at the scene the police are considering as a crime scene. She dismisses it as a “joke.” To a question about the professor, she replies, “Mr. Enigma? Nobody, a make believe person with no meaning at all” (45). The Little Book now stages Lowell’s fantasy for which he cut down the hanging Jane. It is the second of the two mimetic rituals, this one with a model different from that of the first. Alison, pretending to be Jane, visits Carter. Since the police do not interrogate him, he has to be the only one in the colony unaware of Jane’s death (even though the stage directions specify 24 that he remove the body following the slaying ). When Alison sends him out of the bed and the room on a pretext, she and Lowell substitute the corpse in the bed for him to discover upon his return. As he flees in terror, the couple remove the corpse to dispose of it so that Alison can impersonate Jane.


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There is more to the scene than simply plot, though. Alison’s questioning Carter about the little book allows him to give a reply different from the one Marin gave the police. Because he does not know that Jane is dead, the ritual is still being enacted. Professor Enigma has meaning. “It’s always waiting for you there in ambush” (50). Carter restores the mystery to existence. It has a meaning, which Marin denied to the police, but it is indecipherable. It is irrational and savage, random and catastrophic. Yet the mystery also is a loving god. At least it once was. It performed the original sacrifice which Frieda’s and Lowell’s rituals imitate. Lowell’s ritual is more daring than his counterpart’s in Love Diatribe. Frieda induces a death-like sleep in four of the characters and then encourages depressed Orin and Sandy to complete the ritual by sacrificing their self-absorption to revive them. The colonists are being summoned to a sleep-like death which terminates life. Lowell takes it upon himself to resuscitate life from the void, to transform death into rebirth by returning Jane, in the person of her double, to the colony. Unaware that Alison is her double, the rejoicing cast assemble to celebrate the poet’s return from the dead. Lowell takes as a model for the second mimetic ritual, not the colonists’ experiences, but a divine act. The result so astonishes the others that two feel compelled to cite Eliade’s “Myth of the Eternal Return” and Frazer’s (misspelled “Fraser’s”) “vegetative myths” (54) as commentaries on the act to which they and the audience are witnesses. Either one explains the ritual’s function. Mircea Eliade’s book discusses ways in which archaic societies defended themselves against the tyranny of history as autonomous and irreversible. Archaic man regularly participated in archetypal rituals, originally performed by a deity, to revive a transcendent reality and make it immanent, thereby abolishing profane time, which is irreversible, and returning him to sacred or cosmic time, which is the continual present. By reducing his life to the “repetition of archetypal acts, that is, to categories and not to events, to the unceasing rehearsal of the same primordial myths,” primitive man “lives 25 in a continual present.” Of the many examples Eliade gives, one in particular is relevant to the posthumously produced play: A sacrifice, for example, not only exactly reproduces the initial sacrifice revealed by a god ab origine, at the beginning of time, it also takes place at that same primordial mythical moment; in other words, every sacrifice repeats the initial sacrifice and 26 coincides with it.

Thus The Little Book of Professor Enigma is a ritual sacrifice imitating the original sacrifice of the slain and resurrected god. Its objective is to revive the realm present in the divine emissary in Love Diatribe but slain because

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absent from The Houseguests. Revived in the ritual performers, the supernatural reality will vanquish the impending annihilation. To the spectator who protests that the rebirth is a lie nullifying the second mimetic ritual, one can reply that it is not a lie but an illusion, just as George and Martha’s game in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is an illusion and not a lie. Alison’s impersonation of Jane is make-believe, as is her claim that she is returning from a “deep sleep” (54), but the play justifies the second ritual. Prior to it, no one cares about anyone else; no one is sensitive to Jane’s plight. Not only does it rescue the colonists from themselves and the action from banal fantasies, without it the play would be a variation on Christie’s The Mousetrap, in which a group of odd characters are isolated from the rest of the world in Monkswell Manor, where murder is committed. The murder mystery is entertaining but insignificant. The sacrificial ritual uncovers the significance beneath the surface inanity. Sussman concludes his interrogation of Jane’s death by paraphrasing the black boy’s contemptuous announcement of Kurtz’s death in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “‘She dead’” (44). When her double arrives, however, bringing the rain heralded by the thunder and lightning, all feel rejuvenated. One by one, with Alison as Jane, each steps forward to inform the audience of the regeneration in his/her life, from involvement in humanitarian efforts to renewed writing. Of course the ending is comic, but any other ending would be inconsistent with the play’s tone and Kondoleon’s art, which espouses reconciliation without compromising the quest’s seriousness. And the comic ending does not trivialize the play’s discoveries. Although the colonists know only the lust of “cock” and “pussy,” because in the closing lyric “enigma / Of its secrets it is a miser” (55–56), the significance is that the mystery of existence so imprints itself on their consciousness that it spurs them to act. That they can perform a ritual that annuls time’s ravages invokes the possibility of transcendence in nature. As for reviving the absent transcendence, The Little Book completes what we can consider Kondoleon’s trilogy on the subject. The colonists may hope for the return of the absconded God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but the truth they have to live with is that the culture’s center has shifted from a divine to a human center. Yet by relinquishing dependence upon a sacred realm to rescue them, they discover a sacred realm. Discovering the ability within themselves to imitate an act in mythic time, they escape profane time to return to mythic, or sacred, time. The enigma does not change; the colonists’ attitude toward it does. Accepting existence as a mystery, they are no longer intimidated by the enigma, and as they rise from the Dionysian flux to new Apollonian forms, the audience makes another dis-


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covery. If the play justifies the second ritual, the two rituals together justify theatre, for it is the creation of theatre that the audience is witnessing in the rituals’ performance. In creating the illusion of rebirth, Kondoleon’s play meets Howe’s criterion. She observes in the preface to one of the collections of her plays that 27 “plays are all about creating illusion….” Role-playing is theatre’s fundamental act. After immersing themselves in roles fantasized for them, the colonists regenerate roles for themselves. Lowell unites in his person the drama’s sacred and profane realms. His surname is the mythologically suggestive “Everson” (5). A composer, he also is the director of the play-withinthe-play. He performs his compositions in the opening and closing numbers, the latter the lyric about the enigma as a miser of its secrets, and he conceives and directs the sacrificial ritual. Theatre is ritual. By reperforming an action, theatre repeats it in the continual present and renews it. Moreover, by stimulating the imagination with choral dances that discombobulate and prologues that pique, theatre invites the audience to participate with the performers in the celebration of life in the shadow of the encroaching catastrophe. Kondoleon died of AIDS-related complications at age 39 in March 1994. Neither absurdist nor postmodernist, he created plays that affirm the need for love as a healing power to fill the vacuum in human nature left by the disappearance of a healing supernatural intervention. He did something else. Three of his creations fill the void with rituals that are informed by ancient and archetypal structures yet are unmistakably contemporary. In resurrecting ancient and archetypal structures, Kondoleon’s theatre resembles Ludlam’s theatre. Lowell’s ritual recalls John’s phallic dance of defiance in Gurney’s The Cocktail Hour. Yet it is with Howe’s theatre that Kondoleon’s theatre bears close comparison. Orin in Love Diatribe discovers that rather than being “stingy,” his “emotional larder” (8) is a reservoir of images of esteem that well up, filling his negated self and pouring into the unconscious drinker’s reservoir to release his images to well up in him. The family room, which is symbolic of the self, is the equivalent to the kitchen in The Art of Dining, which is symbolic of the feminine self as a storehouse of ingredients with which the artist-chef prepares the art-dishes she serves her guests. The two couples in The Houseguests are like the couple in One Shoe Off in that they huddle for mutual support. Huddling, characters in both theatres discover the healing power of human values such as love. The response to the wind that howls at the close of One Shoe Off and The Houseguests marks a contrast between the two theatres. Howe’s characters’ love and defiance abate the wind’s, or death’s, encroachment. Kondoleon’s characters pray to God to help them abate death’s encroachment

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because love requires a supernatural ground to nourish it. The infusing ritual in Love Diatribe releases an inexhaustible wellspring within the characters only because it has a divine source. When the source absconds in The Houseguests, the wellspring sinks into a vacant center. The affirmation of love remains strong in the plays. With its roots undernourished, however, love’s future is grim. What is inexhaustible in Kondoleon’s theatre is the imagination for creating rituals. Had he lived, the rituals would have continued. Since they end with his end, the next chapter explores a theatre that generates the unending ritual of death and rebirth.

() &' C H A P T E R T H R E E

Richard Foreman “My goal has always been to transcend very ‘painful’ material with the dance 1 of manic theatricality,” Richard Foreman explains in the preface to the second volume of plays from the Ontological-Hysteric Theater for which he has written, designed, and directed since founding it in 1968. The “dance of manic theatricality” suggests the choral dance of Greek theatre. Yet while the two theatres are grounded in choral dances, the differences between them are too many to be enumerated. Instead this chapter proposes to show how after rejecting Greek theatre, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater returns to it in My Head Was a Sledgehammer, a 1994 play that is the first in a trilogy. The chapter opens with an outline of the contemporary theatre on relevant points of contrast with the classical theatre and then examines a 1974 play before examining the 1994 play and the other two plays in the trilogy. Foreman’s plays dispense with plot such as that which entangles Oedipus. Neither is the setting a real or legendary place such as Thebes. It is the landscape of the mind, which is the playwright’s, creating theatre. It follows that his characters are not characters in the traditional sense but impersonations of impulses released in the landscape, there to conflict and collide among themselves and with images from the external world as they become conscious choices. The choices are made within the mind from among the impulses; the plays do not dramatize the external action subsequent to the choice such as Orestes’ fleeing the Furies in the Oresteia. Since the landscape is the interior of Foreman’s mind, the plays are not an imitation of an action in the world but the action of the mind, not a movement toward a resolution but the movement itself. A scene in the 1975 Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation illustrates the OntologicalHysteric Theater’s break with traditional theatre. The actor playing Max does a shuffle dance. When the music fades, he continues, at which time the playwright’s recorded voice comments to the audience: The old theater would prove to you that Max is dancing the way that he is dancing, by which is meant his motives, proven real and genuine, and you are convinced in a

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Drawing Upon the Past way appropriate to the theater. The new theater doesn’t convince you of anything 2 like that but he keeps doing it, anyway.

Foreman does not seek to prove anything. He presents a succession of impulses which channel into choices in images appropriate to his theatre such as wings for flight and falling rocks and bodies, polyphonic music and periodic thuds. The antithesis of the mental action, or the movement embodied onstage in Max, is coagulation, or solidity. The images constantly rise to consciousness and fall into unconsciousness. Whenever one congeals, it is in the playwright’s words a “dead husk.”3 It inhibits creativity. Without linear plot development and traditional characterization, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater frustrates, especially since its founder incorporates strategies such as sectioning the stage with framing devices, distorting spatial relationships, and mixing recorded and live voices to alienate the spectator from the conventional theatre experience. The disorienting strategies lead therefore, not to the sharing of an experience or emotion, but to the discovery of the ground beneath experience, the ground which releases the impulses that the creating mind transforms. The 1974 Vertical Mobility (Sophia = (Wisdom): Part 4), the fourth of four plays with Sophia in the title or subtitle, images the discovery. The play opens with Max, the impersonation of the artist in Foreman, finishing the writing of a composition, presumably another play, at which time the performance space’s rear wall opens to reveal an island mausoleum to which creativity as completed product is remanded. Enter Rhoda, the erotic impulse to which Max responds; she becomes motionless, strapped in a chair. Though she is released, she is not the only immobilized impulse or object. In fact, the next time the mausoleum opens, out comes a rag-stuffed body with which Rhoda interacts. Sophia herself is confined by dead husks, unable to see where she is walking because the book she is reading blocks her view while a stand containing three stuffed heads covers hers. When a stuffed head is set atop Ben’s head, the stage crew knock it off with a baseball bat. With limited mobility, reclining in boats as metaphors for a flowing movement, Max, Rhoda, and Ben journey to Sophia, who is disengaging herself from the book. Freed from it, she and Rhoda change into costumes signifying their liberation. Against images of birds in flight, they are dressed for a game of tennis: a metaphor for a creating spirit whose oscillation between meditation and frenzy the two embody in the game’s phases. They can stroke from the baseline, or they can charge the net for a furious volley, directing racquets against the impelling ball. Now the opening wall reveals the light of altered perception. The play is over after Foreman’s recorded voice acknowledges that Rhoda knows she is “in Paradise, but its beauty is not

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enough for her.” Closure is not the goal of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Neither is the goal recreating Aristophanic old comedy or Menandrean new comedy, though, like Ludlam and Kondoleon, Foreman incorporates images in his plays associated with Greek theatre. Early in Vertical Mobility, Rhoda wears a headdress. Before the liberation scene, she and Max clump across the stage to the mausoleum, each with a foot fastened to a riser to suggest a “cothurnus” (175), to line up behind Sophia, whose head is in a book. The latter thinks of herself as a goddess returned from the dead, yet when an obstacle obstructs her view of the printed page, she complains that she is “always buried in reading matter” (177). Since the costumes worn by Rhoda and Max with the hose running from Ben’s penis mimic costumes worn in Greek tragedy and comedy, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater rejects the theatre whose dramas have become the anthologized dead husks from which Sophia has to be liberated. It is the “old” theatre of “motives” that Max’s shuffle dance in Pandering to the Masses leaves behind. Even though classical theatre is rejected, the images cannot help but invoke the Athenian dramatic festivals. The elaborate headdress and elongated penis invoke Aristophanic comedy while the cothurnus invokes tragedy and Dionysus, the god in whose honor the festivals were held and who wears cothurni in Aristophanes’ Frogs. And the contemporary playwright is unequivocal about his theatre’s source in the dance of Dionysian generative power. Unnamed in his first plays but subsequently identified in the programs were the undifferentiated stage crew. Collectively they were non-speaking chorus members who participated, initially by assisting with the props but ultimately by performing in the dances which charge impulses to become differentiated actors such as Max, Rhoda, and Ben. After they line up behind Sophia in Vertical Mobility and the hose from Ben’s penis is run up under the women’s dresses and into the men’s flies, all dance in place. Then “lights up on room” (175). It is during the dance that the spectator hears the hum that characterizes the plays as reverberating machines. The individuals’ interaction among themselves, with the world, and with the undifferentiated chorus is the play’s action. Their understanding of themselves, their collisions and attachments, and the direction of their movement is the drama. Differentiation, or the impulses’ journey from the unconscious flux to the consciousness of individuation, or wisdom, is painful because individuation is making choices. Yet pain is the necessary condition of creativity. As the title of another play, Pain(t), indicates, the artist cannot paint without having suffered it. The choral dance of manic theatricality transcends the pain in two senses. It offers the differentiated impulse the relief of dissolving consciousness of separateness, and it celebrates the re-

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newal of differentiation by delivering new impulses into the journey, or creative process. Thus in their common source, the early plays recall Greek theatre, only to differ from it. Foreman’s chorus is non-speaking, and his speaking roles do not incarnate the Apollonian principle in their speeches because formed art for the contemporary playwright is dead matter. Creativity, the subject of his plays, is process, which means encouraging the release of Dionysian impulses rather than encouraging their formation into a unitary standard, be it socially conditioned self or Apollonian artifact, although individuation is inevitable. That is, short of suicide, the creating mind cannot stop the process of releasing impulses, but the person can direct them into the individual he chooses to be. The removal of the cothurni in Vertical Mobility supports this interpretation. Foreman invokes classical theatre in his theatre’s early plays because both have the same source. All creativity does. But Greek dramas have become artifacts to be studied and not living action. Moreover, by removing the symbol of tragedy for the liberation scene, Max and Rhoda reject not only the theatre in which tragedy was born but the tragic vision of existence, a vision in which man is increasingly isolated from the ground of his being. Let us now consider the 1994 play in which the hero accepts the cothurni, My Head Was a Sledgehammer. It is the first play in the trilogy that this chapter studies. When the experimental theatre’s founder went into his meditative period—his middle period following the 1985 Miss Universal Happiness—he reduced the cast to three impersonated impulses. Performances still included frenetic action, in the hobbling, driving, and spinning scenes in The Cure and What Did He See? and in the chase scene in The Mind King and the stabbing scene in Samuel’s Major Problems. But he had eliminated the chorus and the dance sequences. He restores the chorus to My Head Was a Sledgehammer, the setting to which is a dazzling metaphor. It is a classroom but a non-representational one with blank blackboards that the chorus try to erase; books and papers slammed against walls, crumpled, and thrown about; props such as a stuffed horse and huge disk rolled on and off a stage sectioned with string and markers; an electric chair; and geometric shapes of different sizes at different angles. The analogue is the interior of Foreman’s head into which and from which pulsate a chorus of pre-schoolers, all dressed identically in a uniform which conceals gender and all wearing dunce caps and masks or funny faces. The directions call for them to invent their behavior. They bolt, collide, perform gymnastic routines, stop and point in unison, and pulsate on and off

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the performance space. They are undifferentiated, inexplicable impulses: sheer force manifested as a repeating mechanism. Their designer identifies 5 them as “gnomelike creatures.” The dictionary defines gnome as an ageless creature who lives underground guarding the earth’s treasure. The multiplicity of impulses is the base layer of the stage design for a multilayered mind. The fluid unconscious releases impulses into consciousness which, itself multilayered, converts the incoming force into the form appropriate to the action required. A school is a perfect image for the conscious mind’s natural activity as a classification system. Arranging hierarchically from lower to higher learning, it imposes order or understanding on life’s disorder in academic disciplines, books, and other forms encountered in the classroom and library. The culmination of order is the school’s headmaster, the mind’s center of consciousness. An irrational chorus pulsating in physical movement and a rational individual communicating in language are the two poles between which the drama takes place. Rhoda is the stimulus in the early and middle plays for oscillation between poles, but she is not present in My Head. Two students are, though, and they are brilliantly consistent with the metaphor of a school for the head. Midway between the pre-school base and the headmaster vertex are two impulses differentiated into male and female students. Unlike the chorus, they speak but ask questions of the center more than make statements to him, for they are gaining consciousness and they learn through language. The male literally absorbs knowledge. Reading in one of the Professor’s books, “‘Eat me’” (201), he ingests the page. The vertex is the most differentiated structure in that he is neither multiple nor double but a single individual. The one questioned who speaks in statements, he is the Professor, the one who professes to know. At the play’s opening, he admits that he feels connected to the “source” (195) of the voices he hears. He is connected. For example, he knows that the spiritual impulses which emanate from the unconscious are the truth of existence which “gushes forth” through him and all life but once revealed “takes the unfortunate shape of everything that isn’t true” (200). Spirit becomes its opposite, matter, when manifested, as the chorus becomes visible when pulsating onstage or further concretized when, converting impulses into thoughts, the Professor expresses the thoughts in language. To the female student, he makes a critical distinction. When she repeats her understanding of his ability with language—“You make up rhymes that don’t rhyme”—he demurs. “Not quite. I make up rhymes. I do that. But: they don’t rhyme” (216). Rhyming is a rational arrangement of irrational impulses, which do not rhyme. Yet it is his explaining his function that sets

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in motion the drama, returning matter to spirit, unity to multiplicity, and life to death and rebirth. The text of My Head, which originated in Foreman’s subconscious, is “verbal disorganization” (220). The Professor, as the headmaster of consciousness, organizes the disjointed images that the unconscious releases. As he says, “I GO, with the FLOW—” (207). To the degree that he is the medium through which the impulses flow to create “automatic truths” (216), he is simply performing his function. Coordinating the flow, he channels opposing currents into fusing metaphors. Much of the play has to do with displaying charts and objects to illustrate metaphors that enable the flowing currents to continue traveling. Travel itself is a metaphor for the process that releases contents of the unconscious into consciousness. The Professor exceeds his function, however, when he explains the mind and thereby demystifies it. But it is understandable that he would explain. He is seduced by his students’ emulating his higher form, the form to which they aspire in the process of individuation. The process is the reason they are in school and the reason the mind is pictured as a classroom. The male and female students have evolved as individuals beyond the uniformly irrational, underground impulses and are directed toward their role model. He is the classroom’s focus; they seduce him into becoming the center. Flattered by their emulation, he allows himself to expend himself—his spirit— by converting it into the discourse of language and the surface reality of illustrations. As they absorb his thoughts, they converge toward a new center, leaving him a dead husk as he leaves impulses he converts to rational form. Reduced to matter, no longer impressing his students who have appropriated his knowledge, he falls toward the unconscious flux in which he originated. We have been seeing My Head as a drama of the interior life because Foreman is at a peak in his career. By investing the impulses with characterological qualities lacking in his early cerebral plays, he humanizes the quest for meaning in the disorder of existence. The three have egos, reveal feelings, and add exotic items to their clothing to attract one another. As males, the Professor and male student compete for the female student’s attention. One of the Professor’s first statements is that his “secret desire is—win love from many beautiful women” (196), a sentiment the female student pretends not to hear. As students, the male and female compete for the instructor’s attention. Striving to achieve in school, the two students press for more of his knowledge. Driven away from the source of his voices in the pulsating chorus, he increasingly expends energy to bridge the widening gap with metaphors and an explanation that unifies existence, all the while knowing that an explanation for the truth is not the truth itself.

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Yet the three are not characters who have so evolved beyond their origin that they are no longer impulses. The Professor and the male student periodically race across the stage from each other, pound their chests, and emit primal screams, amplified by their body mikes. The three impulses fall to the floor, bolt, and appear and disappear because they are involuntarily competing for attention in a repeating mechanism in a reverberating machine, Foreman’s metaphors for his plays. As neurons in a mechanical process, they will proceed to their destination in the brain, there to be converted into whatever action the cellular structure dictates. Seen this way, the play contains no mind separate from the brain and no center of consciousness separate from the center of the nervous system. Foreman’s multivalent theatre creates more than one viewing possibility. From a welter of undifferentiated impulses, a mechanical process differentiates, and from a welter of undifferentiated impulses, an educational process produces an individual who differentiates. As a result some might conclude that determinism and choice have about equal weight in interpreting behavior in the play. I disagree. As the title, Unbalancing Acts, of one of the playwright’s volumes indicates, a duality is difficult to keep balanced. For me, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater is a theatre of the tension between mind-choice and brain-determinism with the former taking the edge. In My Head it is the return to Greek theatre that unbalances the interpretations toward free will. First, though, we must go outside of the play for metaphors fundamental to the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. In Symphony of Rats, Tornadoville is the city where “something gives birth, a holy spirit ignited, unlocatable, burning.” It is the mind as the unconscious field in which life is born as a pulsating chorus and from which the conscious mind forges language. Tor6 nadoville also is the “planet city of sacrifice and expiation.” Another play supplies a context for the sacrifice and expiation. “What’s the best story to tell?” the artist in What Did He See? asks and then answers, “Well, the story 7 that devours itself. Circular.” That is drama’s archetypal story—Dionysus generates Apollo, whose slaying Dionysus’ rebirth expiates—and the paradox of Foreman’s art. The Ontological-Hysteric Theater is uniquely his creation, yet he must repeatedly displace himself from its center. The opening utterance in My Head is the female student’s questioning her mentor about his claim that he hears voices. He does because he is connected to the source of truth, the pre-vocal stirrings of the energy that flows through him. The claim does not seem to be arrogant until we discover that he denies God in his life. Since Foreman in a passage to be quoted below equates God with the unconscious, the Professor sets himself as a center of energy opposite from and superior to the unconscious. That is the ascendant

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part of the play’s action. As characters in an educational process, the students, appealing to the Professor’s ego, seduce him into appropriating the classroom’s center. As afferent impulses in a neurological process, already differentiated and becoming increasingly individuated, they converge on him as the brain, the nervous system’s center to which they are impelled. Reintroducing Greek theatre, however, Foreman mythicizes the drama as the circular story that devours itself. About midway, after he has begun explaining the process by which something becomes its opposite, the Professor assumes Apollonian form. He is offstage when the female student calls to him about his reaction should God appear. He appears wearing a feathered headdress, invoking the costuming of Greek theatre. I propose that the feathers suggest an archer—Apollo. By attempting to explain the process, the Professor has become its observer and interpreter. He has become something else too; he actualizes the process. He has superseded the mass of neurons from which he evolved to become the opposite of his irrational origin. He has become transcendent rationality: the god Apollo. Yet the donning of the feathered headdress is a visual contradiction, marking the zenith of the Professor’s ascent and the reversal to his descent. While extending his spirit skyward, it adorns his body, weighing it down ever so slightly. Accusing him of being vulgar and pretentious, the female student invites him and the male student to sit in an electric chair, which would invigorate them by transmitting current into them. They refuse. Solidified as a result of expending his energy in advancing himself—that is, consciousness—as the explanation for existence, the Professor is pulled back into the process. Accusing the students of cheating him out of his “appropriate energies” (220), he is aware that he is “about to gravitate…in directions” he is “incapable of traveling” while the ascendant female student suggests that “science” is the best discipline for explaining what is happening and the ascendant male student alludes to “role reversal” (228–29). “If you were all alone, that would matter” (235), the female student puns on the descendant teacher’s condition as she and her classmate, finding him unnecessary, ignore him. Before being eclipsed, the Professor leaves the stage and returns wearing “cothurni” (232) comparable to those worn by Max and Rhoda in the 1974 Vertical Mobility, in which Foreman rejects Greek theatre as an anthologized dead husk. With the reappearance, in My Head, of the risers that suggest the thick-soled boots, Greek theatre returns in the myth of the god whom the Athenian dramatic festivals honored, whose statue was present at the performances, and who as a character in Aristophanes’ Frogs wears the boots. The Professor’s cothurni get the students’ attention, but the assumption of the risers is more than an attention-getting strategy. Falling from his Olym-

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pian observation post, and all that that implies about reason and language fixing meaning, he actualizes the process a second time. He becomes the dying and reviving god, the fluid Dionysus. He sacrifices explanation to talk in riddles. He sacrifices the conscious mind for “that part of where you are that isn’t where you think you are.” And in an image that recalls Tornadoville’s “holy spirit ignited” and “burning” in Symphony of Rats, he sacrifices himself for the “invisible fire” that burns “here,” which is not in life but which creates life. Chanting “One more time!” he returns to the “beginning” (236–39) to activate the force field that releases the impulses with which the creating mind transforms images into polysemous poetry and Apollonian artifact. In creating is the possibility for free will and consequently for tragedy. Even though neurons determine one’s capacity for life as they discharge their programmed functions in the nervous system, man is free. He can choose to keep flowing a current within the network of currents in his system, or he can let it congeal. Making choices about his life, he accepts responsibility for it, thereby altering the trajectory of its arc. Since the creating mind makes metaphors and forms thought and language from the flowing impulses’ energy, it moves centripetally until the Apollonian self—the artist with his art and the Professor with his consciousness—preempts the center of mental activity. Though his intention was not to create a unitary standard, he has done so. His creation has become the contemporary equivalent to the Greek theatre Vertical Mobility rejects: an object to be studied rather than a living action. And he, the creator, has become isolated from the source of creation in the ground of his being. At one time Foreman even considered “staging the text in 19th-century 8 dress, with The Professor standing in for Nietzsche himself,” a statement that invokes the birth of tragedy in the evolving separation of Apollonian actor from Dionysian chorus. The tragic element in My Head is twofold. The Professor accepts the responsibility for his action, although it was inevitable given the nature of creating that converts pulsating energy into formed art, and he suffers the consequence of his isolation. The pain is not now that of choosing individuation’s direction but that of accepting its inevitable catastrophe. The Professor himself foretells his fall when at the zenith of his transcendent, Apollonian individuation, he declares that truth “disappears by turning into whatever it is that eats it” (221). The rending, omophagic allusion, which is not the only one in the play, is to the Bacchae. Like Euripides’ Pentheus, the Professor becomes Dionysus, the god who must be slain to be resurrected. Reintroducing Greek theatre into the contemporary theatre mythicizes the creative process, which in turn restores the mystery to existence that the

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Professor’s self-evolution demystifies. Mythicizing restores the tension and the oscillation between Olympian Apollo and underworld Dionysus and all the antinomies that the complementary deities connote, not the least of which are will and necessity. Here again, while rejecting classical theatre’s dramaturgy and motives, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater recreates its am9 bivalence and ambiguities. Reintroducing the Greek theatre’s archetypal myth reinforces the notion that the Professor is free to choose his fate and thereby keeps fluid the play’s multiple possibilities, for just as he can make choices on individuation’s ascent, so can he choose to descend. The descent, however, does not make My Head a tragedy. The descent is generative. It generates the contents of theatre, the creating of which is the subject of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Like Foreman, the Professor begins his career as a contemporary didaskalos, a teacher or trainer of the chorus for drama performed at the Athenian dramatic festivals.10 But the latter is seduced by adulation into replacing the chorus as theatre’s source of energy. Once he discovers his isolation, he realizes he must reactivate the field of energy, in the process renewing his expended spirit. Accepting the cothurni is twofold. It is tragic in that he must sacrifice his deserved acclaim, yet the figure is comic. The risers that suggest the heavy-soled boots weigh him down, accelerating his descent to the chorus, who welcome him with “pounding music” and the frenzy of “chaos” (238– 39). Chanting “One more time!” the teacher returns to theatre’s “beginning.” In an interview that accompanied the play’s magazine publication, the 11 playwright admits that he thinks of himself as a “comic artist.” He elaborates in the preface to the 1989 play, Lava: There are writers who despair that language is incapable of expressing the true self, and that a gap exists between the self and the words that come, but for me that gap is the field of all creativity—it’s an ecstatic field rather than a field of despair. It’s the field of the unconscious, of God; it’s the unfathomable from which everything 12 pours forth.

The flux is the pole opposite to that of the formed art. The Professor’s fall does not close the drama but reopens underground currents; he does not fall into experience but into the field beneath experience. In My Head the descent thwarts closure because there is an underground force field. Death is but a stage in a ritual in which rebirth succeeds. Suppose, though, the force field shuts down, terminating the ritual. That eventuality pervades two plays of the mid-1990s, Samuel’s Major Problems and Permanent Brain Damage, in which death ominously encroaches.

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The trilogy’s second play, I’ve Got the Shakes, attempts to neutralize death. The strategy that thwarts closure is forestalling the descent. Foreman’s casting of Jan Leslie Harding as Madeline X, the impersonated impulse who is the heroine, gave the trilogy’s first two plays a continuity. The texts do not have a continuity. No one in the second play refers to the Professor in My Head Was a Sledgehammer. But since Harding played the female student in the first play, I’ve Got the Shakes can open after the Professor’s fall with one of his students replacing him as teacher. Obviously I cannot insist on this seamless interpretation. The sets change from a classroom to a room prepared for a circus. The students are three: two females and a male. The chorus are clowns and a ringmaster. The differences notwithstanding, the similarities between the two plays predominate. Madeline X knows she is the teacher, and the three students know they are to receive instruction. She, however, does not know what she is to teach, and they do not know what lessons they need, although the educational process in My Head informs this play. As the students learn, they appropriate the teacher’s role. One of them, Lola Mae, offers two glosses on their learning. When she finishes, she asks her teacher whether she understands. Madeline X says that she does. Lola Mae then extends the question: “That 13 I’m speaking in your voice?” Though the educational process informs I’ve Got the Shakes, the slaying and reviving ritual does not. Madeline X is as confident as the Professor that there is an “explanation” (288) for existence, but she does not advance it as he does in My Head. The Professor does not formulate an explanation; he does not verbalize one. He becomes the explanation by rising above the chorus’ chaos to form a unifying standard in a center of consciousness. That is, consciousness becomes the explanation or reason for existence and in so doing demystifies existence. He shifts perception away from the act of creating life and art to the form of life, art, thought, language, and so on. The acquisition of consciousness is the process Madeline X must decelerate because it confers individuation, the acquisition of which is an ascent that culminates in a reversal and catastrophe. Her addiction to reality spares her the descent. Reality in I’ve Got the Shakes is twofold. The heroine is aware of herself as a universe and aware of parallel universes such as the sensory world whose physical properties send impulses flowing through the self. Mirrors, which imply a balancing duality, are a ubiquitous stage prop. The two realities mirror each other because the heroine is at an age when the two claim equal attention. The smudged lipstick on her face and the faces of the two female students suggests pre-adolescence; they are girls who appear to be still “sloppily eating from a pot of red jam” (274). The chorus members are clowns, the

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playthings of childhood, and they do not pulsate on and off the stage but are onstage most of the time and interacting with the principals. At this point Madeline X’s experience of herself and the world is still immediate. She is just beginning to interpret herself and the world. Her dress signals the development of her addiction to the world. She enters wearing a “skimpy silk dress, very short, and tall sexy boots that rise to above her knees” (274). The high boots are not exaggerated cothurni but evidence of her desire to be fashionable. She admits that outside of her exists a “certain mastery…called the world” (279). The mastery attracts her. On at least one occasion during the play, she leaves by herself for an excursion into it. Yet if the world’s reality had sole claim on her attention, she would solidify into a socially conditioned self and her creating spirit might atrophy. Although this development outward is not as apparent in the trilogy as the development of consciousness is, because the action takes place within the mind, it is a real possibility in Foreman’s theatre. One of the three principals in The Cure, for example, wants to experience as much of the world as he can. The heroine’s realization that she is a teacher signals the development of her addiction to herself. In the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the collision of impulses with objects and images, concepts and ideas begets consciousness, which as it develops seeks meaning from life. Teaching is a metaphor for the way that consciousness unifies as it preempts the field by absorbing the classroom’s energy. Examining why the self feels and acts as it does, it advances explanations to reconcile mind and body, conscious mind and unconscious mind. Though Madeline X does not usurp the classroom, her students call her “little Miss Ambitious” (278) and accuse her of being “Godlike” (315). It is easier psychologically to be addicted to the self than to the world, especially when the encounter with the world is not with reality but with a representation of reality. When the heroine returns from the solo excursion, she describes the world as a place where communication regards “only the important subjects,” thereby making them the “important subjects” (312). For a group excursion, the principals are supplied with boots and rope with which to scale a picture of a mountain. With footing treacherous in such encounters, pratfalls are the consequence, as when the three students fall to the floor while trying to sit on chairs painted on panels. The danger of rejecting the encounter because it is not with reality-initself we have seen in the Professor’s case. When the interior cultivation is unchecked by interaction with an exterior reality, representation or not, consciousness becomes solipsistic and exemplary. The self, which becomes the subject and object of consciousness, becomes the authoritative point of

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view which forecloses other points of view. Thus if the self had sole claim on her attention, her development would culminate in formed meaning, which is opposite from the fluid ground in which undifferentiated impulses originate and dance. Like all impulses, Madeline X contains this isolating possibility. Perceiving a picture, she provokes the male student’s judgment that she has “shut down” a “multiplicity of other possibilities” (299). Denied advancement, Schlomo falls asleep. Within moments she announces that she is the “only universe there is” (306). She is the only universe she can know, but her ambivalence about developing consciousness and individuation also spares her the descent. The opening scene dramatizes the ambivalence in visual images that suggest a vestigial connection with the Apollonian-Dionysian conflict in My Head. The principals and chorus enter the performance space and turn back looking for Madeline X, who is separated from them. She enters and joins them. After a verbal exchange, all dance to music. As the music lowers, she dances by herself until the music stops. She must force herself to rejoin the group until once again she breaks away, provoking Lola Mae to ask why she “resent[s] the rest” of them (277). Madeline X cannot stop her self-evolution. Recognizing the hunger “for meaning” (304), she cannot be satisfied with a “hole in the center” of her life (297). The problem is that existence is a mystery which lies “hidden.” The mystery may be the ritual of death and rebirth, but until she is immersed in it, she can only describe it in terms of its representation. “I could try to say what’s hidden,” she amplifies, “but it’s not like the thing that is hidden” (321). Resisting the student adulation that seduced the Professor—walking away from Schlomo’s and the third student’s, Sonya’s, kisses—she makes a choice. No single event disposes her. Rather it is the gradual realization that the sole reality that gives her any kind of firm footing is herself. The heroine chooses to remain between the extremes of consciousness and unconsciousness. When Schlomo asks her if she would like to be “totally stupid,” she replies, “No, just a little stupid” (289). Total consciousness is Apollo’s realm; total stupidity, or unconsciousness, is Dionysus’ realm. To achieve either pole activates the process that moves toward the other pole. No Greek myth informs the trilogy’s second play perhaps because of Madeline X’s resolve to remain between poles, offsetting her addiction to one with her addiction to the other. The mystery’s explanation she leaves “to God” (283), whom she, unlike the Professor, acknowledges. Choosing not to descend, she does not demystify existence. On the contrary, she chooses to remain between the self and the world, stretching each present moment across the antinomies through the creative act of making meta-

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phors. She will live the mystery in its artistic representation. She will build 14 bridges across parallel universes. In a closing scene which contrasts with the opening scene, she holds with the other impulses “on gentle mother earth” (320). Between the dissolving depths of the participation mystique and the solidifying heights of the principium individuationis, she will attach words from the latter to energy from the former to bridge the two realms. Words “make a bridge,” she answers Lola Mae’s question in the play’s opening minutes, “and I can stand on that bridge of words,” or, she qualifies the statement, “my head stands on that bridge of words” (275–76). There is a problem here too, however. The problem inheres in metaphor-making. Madeline X does not analyze the figure of speech, but Foreman does in the preface to Lava. Words are metaphors in that they are not identical with the images, feelings, and objects to which the mind attaches them. The attaching gives rise to consciousness. In the instant the mind becomes aware that it is creating a metaphor to bridge the gap separating realities, consciousness of the self as a separate entity is born. When Foreman concludes the thought by stating that “you increase the size of the gaps if you want more consciousness,” he equates consciousness with godhood, or god-approximation, although he does not use the term. The gap’s field is the 15 opposite of godhood; it is the “field of the unconscious, of God.” A visual image, which accompanies Madeline X’s comments on bridge-making, substitutes for the discursive explanation. A “six-foot-tall primitive God mask” (275) enters when she begins her comments and exits when she finishes them. Madeline X has to understand the implications of metaphor-making and not because God’s representation appears. According to the program notes, she has the shakes because she must choose between a world in which reality is hidden behind representation and a paradise in which the self may lose everything. The hidden reality in paradise may be “nothing.” The “nothing” is the death mentioned at the opening of this examination of I’ve Got the Shakes, the death the heroine’s strategy seeks to neutralize. She feels that if she does not adopt a strategy, she risks losing what she has gained, through her addictions to the self and the world, for godhood that may terminate in the death of the self and the self’s ability to create metaphors. Foreman’s plays, however, are polysemous. The heroine also has the shakes because she administers shocks to herself, shaking her being. Her strategy spares her the descent, but it cannot spare her life’s pain. Since the process of gaining consciousness cannot be stopped yet must be decelerated to prevent the rise to individuation and fall to what may be “nothing,” the heroine has to balance the flow of impulses from her Dionysian nature with

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metaphor-making in her Apollonian nature. She has to slow the rush of impulses to slow the corresponding creation of metaphors. She hits herself on the head with a hammer. The first time illustrates the objective. The blow occurs in the opening scene after she leaves the group to dance by herself. When she hits herself, the chorus of clowns who have left the stage reappear in a conga line, the music resumes, and she joins the end of the line. In the play’s closing scene, three times she hits the animal body brought onstage. She will convert the pain to pleasure as she attempts to stretch out each present moment. A “gentle and happy music rises” (322) as she joins the others. To counterbalance the natural tendency of consciousness to convert flux (and multiplicity) to metaphor-making and form (and explanation and univocality)—all of which ascend to professorship and godhood—Madeline X will have to beat her head to regulate the flow of impulses from the gap’s force field. They are the raw contents that consciousness seizes and converts or transforms. Apparently she does in the interim between the closing of I’ve Got the Shakes and the opening of The Universe, the trilogy’s third play. A visual image actualizes the strategy. It is not the play’s actress who embodies the image. Mary McBride, who played Lola Mae, returns in the third play, but she does not assume Madeline X’s role. The impulse with characterological qualities whose head is bandaged as is a small cut on his face (where he missed his head with a hammer blow?) is James. He enters moving slowly and balancing a glass of milk on a tray. Adept at balancing, he also seems adept at conquering desire. His position is 16 not that he avoids tasting the milk but that he never has “such an urge.” Since verbal and visual images connect the two plays, the description of his prior residence may refer to the second play’s closing scene. Before arriving on the third play’s set, he was seen “on the planet of the disturbed people” (18). Or he may have been sent to a place for people who interfere with normal processes. In any event, The Universe is a response to I’ve Got the Shakes, as James’ decision at play’s end makes clear. James is the play’s central character. He is not the play’s central consciousness when it opens. If he were, he would be the Professor, and he has withdrawn from the action. Yet he is present, and he is not alone. He cannot be. The Ontological-Hysterical Theater is a theatre of shifting perspectives as impersonated impulses interact with one another, the chorus, and the stage props. With sheets of Plexiglas between the audience and the performance space, spectators are themselves perspectives on the action. Each must decide for himself what to make of what he sees and hears. For the bewildered spectator, Ontological-Hysteric Theater programs usually include a synopsis. According to the program, the play has a subtitle, How It Works, which implies a process, the opposite of the rejection of a

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process that James’ initial appearance images. Neither is the play’s universe life’s sole universe, although the title is singular. The Universe is an isomorphic model of parallel universes, a mirror in which spectators can opaquely see the others. Were the universes identical, there would be no need for metaphors to bridge the gaps between subconscious and conscious minds, internal and external worlds, the self and the non-self. Were the Ontological-Hysteric Theater’s mirrors pellucid, there would be no need for imagination. Another perspective precedes James’ entrance. Tony marks a departure in Foreman’s plays. The agent of mediation between competing impulses is usually a female, the erotic role of Rhoda that Ontological-Hysteric performer Kate Manheim made her signature until she retired from acting. Tony’s suit is masculine; his peruke, lace cuffs, and makeup are feminine. Androgynous, he is the intermediary between masculine James and feminine Mary. The interaction of the three is how the universe works. Characterized in the program notes as “the ‘other,’” Tony initiates the interaction by commenting on the strangeness of James’ presence. As the other questions the central character about his milk, the action speeds up with them and the chorus of five cone-headed servants running about the room exchanging glasses of milk. A crash and Mary briefly appears, a breast exposed, for Tony is fulfilling his role outlined in the program. He “has really come to introduce James to a preordained someone who will break James’ heart.” The balance is upset. With the chorus the two interacting impulses collapse to the floor, rise, and pulsate. No longer withdrawn, James can no longer claim not to feel an urge. As Mary “passes through in the rear” of the room (24), the servants shoot him with Cupid’s arrows. He has desire and should have it. Desire actuates the Ontological-Hysteric Theater; it drives the impulses. Actuated, James eats his favorite meal, the same food eaten in Foreman’s favorite play, The Cure. First the chorus and then Mary pour energy in the form of cereal into a bowl, and he wolfs it down, though knowing he has “no real possibility of satisfaction” (27). Ingesting contents of the unconscious only whets the appetite for more energy, increasing the difficulty of restoring stability. He is energized. When he and Tony collide and fall, they give birth to consciousness. They become aware of their tolerance for pain. Unable to avoid collisions, James cannot avoid the attraction he and Mary feel for each other. The encounter that comes from the “electricity” (34) passing between them also gives birth to consciousness. When an impulse looks into another impulse’s eyes, he/she is looking into one of the ubiquitous mirrors. Like the Plexiglas in which spectators see themselves and

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the stage action, the mirror reveals the self and the non-self. The first time James and Mary stare into each other’s eyes, they stagger backwards from the shock of recognition and alienation, a shock, in his words, of “realizing somebody’s looking back” (37). His comments testify to his gaining consciousness, for though he does not verbalize a desire to teach, he begins to instruct. His comment after the shock of the encounter with Mary is the play’s subtitle: “How the mind works” (40). The mirror stage of how the mind works is the gaining of consciousness, individuation, selfhood. In the program synopsis, James has fallen “into the human condition.” He sees himself and someone he can never be, someone he can never “get inside” (42), someone that attracts and repels him. His and Mary’s mutual attraction and repulsion create the play’s funniest pratfalls and the Ontological-Hysteric Theater’s psychomacy. At her urging, he drops his pants, only to have her laugh at him. “Go away!” and “Come back!” (44 and 57) he alternates calling to her, provoking her frantic exits and entrances. They cannot stop because stopping is not something they can do “on purpose” (43). Yet Foreman’s theatre is not totally determined either. Since his theatre is multivalent, more than one interpretation obtains. James cannot stop the process, but he can make choices within it. He can resist. Initially the other, Tony becomes the mediator when he introduces James to Mary, who is the other. She embodies the unconscious; she is its representation. Everything that James, the subject or consciousness, is not, she belongs to a “secret organization” dedicated to “disrupt[ing]” lives (47– 48). She is hidden. For the first one-third of the play, she appears only in flashes in the background. When she comes onstage, Tony covers her face with a phonograph record. At one point, after their eyes have met, James attempts to paint her image, but despite her provocative pose, he quits, frustrated by an unyielding canvas. Introduced, James falls out of denial and into desire and an ambivalence that reaches its greatest tension in the pants-dropping scenes, in the abortive painting scene, and in increasingly torrid kisses that bring him no closer to possessing Mary. Since he can neither lose his consciousness born of their encounter nor possess her unconsciousness, he blinds himself to relieve the tension. I believe Foreman is invoking the Oedipus myth, but without invoking the Sophoclean plot that entangles Oedipus, in terms consistent with his theatrical conception. If all mental activity originates in the field of the unconscious, the impulse that is James originated in the field that is Mary. She is his mother. The milk he professes no urge to drink the synopsis refers to as “Mother’s milk,” a verbal image embodied in the visual image of Mary’s first appearance. Her breast is exposed. Once aroused, the only way

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that James can annul his desire for her, a desire so intense that her eyes sear him and his books and received ideas cease to give him pleasure, is to blind himself. He can delight in the freedom he feels, yet he is not totally free. The process is alive—the mind works—so long as he is alive. Mary and Tony are still present though unseen and as the other, the unconscious, always will be present. If he will not engage in the process, he has to thwart it. Madeline X’s solution at the close of I’ve Got the Shakes is no solution because it is impossible to sustain a regulated, balanced natural release of energy and a conversion of that energy to consciousness and metaphormaking. At some point contingency will upset the equilibrium. Repressing desire, James’ solution at the opening of The Universe is no solution either, for the subject will always feel desire for that which he/she lacks. Though he attempts to deny Mary, James feels desire for the source of creation in the ground of his being, which is the feminine field of the unconscious. His choice of action at play’s end is therefore different from his choice at play’s opening and different from Madeline X’s choice. The choices of the two principals of the trilogy’s second and third plays follow from their different responses to the reality of existence, which in its contingency is tension-filled. Madeline X does not want a “hole in the center” of her “life” (297). According to the program, it may lead to “nothing,” which is ambiguous enough to range from no relief from tension to the permanent relief of annihilating death. She chooses to stretch out the present moment by building bridges over the hole, thereby offsetting its power with the power of metaphor-making. When James looks into Mary’s eyes, he sees a “hole straight into the brain” and the hole is “nothing” (57). Since he continues to be attracted and repelled, alternately summoning and discharging Mary, he tries to fill in the hole by painting her portrait. Only when he realizes that he can neither possess the mystery nor annul its power does he blind himself. The strategy is to disrupt the process. Neutralizing contingency by creating contingency is his version of Madeline X’s neutralizing strategy. Laughing hysterically, he proposes to Tony and Mary that the three spin themselves into dizziness. That he lands in a piece of pie strikes him as hilarious. The disruptive strategy fails him as the withdrawal strategy failed him following Mary’s entrance. The paradox is that no matter what strategy he adopts to annul the power of the unconscious, he accelerates the development begun in his instructing on how the mind works. He is ascending to professorship and godhood. The conscious self, he will become the reason for existence. He will inhabit transcendent, non-contingent space, whose disembodied voice calls to him, a man so desperate to escape the human condi-

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tion he has fallen into that he blinds himself. He does not answer. His choice reverses his direction and that of the trilogy’s second and third plays to return to the closing of My Head Was a Sledgehammer. Toward the end of I’ve Got the Shakes, Madeline X informs the others of an insight she has. “If I went crazy, all my problems would be solved.” She then includes their “problems also. They’d be taken care of” (306) because she can perceive problems only through the perspective of her consciousness. The implication is that problems, a source of stress, are in the domain of consciousness. One can solve them by advancing into the domain or returning to unconsciousness. The first direction develops consciousness, individuation, and the self. The second direction, going crazy, dissolves the problems but also the things that give one an identity: consciousness, individuation, and the constructed self. The heroine resolves to stay in her universe moored between rationality and irrationality. That empty space beckons frightens James, who has a dawning discovery that by sacrificing his sight to shut down desire as the avenue to engagement, he has gone too far. Ahead is transcendence, the expense of energy on the ascent to form that is the antithesis of the ambiguous “nothing” on the descent to dissolution. It will solve his problems but only because by entering empty space, he leaves behind collisions and interaction, pulsating chorus, Mary and Tony, and desire. What he will have in their place is the antithesis of going crazy. He will have his rational self. He then has the realization that he can dissolve all problems in the “flux-fluxity-flux-flux” (67). Forgoing the attempt to possess the mystery embodied in Mary as the other, he yields to it. He accepts from the servants a glass of the milk rejected in the play’s opening minutes and begins to sip. As the lights come down on the performance, he grips his stomach and winces in pain. James’ descent recalls the Professor’s descent in My Head Was a Sledgehammer. His pain does not recall the other play’s joyous closing. Since the closing images are different, we have to examine three implications that come out of the trilogy. It is easy to find in Foreman’s critical writings passages that reveal his attitude toward the choices of balancing antinomies and suspending them that 17 Madeline X and James make. The first implication is that it is impossible to regulate the flow of impulses and the making of metaphors and still be creative (as opposed to analytical, which is more Apollonian than Dionysian). I do not mean to imply that Foreman’s middle period, or the plays following Miss Universal Happiness (1985), is regulated without the opposing unpredictable element. Yet for the inveterate Ontological-Hysteric theatregoer, the trilogy reaches heights and depths beyond those of the middle plays. One reason is the return of the chorus from the early plays in costumes that

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enhance their dance of manic theatricality. The four or five members of the stage crew are the immediately visible fusion of the unpredictable and the orderly. Their opening description in The Universe captures the fusion. They perform “somewhat aberrant, carefully choreographed actions” (17). A comparison with Howe’s theatre yields the first implication. The pattern of individuation’s death generating a communal experience that we saw in her plays Foreman dramatizes as myth and ritual. In My Head Was a Sledgehammer, Apollonian form’s dissolution generates the Dionysian chorus’ rebirth. If we think of the playwright’s middle period as settling into form after the disorienting experiments of his early period, the middle period’s dissolution gives rise to the Dionysian chorus in the trilogy. The second implication has to do with Foreman’s commitment to stag18 ing “originative impulse before it is tamed by social constraints.” The implication of The Universe is that sexuality and socialization are not subsequent to creation but in the very matrix of existence. By itself the point is not important. It becomes important when it connects with the third implication. In the preface from which I just quoted, Foreman expresses the dream of remaining “in the gap of the non-representable,” the field of the uncon19 scious, rather than proceeding into the production of dead husks, of “form.” He knows better than anyone that the dream is in tension with reality. The reality is that neither Madeline X nor James nor the playwright himself can stay in suspension and live, particularly if generation is sexual and social. The field of the unconscious delivers the subject into imbalance and ten20 sion. Delivered, the subject develops moment-by-moment consciousness. He/she can resist the unifying process by interacting impulses within the self and between the self and the world to keep open a multiplicity of currents and thus a multiplicity of choices for creating his/her life. Inevitably, however, given the hunger for meaning that Madeline X recognizes in everyone, the subject becomes a reductive perspective. The instructing subject ascends to professorship and godhood, the state in which imbalance and tension cease. The wish and the reality are one and the same. Creating has solidified into creation. The sole way to undo being a unitary standard is to dissolve the formed product, from consciousness to art, in the ground of one’s being: the “flux-fluxity-flux-flux.” The Professor descends joyously. James descends painfully. Pain increases with each descent because each dissolution is more problematic than the preceding one. Yet even though the day will come when there is no renewal, creativity mandates surrendering to contingency. The alternative to the ritual of death and rebirth in the field of the “noth-

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ing” from which “everything pours forth” is the emptiness of transcendent form. In the mid-1970s, the playwright described the process by which he creates a play, which is the process the Ontological-Hysteric Theater performs. The conflict of meanings within him creates a continually shifting perspective. “That means of course…that there is no conclusion…no beginning, middle and end…but, intermissions. Until I die, But then I won’t be able to 21 write about it.” Though James’ wince prepares for the finality of tragedy in the book’s next section, Foreman’s plays remain exuberantly comic. The theatres in this section of the book are exuberantly comic because the characters and impersonated impulses overcome their fear of sterility and the enigma of existence to descend into the ground of their being. To emphasize that ground as the generating source of creating, the plays are situated on ground level. (The Ridiculous Theatrical Company has to be disregarded because Ludlam reinvents archetypal plots that contain settings such as the mad scientist’s island laboratory.) The Cocktail Hour, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and two of the plays in Kondoleon’s trilogy are set in one-family homes. The third Kondoleon play takes place in an art colony in the country. Like Foreman, Howe takes the audience inside the generating in sets that are analogues to the self, but unlike Foreman’s sets, they are also stage images of a restaurant and homes external to the self. The exception to the situating on ground level is “The Zoo Story.” Jerry, who lives on the top floor, bolts past the hag’s first-floor room on entering the brownstone. The play has tragic overtones because he cannot make the descent into her domain. In the next section, the plays follow Jerry’s flight upon entering the roominghouse. The first three take place high above ground level: on the terrace of an apartment overlooking Boston Harbor, in a penthouse apartment, and in the top-floor apartment of a brownstone. The fourth play goes even higher. It closes in the emptiness of transcendent form. In tracking the ascent, we leave comedy for the world of tragedy.


() &' C H A P T E R F O U R

A.R. Gurney, P.J. Gibson, and Adrienne Kennedy This book’s first section began with Gurney’s The Cocktail Hour (1988) because a character in it relates his playwriting to the historical origins of Greek comedy. This second section begins with Gurney’s Another Antigone (1987) because a character in it relates the play’s action, not to the historical origins of Greek tragedy, but to the tragic experience as Greek tragedies dramatize it. The assumption is that Greek tragedy can be adapted or reinvented in contemporary terms. That it can be this section of the book demonstrates. The Antigone reinvention, however, does not work as well as Gurney’s second venture in full-length tragedy. To appreciate why the 1993 play, Later Life, is a more genuine American tragedy than the 1987 play, we have to look at the tragic experience as the character in Another Antigone defines it and as both plays dramatize it. The character is Henry Harper, Professor of Classics in a New England college who is teaching a course in the genre. In his concluding lecture, he likens himself to Creon, the authoritarian figure in Sophocles’ Antigone. The character who identifies with Sophocles’ heroine is a student in his course, Judy Miller, who defies his authority by refusing to submit a term paper, a course requirement, instead submitting her contemporary version of the classical play and when he refuses to accept it for credit, staging it. In classroom lecture and office conference, Henry defines tragedy as his conflict with Judy over her alternate submission widens to involve the college administration and student body and to include issues other than course requirements. His concluding lecture gives the definition in its fullest form. As the tragic hero/heroine is being crushed by forces over which the character has no control, he/she accepts responsibility for his/her life, affirming freedom of the will in a determined universe. Henry accepts his responsibility for the conflict by leaving the teaching that he loves. In the succeeding scene, Judy accepts her responsibility by declining the sizable award given annually to an outstanding student.

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In the concluding lecture, Henry argues that the tragic experience is foreign to Americans because not only are we free to choose our destiny, we have many destinies from which to choose so that if we do not like a first choice, we can choose another. Though he does not mention Judy, she exemplifies the freedom of choice. Unhappy with a course requirement, she chooses an alternate of her own making without any fear of the consequence, and she receives credit for staging the play from another department. “We have no oracles,” Gurney’s professor puts the issue in a context larger than the academic, “no gods, no real sense of ultimate authority to 1 insist that if we do one thing, another will inevitably follow.” He continues to define the Greek tragic experience through the tragic hero/heroine, who exceeds the limits set by the authority of Greek culture, even though the transgression is unintentional. Conspicuous by its omission from the definition is the chorus. Yet it would seem to be the most obvious element in a course on Greek tragedy, since “classical tragedy…is distinguished from most later forms of drama by the presence of the chorus.” The term here does not refer to undifferentiated impulses as impersonated in the Ontological-Hysteric Theater but to a group of people conscious of themselves as a group sharing values and concerns—a 2 “constituency” within the larger society. One of its functions is mediating 3 between the audience and the isolated hero or heroine. Henry’s verbal omission has its visual counterpart in the absence from Another Antigone of a community sharing values and concerns that corresponds to the Theban elders in Sophocles’ play. In the absence of a group representing the larger society, the characters have to fill the vacuum. At one point Henry’s supervisor, the Dean of Humane Studies, addresses the theatre audience as a group of senior-year students waiting to register with the college’s Placement Office for job leads. She functions as a chorus in that she mediates between the audience and Henry’s increasingly underenrolled courses, defending them as “valuable requirements” (109). Henry himself functions as a mediating chorus twice. The first time he addresses the theatre audience as his class for whom he translates from Sophocles’ Antigone the opening of the choral ode on man’s greatness and limitation. The second time he again addresses the audience as his class to complete the definition of tragedy and in so doing likens himself to Sophocles’ Creon. In all three occurrences, a situation which precludes those addressed from responding only serves to further isolate the hero and his standard. What Henry identifies with is what every Gurney protagonist identifies with: the standard of a bygone age. His standard is the humanistic tradition transmitted in a college curriculum which engages the student through re-

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quired readings and oral and written responses to the readings. His commitment to that standard brings him into conflict with a student body for whom the tradition is irrelevant in a democratic age. But the students do not have their own unitary standard. Each one is motivated by his individual needs. Gurney, who can be very funny, satirizes the tradition’s debasement when Henry, learning that his courses are being cancelled for lack of enrollment, proposes that if students preregister for them, he will substitute projects such as models of the Parthenon and maps of the Peloponnesian Peninsula for papers and the Pass/Fail option for grades. Implied but not present onstage, the students do not form a chorus because although they share concerns about grades and jobs, they do not share values. They are not powerless, however. They command political force as the dean well understands. Though she personally believes in the traditional standard and defends it when she can, she recognizes political and fiscal realities. Since the college cannot survive without students and generous alumni contributions, she urges Henry to reconsider his rejection of Judy’s alternate submission especially in the face of dwindling enrollment for his courses. Thus Henry is in conflict with Judy, who defies his authority, and the student population. So too is Judy in conflict with him and her peers. But whereas he tries to engage the students in the tradition by teaching it to them in the traditional methodology of lectures and papers, and he does win a convert in Judy’s boyfriend, she tries to awaken them to form a chorus of moral force by recreating Sophocles’ play in an issue on which their survival depends. She applies the Antigone myth to the nuclear-arms race, reimagines the text in a contemporary idiom, and encourages students to participate in staging her play. Another Antigone can take us no further. Henry’s alleged anti-Semitism roils the conflict, and the ending, with the professor offered a year’s leave with full pay and Judy’s family able to support her until she finds herself, softens each one’s suffering. The absence of a chorus from whom they are isolated also minimizes the felt reality of their suffering. The pattern that emerges from the play, however, is important because it complements the pattern of The Cocktail Hour. The conflict in Gurney’s theatre opposes a champion of a standard of a bygone age and a contemporary democratic society fragmented into a multiplicity of selves and values. Yet in the next play to be examined, the playwright not only creates the element missing from Another Antigone, he creates a character as intermediary between the protagonist and the chorus, a character with whom the protagonist can be emotionally involved. The champion of a bygone standard, an intermediary, and an embryonic chorus combine in Later Life to create an American tragedy.

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The play takes place on the terrace of an apartment overlooking Boston Harbor. It opens with Sally, the hostess of a party within the apartment, beckoning to one of the guests to follow her onto the terrace, where he is to wait while she fetches a female guest, introduced as Ruth. As he talks with Ruth and other guests who wander on and off the terrace, middle-aged, conservatively dressed Austin gradually reveals the unitary standard he champions. Boston, where he has lived all his life as a member of one of the area’s 4 finest families, is the “Athens of America.” While serving a tour of duty in the navy, he visited the Bay of Naples, “one of the great natural harbors of the Old World” (28). He protests the desecration of Boston Harbor by developers who want to make it a theme park but will not contest them, for the modern world is driven by forces he cannot control. His unitary standard is the WASP culture which taught him control but which is so beleaguered in the contemporary culture that it has retreated into enclaves. Divorced, his children finished their educations and on their own, his enclave is the one thing he can control—himself: his love of classical music, for instance, or his playing squash by the “old rules” (67), as another guest, his friend Walt, characterizes him to Ruth. The WASP culture taught him the rules as it taught him such virtues as civility and responsibility. It also taught him self-reliance to the degree that he has always thought of himself as among the “elect” (63), an attitude he admits is difficult to maintain in a democratic society. Unlike Henry Harper, who imposes his standard onto his students, he imposes nothing. Alienated by the drift of modern life, he withdraws into himself. One source of the ambivalence that pervades Gurney’s theatre is a mixed attitude toward WASP culture. Character after character rails against the restrictive, exclusive rearing culture at the same time that each is grateful for the virtues it implanted, for they are civilization’s values. Austin is civilized. That is his problem, though. Since he embodies the standard of a bygone age, since he is the standard bearer, his withdrawal from life separates him from himself as well as from the chorus and Ruth. One passage will have to suffice as evidence of his self-alienation until we return to him after identifying the chorus. As the evening progresses, Austin tells Ruth that he goes to a psychiatrist but, unlike young people, does not flaunt his feelings. Suddenly the man in possession of himself falters when he tries to verbalize them. “But me? Even if I…could say…even if I found some way of…I mean, it’s a little late, isn’t it?” (61) Austin is refined, fixed Apollonian form in opposition to the crude, fluid Dionysian chorus. They are the hostess and her guests, the revelers within the apartment, some of whom come onto the terrace to observe the skyline and harbor and to chat before returning indoors. Though created in con-


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temporary images, they meet four criteria of a Greek chorus. The guests are polymorphous. They represent the two genders and different sexual orientations, come from different regions of America, speak with different accents, and wear different styles of clothing. They dance. A husband and wife invite Austin and Ruth to accompany them to a highway nightclub for dancing. They sing: old songs offstage. And they would mediate between Austin’s old 5 world and the new world of present-day America if he would let them. Since Austin holds to a unitary standard, he does not respond to them as the mediating body of an embryonic chorus. He responds with civility, of course, because he is the essence of the cultured man, but not with feeling. One could almost say that he is blind to the guests’ polymorphism. After the couple who invite the two for an evening of dancing leave, he remarks to Ruth, referring to the vulgarization of his standard, “I suppose every place is getting pretty much the same these days” (55). The chorus represent the audience, who represent the larger society within which Austin’s standard is enclaved. Visually the opposition is dramatized by his permanence and the guests’ transience on the terrace overlooking the city where he has lived his life, for although he too is a guest, he identifies with the city and not with them. The opposition also is dramatized verbally. Whereas he reveals himself gradually, they do so immediately. Whereas he is reticent and reserved, they are open and frank, discussing their personal problems and marriages, even alluding to such intimate matters as their sexual lives. Gurney is most deft when he combines visual and verbal dramatization. A lesbian, who has been unsuccessful in picking up a partner inside the apartment, asks Austin and Ruth whether they are married or lovers. When they reply in the negative, she stares at Ruth as she prepares to leave, suggesting that Austin’s companion is in the wrong element by being with him. Ruth is in both elements. Her role is to mediate between Austin and the chorus and through the guests the larger society they represent. To be a mediatrix, she has to have an affinity for the lone man and the revelers. Visiting a friend, who brought her to the party, she recognized Austin in the apartment and told Sally, who after telling him to wait on the terrace returns with Ruth. But he does not remember her until she narrows the place of their meeting years before to Capri when he was a young naval officer and she was in a group of touring students. As she coaxes the memory from him, Later Life recalls Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle,” a tale that Gurney acknowledges in the introduction influenced him in the writing of the play. The drama’s characters resemble those in the story. James’ protagonist, John Marcher, has so cultivated one part of himself that it restricts him. Marcher has developed

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his consciousness at the expense of living life. Convinced as a young man that something is to happen to him, he waits and broods, turning over the possibilities in his mind. He does not wait alone. The tale’s other character is May Bartram. Smitten years earlier when at a meeting he told her the secret of his fate and meeting again in the present, she chooses to watch with him. As time passes, it becomes apparent that she is more perceptive than he because her field of vision is larger than his and her involvement in the life of that field greater than his. She engages herself in his vigil; he, in himself. Only after she dies does he realize what she comes to realize during the years they watched and waited. The momentous something had already happened. Life had passed him by. The drama contains an occasional echo of the earlier work. For example, in coaxing Austin’s memory, Ruth discloses that at their Capri meeting he confided his conviction that “something terrible was going to happen” to him in his life (40). In the Jamesian counterpart scene, May reminds Marcher of his confidence at their Naples meeting that he was “being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen” to him.6 Later Life, however, is similar to the tale only in its framework as Gurney notes (xi). A passage about May in “The Beast in the Jungle” points up the difference. “So, while they grew older together, she did watch with him, and so let this association give shape and colour to her own existence” (368). Ruth is not dependent on Austin as May is on Marcher. Though she would like to develop a relationship with the Bostonian, she also has an affinity for the chorus and the society they represent. Born in the Midwest, she has “kicked around over the years” (49). Despite suffering terrible losses, the death of her first husband after only seven days of marriage and the death of her only child by a second husband, she did not withdraw into anti-depression medication and visits to a psychiatrist, as Austin did following his divorce, but married twice more, to the same man. Her characterization of him as a “man of the West…very—American” (51) makes him not only the geographical but the metaphysical opposite of Brahmin Austin, for her husband has hit her and continues to squander her money. Yet with him she has a bonding and a love that Austin seems incapable of. Years earlier the latter declined her offer to go to her room after the Capri excursion had returned to the mainland. By not acting, he fascinated her then, but on the terrace he ceases to charm. When he protests that he cannot understand her attraction to a man who hit her in the name of love, she “looks at him as if for the first time” (78). And when, learning that the man from whom she is separated has followed her and is waiting in the airport


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cocktail lounge for her to return home with him, Austin makes a passionless counter proposal, she departs. She rejoins her husband, not the party. Austin foils her attempted mediation between him and the other guests to effect their union. Austin and Ruth are the two principal characters. Two other performers, an actor and an actress, play five roles each: the hostess and the guests that together make up the embryonic chorus. The first guest to come onto the terrace as Austin, obeying the hostess’ directive, waits is Jim. Extravagant in speech and gesture, he is a man trying to give up smoking who defines himself in terms of the activity. He was an existential smoker. “I smoked, therefore I was,” he explains. And since he is quitting that which gave him his reality, he will become a “shadow” of his “former self” (13–14). He also could call himself an existential speaker. Just before Sally returns with Ruth, Austin tries to get him off the subject of smoking with little success, for he seems fearful that once silent, he will cease to be—that once present, he must speak. Jim’s imagery is provocative. To Austin’s question to the hostess about what he should do while waiting for her to bring the female guest to him, Sally advises, among other pastimes, that he examine his “immortal soul” (10). The smoker appears referring to “heaven on earth,” “forbidden fruit,” “shaking hands with the devil,” and a “shadow” of his “former self” (12–14). The implication is that the set is hell and Jim is a shadow of Austin’s immortal soul that manifests as he examines it. By itself the preceding statement is nonsense. Austin never smoked, and when Sally returns with Ruth, she speaks to Jim, who has an independent existence. But the statement does not exist by itself. A later scene contains an allusion to one of Western literature’s monumental descriptions of hell. Gurney himself in the introduction puts the protagonist in hell. So does the drama as he locks himself in his self-prison. Before Sally fetches Ruth, Austin wavers at the prospect of having to meet someone. “No,” the hostess directs him to wait, “it’s time you took a chance” (10). As the two principals move haltingly toward the recovery of their earlier meeting, they are periodically interrupted by guests who come onto the terrace. Singly or in pairs, the issue the revelers address is whether or not they can change by taking a chance. Jim leaves confident that he can quit smoking. A married couple are at odds over where they should live. Roy, who suffers from arthritis, wants to move to a retirement community in the South and spend his days playing golf. Marion does not want to leave their friends, children, and grandchildren. She will go with her husband if he goes, but as they rejoin the party, she hints that the day may come when she will leave him in the South and return to her beloved Boston. Duane, a

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computer expert, became separated from his wife indoors. When he finds her, he confesses his error in ignoring her by talking shop on her birthday, which he had forgotten. Admitting that he is “learning” in his “old age” (39), he phones to have roses waiting for her when they arrive home. Though disappointed by the defection of the woman she thought was behind her, the lesbian finishes her repast and returns to the other revelers to try to find another partner. The guests mirror the drama within the principals and between them. Ruth, for example, wants to be alone with Austin as they recover the past, yet if she is to commit herself to a move to Boston, she wants to be sure that they can interact in the future. It does not follow, however, that the chorus members are aspects of Austin and Ruth as if they were in Foreman’s theatre of the mind. They have their own independent existence but the same conflict as that of the principals. Are they able to change and reconcile their multicultural differences in a new-world union? Entrenched in his old-world self, Austin does not perceive his connection with them. He does not realize that he shares their conflict; neither does he think of himself as a reveler, though he too is a guest at the party. Yet with Ruth’s help, midway through the evening he remembers his first meeting with her. For the only time since Sally brought him onstage, he leaves to replenish their drinks, but before he does, Ruth asks him what guarantee she has that he is not retreating as he did years ago. “I learn from my mistakes” (45), he asserts. He claims to be changing, to be taking advantage of a second chance. A married couple, the McAlisters, come onto the terrace. Transferred from Atlanta, they have overcome their apprehension about the move to embrace Boston and all that it offers, including a Harvard extension course in Italian. Their love has been renewed; their sex life, revitalized. “‘Nel mezzo di mia vita…’” (52), Esther misquotes the opening line of Dante’s Commedia: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.”7 The misquoting indicates that she and husband Ted are not in hell. It is not a reality for them but a division of a tripartite Italian poem to be studied, one of many activities they are enjoying in the happiness of middle age. The second indication that they are not in hell is visual. They leave the building. And not only do they leave, they invite Austin and Ruth to leave with them to a highway nightspot where people can do the “old kind of dancing” and the “new, too.” They even have learned “some new moves” from students (54). Like Ruth, who mediates between the old world of Capri and the new world of Boston by singing lines from Italian songs to jog Austin’s memory, Esther and Ted mediate between the old and new worlds by dancing. Ruth defers the decision to her partner, at whom she “looks” (54) for direction, but he declines,


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unable to see in the McAlisters anything but the sameness of a debased culture. The climactic scene over, the play’s action reverses away from interaction and toward the isolation with which it began. In the play’s first half, a variety of characters appears. In the second half, only two other than Sally and the smoker, Jim, appear. Walt and Judith are the principals’ alter egos, present to speak what is too embarrassing for them to speak outright. The two guests not only externalize the principals’ conflict, they magnify it. After confessing to being on anti-depression medication, railing against his restrictive WASP culture, and belittling his visits to the psychiatrist, Austin kisses Ruth under a sky “as it was in Naples.” Guest Walt, his best friend, appears, “a little drunk” and wearing a “navy blazer” (64), imagery which imitates naval officer Austin, who had been drinking prior to meeting Ruth years earlier. To her, Walt praises Austin for his fidelity to his WASP culture’s “old rules” (67). Judith, the friend Ruth is visiting who brought her to the party, appears. A musician, she “wears a plain, dark velvet dress and has rather wild, unruly hair” (68), imagery which imitates her friend’s “slightly artsy dress” (14). She informs Ruth that she has a phone call and after the latter goes indoors tells Austin and Walt the story of her friend’s marriage to a man who hit her and who squanders her money. The relationship between Austin and Ruth is being conducted outside them because they are separating, a truth they have intuitively recognized since he declined the McAlisters’ offer to go dancing. After Judith leaves, Walt urges Austin to rescue Ruth, but he defends his caution by citing his age and settled ways among other reasons. Ruth reappears and, as the sounds of the old songs the revelers are singing inside the apartment float onto the terrace, prepares to depart. She waits only long enough to listen to Austin’s passionless counter proposal before returning to her husband and her past in Las Vegas. This second failure to act, years after the initial failure, confirms her perception of him as a man outside of life. “The Beast in the Jungle” returns as a motif in Ruth’s prediction of how Austin will react should he ever learn his fate. James’ protagonist’s insight in the cemetery is redemptive; it restores his humanity. While visiting May’s grave, Marcher chances upon a mourner at another grave who when he passes presents him with a face ravaged by grief. In this mirror image, Marcher sees the lack of passion in himself. His consciousness awakened to the knowledge of pain, suffering, and lost opportunity, he flings himself onto May’s tomb. Austin’s awakening is similar; his reaction, different. Jim returns, smoking. The attempt to quit has been abortive. He was managing, he explains to Austin and Sally, the latter tidying up before leaving the terrace to the former, when the singing of an old song recalled someone close to him who is

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dead. Seeing Jim cry, Gurney’s protagonist awakens, but he does as Ruth predicted he would should he awaken. He suffers impassively as the stage lights fade on him, leading the playwright to write that he “stands like a ghost, outside the human community,” clutching the sweater Ruth forgot in her haste to leave. He is “damned” (x-xi) but not because he does not cry or fling himself onto the terrace floor. He cannot change and join the human community represented onstage by the element absent from Another Antigone, the element that gives Later Life a depth not found in Gurney’s other plays as good as they are. He cannot join the chorus.8 Gurney’s The Cocktail Hour closes with a comic recognition scene in which playwright John identifies with his father. Later Life closes with a tragic scene in which Austin identifies with a man who appears to be so opposite to him in language and gesture that he could qualify as the Brahmin’s other. Austin stares at Jim crying over the death of someone close to him, his lover presumably, angering the defeated smoker. “Why are you staring?” he asks. “I’m just a sentimental old fag who smokes” (85). I do not think that homosexuality, alluded to in the slur, is an issue in the play. It is in The Old Boy, collected in the same volume with Later Life, but the playwright denies that it is that play’s subject. Rather, he writes, its presence dramatizes the “dangers of conformity…” (ix). I think that Gurney introduces it in Later Life to emphasize the recognition in the scene. Like reveling, homosexuality is a potential in Austin, not only because it is in all humans, but because it is latent in his relationship with Walt. While Walt is praising his best friend, he kisses him, answering Ruth’s question about their relationship with the statement, “I love him a lot” (67). The act repulses Austin. At the beginning of the evening, extravagant Jim would seem to staid, conservative Austin the last person with whom he had anything in common. By evening’s end, he has the shock of recognition that he does and does not share with the man who breaks down in front of him and the hostess. Both have suffered losses, but whereas Jim can release his emotions, Austin cannot. As the lights fade, he looks “longingly toward the life within…” the party (86) from the hell of his physical and spiritual isolation. By interacting, playwright John and his family in The Cocktail Hour open the social form and the play to expand the contents of each until the two forms become one. By withholding himself, Austin closes the social form and the play. As a constituent of theatre, the chorus does not develop beyond the embryonic stage. Neither does it expand as a constituent of society. The revelers can sing the old songs well enough but only for a period of time. When the lights fade on solitary Austin, they stop singing. Before vacating the terrace, Sally invited him to join in the singing, suggesting that


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dancing might follow. The audience, however, does not know what follows. Their energy unfocused and directionless, the guests may disperse, ending the party, and in Gurney’s imaginative world, the party, as in The Perfect Party, is the metaphor for the democratic process that brings people together in a social context to form a more perfect union. In The Perfect Party, the Brahmin changes. In Later Life, he does not. In this play’s tragic vision, the world ends in darkness. Austin does not awaken in hell until the closing scene. For a preliminary picture of its nature and torments, we have to turn to a play in which the protagonist awakens in hell during the course of the action. P.J. Gibson’s Brown Silk and Magenta Sunsets takes place in a penthouse apartment that features three life-sized paintings the subjects of which are “frozen in time 9 until brought to life in the mind and world of” their owner, an AfricanAmerican woman, Lena. Fixing the images of the three persons, now dead, with whom her life was intertwined is her way of controlling the past in that at will she can summon the subjects from the canvases to reenact the past as she wants to remember it. The set is an analogue to Lena’s mind. When she first enters the set and pours herself a drink, the phone rings. Her staring at the ringing suggests that she is turned inward. She is, for when she picks up the phone, the voice is that of her daughter, Fendi, one of the three paintings. Slamming the phone down, Lena pours herself another drink. The set is also realistic. The ringing of the door buzzer announces the arrival of Able McKitchen, a 19year-old art student whom Lena has hired to paint her portrait and whom she plans to seduce. Another reality enters the apartment too, not through the door but from within the mind. Once released from the containing frame, Veeda, the singer who became the young Lena’s mentor, says to the woman who summoned her, “Only thing, while you’re diggin’ up the past…. How ‘bout diggin’ up the truth?” (456) Thus the drama is the conflict of will and conscience, will and nature, frozen consciousness and undermining unconsciousness with Lena losing control until she does the only thing she can to prevent another loss of control. Lena always has been strong-willed. In act 1’s reenacted scenes, from her girlhood discovery of the musician, Roland, to her teenage conquest of him, she is accustomed to having her way. It is her will that freezes the musician, the singer who taught her how to sing so that she could perform with Roland, and her daughter by him. It is her will that toasts the paintings, summons the subjects to reenact the scenes she wants replayed, and remands them when she is finished with them. It is her will that sets the trap for Able by commissioning him to paint her portrait.

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Just as Austin’s enclave is his self, so is Lena’s her self. Hers is a passionate nature, and she accepts responsibility for the self that that nature created. “And there are consequences in life for the actions we take and make,” she justifies her seclusion to Able, who refers to the penthouse as her “prison.” She continues, “I chose passion and…this…(She indicates her environment.) this is my sentence for ‘crimes of the heart,’ ‘crimes of passion’” (439–40). The widow of an older man whose wealth enables her to have life-sized paintings, she chooses to be a recluse. Her nature prevents her from merging with the vulgar crowd. Having been passionately in love with Roland, she prefers his image, so that in her mind she can relive her passionate scenes with him, over the companionship of a lesser man. Should she meet someone who arouses her, like the art student paying his bills by delivering meals, she seduces him in her penthouse, where she lives in the past framed by her Apollonian consciousness. For Lena to fix in her consciousness the past she wants to remember, she has to repress under the frozen surface the past she wants to forget. That past refuses to be fixed, however. It impinges on her consciousness in the insistent ringing of the telephone despite her efforts to silence it by shouting at the portrait of her daughter to stop. The more Lena summons her subjects to relive her passionate scenes, the more insistent they become. They not only resist her efforts to remand them, but by the second scene of act 1, they communicate among themselves below the level of her awareness. In the play’s unraveling irony, Lena drinks to blot out the painful memories she wants to forget, only to have the drinking melt the frozen surface in that it loosens her control over her passionate nature. By the opening of act 2, her stuporous state frees the subjects. They call to her without being summoned and step from the containing paintings. As Veeda says to the drunken woman, “I told you…Each swig gives me a little more room. Have another” (487). Yet since she still exercises a modicum of control, they are the voices of her passionate nature still under the jurisdiction of her conscience. They reenact the “‘crimes of passion’” to which she alludes when speaking to Able. In act-2’s opening scene, the three relive the past repressed in act-1’s relived scenes. Despite Fendi’s plea to accompany her unmarried parents as they perform on the road, Lena leaves her with her grandmother. The plan for unencumbered intimacy with Roland backfires. Since the child feels unwanted, Roland sends Lena home to be with her, an act which alienates the mother from her daughter, who comes between her and the man she loves, and from the girl’s father, for making her feel that he does not want her (and he eventually marries singer Veeda). Part of the revenge she takes on him when he comes to her for help is to encourage him to drink, knowing that


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drinking will kill him. The revenge she takes on Fendi is never to be close with her, a rejection that finally drives the young woman to kill herself. That the three reenact scenes Lena wants repressed and take possession of the apartment dramatizes her loss of control as her unrestrained nature overpowers her conscience and consciousness. In act 1 she is the warden whose consciousness and will control her nature by fixing the subjects of the paintings in images from which she summons them to perform the sanitized past and to which she remands them. But they become stronger as she fuels her passion—remembering Roland and anticipating Able—and her willpower to resist her nature weakens. Able’s ringing of the buzzer ends act-2’s second scene, fulfilling Veeda’s prediction that she will not have to wait for the afterlife to “burn in hell” but will discover “hell right here” (498). As her nature overpowers her, the unrestrained subjects become her irrational impulses. In act 2 they are the wardens observing Lena as she performs the subconsciously released past in the present. When Fendi first attempted suicide as a child, Roland rushed home to be with her and Lena. During the time he was home, Lena became pregnant, but she withheld the knowledge from him for fear that he would insist upon her staying with the child as he had insisted that she stay with Fendi. When her son was born, she sold him. Years later she sees a resemblance between Able, who reveals that he is adopted, and Roland. In her drunken stupor, she ignores Veeda’s warning that she may be seducing her son because subconsciously she wants to. In the climactic scene of act-1’s consciously enacted scenes, she is reunited with the man who abandoned her. In the climactic scene of act-2’s subconsciously driven scenes, she is reunited with the son whom she abandoned. In act-2’s climactic scene, the three are a Dionysian chorus, participating in, while commenting on, the seduction. Led by chorus leader Veeda, who opens the scene by alluding to the myth of Jocasta and Oedipus, Roland and Fendi step from the paintings and simultaneously with their slow movement “deliver a slow haunting chant” (500) as the three welcome Lena to their underworld domain. They are in control, driving her and the action. With Veeda asking her how she feels, Roland assumes a coital position with her, erotically readying her for Able, who enters the apartment and replaces him. The climax occurs when the chorus encircles the succumbing lovers before returning to the paintings. The irrational act consummated, the three are once again voices of conscience asking the rational Lena, who is becoming aware of Able’s presence, to look at what she has done. Dismissing the art student, she fires her revolver at the canvases to silence them. She freezes them in their original positions because she has regained consciousness and conscience with it, but

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although the action reverses, she is not where she was before the seduction. She has committed another crime of passion and possibly an incestuous one. Exerting her will a final time, the woman who told Able that she accepts the consequences of life’s choices, even though dictated by her nature, accepts the consequence of her action with Able. She obliterates consciousness and conscience by turning the revolver on herself. By the end of Later Life, Austin is divided between the claim of his old-world culture and the attraction of Ruth’s new-world freedom, and he feels the gnawing of conscience for failing her on the terrace as he did not feel it for forgetting their Capri meeting. From the opening of Brown Silk and Magenta Sunsets, Lena is a divided self. Instead of attempting to channel her nature creatively, she controls her consciousness of her behavior. She represses that part of her past that belies her self-image. As a result she is a recluse, isolated in her penthouse prison. Yet since she is no more Satanic than Austin, she cannot through an act of will resolve her being into a solidified Apollonian consciousness. Before Able’s arrival she cannot maintain her self-image. After she seduces him, she cannot repress another crime of passion under a consciousness so strained by the existing pressure that she has to drink herself into a stupor to forget. The irony is that by dissolving consciousness, she dissolves control, and her Dionysian nature propels her into another crime of passion. Unable to reconcile her divided self—unable to integrate her conscious image with her unconscious desires—she resolves her dilemma by permanently dissolving consciousness. Awakening in hell, she kills herself. The protagonist of Adrienne Kennedy’s 1964 play, “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” knows that she is in hell from the moment she speaks because she knows that she is fragmented. In her opening monologue, Sarah, a young “Negro” woman, identifies the set as her domicile. It is a “small room on the 10 top floor of a brownstone in the West Nineties in New York,…” where she, a college graduate and part-time library worker, aspires to be a poet by imitating Edith Sitwell’s poetry. Yet by the time she finishes the monologue, she refers to the multiple rooms in which exist her four selves, who enter and exit while she speaks. Even if they did not silently appear during the monologue, the action preceding the monologue establishes the set as symbolic. Before anyone speaks, Sarah’s mother crosses the stage. Dressed in white, carrying a bald head and mumbling to herself, she walks as in a trance. As she vanishes, the curtain opens. The material, the directions read, “brings to mind the interior of a cheap casket”; frayed, it looks “as if it has been gnawed by rats” (2). With its ebony ravens and lurid lights, hallucinatory mother and ghastly occupants, the set resembles an Edgar Allan Poe haunted palace, and one of the two


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female selves of Sarah’s divided psyche refers to the domicile as the “castle” (3). To a greater degree than in Brown Silk and Magenta Sunsets, the set’s interior is the interior of the protagonist’s mind. There is less interaction with the external world than in Gibson’s play, in which Able arrives to paint Lena’s portrait. In “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” the open curtain reveals two of Sarah’s selves, Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg, who speak of a visitor, but he is the dead father, who “keeps coming back forever” (4). Since there is more mental deterioration in Kennedy’s play than in Gibson’s play, Sarah has less control over herself than Lena has over herself. A knocking at the door begins after the curtain opens but unlike the ringing of the phone in the penthouse apartment, which jars when it sounds, is so persistent that it contributes to the play’s rhythm. Victoria hears in the knocking the arrival of the father, whose reality the young Negro woman is unable to vanquish. The Queen and the Duchess silently reappear moments later during the protagonist’s monologue with the other two selves identified in the cast as divisions of her self: Jesus and Patrice Lumumba, the slain prime minister of the Republic of the Congo. Although the four are included in Kennedy’s autobiographical People Who Led to My Plays, I recommend Werner Sollors’ article to anyone studying her craft. It is recent, acknowledges works by other critics, and benefits from correspondence and conversations with the playwright. A question he raises is why she chose these four as Sarah’s personae. In answering it, he discusses the associations and meanings they take on, their shifting relationships with the protagonist and one another, and the way in which the transformations in identity and the ritualistic repetitions in language structure the drama.11 My study has another focus. I will begin with the location of the rituals. Sarah’s top-floor room is her consciousness, but it has been invaded by her unconscious. Refusing to dissolve, Apollonian consciousness is swamped by the rising contents of a Dionysian unconscious that cannot be repressed. This issue cannot be examined apart from the second issue, which is the reason the young woman clings to consciousness. It is the construct in which she has taken asylum so that she does not have “to be” herself (5). She does not want to be black, the color she associates with her father and “evil” (5), anticipating that when she has friends, they will be white, her “fortress” and “embankment.” The two metaphors she uses “against recognition of” herself (6) are Apollonian images of height and solidity. They are barricades against rising water, a metaphor for Dionysian reality. Merely securing high ground, however, does not put her beyond the reach of conscience. She attempts to neutralize its pangs two ways. In the

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first way, she transfers the guilt she feels onto her father, blaming him for her mother’s, and her, condition. A dark man, he raped her mother, who looked like a white woman, causing her hair to fall out, just as her own is. In the simultaneous second way, she justifies the pangs by confessing to a crime consistent with the guilt she feels. She deserves the punishment because she killed the beast by bludgeoning his head. Yet when the arriving black man identifies himself, he is Lumumba, and it is the slain prime minister’s skull that has been split. What Sarah is actually trying to kill is her African heritage: the black father who forever returns from the dead, the jungle that forever encroaches in the New York brownstone. Recalling the period of her life between 1953 and 1960 when she often found herself staring at a miniature statue of Beethoven on her desk and a photograph of Queen Hatshepsut on the wall, Kennedy writes, “I did not then understand that I felt torn between these forces of my ancestry…European and African…a fact that would one day 12 explode in my work.” The discovery of a field of images within herself and her African-American culture is a motif in People Who Led to My Plays. For example, the most exciting course she had in high school was with a history teacher who introduced the class to the concept of a “‘universal unconscious’” (64) and who was the author of the statement, “‘All events are connected’” (64 and 81), which resonated in the aspiring writer. Recovering the dormant images and connecting them enabled Kennedy to become an artist. Reading Faulkner’s novels, she found reinforcement for her feeling that the “South was a strange mesh of dark kinship between the races” (98). García Lorca’s poetry showed her that imagery is “multilayered,” connected from the surface to the “buried” depth (98). Seeing the Spanish playwright’s Blood Wedding, she realized that a play does not have to be realistic but can be set within a dream (108). It was, however, while writing a short story aboard an ocean liner on a voyage that would eventually take her and her husband and son to Africa that she had her breakthrough. Replacing traditional narrative’s linear progression with an internal “logic,” she joined the “real and the unreal,” her “unconscious and conscious” (116). When she and her family returned to the States, she had the completed “Funnyhouse of a Negro” in her suitcase. Unlike her creator, Sarah wants to connect only on the surface and only with half of the determinants of her racial heritage, a determinant of her self-development. She wants to live in a white world with white friends yet knowing that relationships are “lies” (7). They are false, not because whites reject her—she has a white lover—but because she is living a lie. She wants to disown the other half of the racial determinants yet knowing that it will not stay buried. Thus she is a divided or fragmented self who can neither


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reconcile her conscious and subconscious minds as Kennedy did on the ocean liner, releasing her creative energy, nor can she disconnect them by repressing her unconscious. She can consciously disconnect by imitating white, British poetry, but her conscience punishes her for attempting to renounce her heritage. Pangs of conscience are not limited to her attitude toward her father. Since the four selves also are voices of her conscience, “Funnyhouse” may be said to continue the tragic isolation in Later Life and Brown Silk and Magenta Sunsets. Sarah is isolated from her past, which returns in the persons of a chorus of four alter egos. They are her guests from hell, for although she has withdrawn into her mind, her past-nature-heritage does not respect her privacy. In the penultimate scene, Jesus appears followed by the other three selves “wandering about speaking at once” in the room overgrown by the jungle (20). Sollors sees in this scene of mixed, repeated speeches and in other scenes a “chorus-like form” echoing Greek tragedy, a genre “with which Kennedy feels a special affinity,” as she reveals in the autobiographical People and in accepting commissions to adapt Euripides’ Electra and Orestes. He calls attention to an early indication of the affinity in the play in the mask that can be worn by the Queen and the Duchess. The gouged eyes, he writes, “evoke Oedipus.”13 I want to develop the notion that “Funnyhouse” has an affinity with Greek tragedy. In the stage directions describing the mask, Kennedy specifies that the actresses do not have to wear it, but if they do not, their faces should be made up to “look exactly alike” (3). Only the individual facial characteristics should be concealed. The four selves are distinguishable by color, gender, and size. Jesus is a yellow-skinned hunchback whereas Lumumba is black and the women alabaster. But they merge, repeat one another’s speeches, and divide again as they mix in the rituals. In other words, the four meet a primary requirement of a Greek chorus. They are polymorphous. They are Dionysian. Polymorphous, they are fluid in changing identities with the knocker, for instance, who is not the father but Lumumba. Returned from the dead, they are slain and resurrected. Appearing and disappearing, at times stationary and at times animated, they perform an action that is ritualistic: repetitive and recursive. It would be stretching the point to claim that they dance, although they can be said to sing. Sollors hears in the “repetitions and variations of identical lines…a rhythmical incanta14 tion….” Singly and in unison, in repeated movement and language, without beginning or end, the alter egos generate the mix of Sarah’s ancestry. In their fluidity they represent the unconscious, irrational flux in which she origi-

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nated but which she repudiates. In their diversity they represent the family and society to which she is tied but from which she has isolated herself. Sarah wants to be, not multiple, but unitary. She wants to be white. Attempting to disconnect the selves one from another, she denies her black father entrance to her room while installing white Victoria, a statue of whom occupies the room, as her “idol” (5). Yet all of the selves keep returning, merging, and dividing. Since she cannot disguise her “unmistakably Negro kinky hair” (6) or disconnect one from another the guests from hell, she attempts to control with her Apollonian consciousness the voices of her conscience; it is her way of freezing reality. She not only expresses her desire to have white friends and to write white poetry, she maintains the illusion that she can be accepted as white. As she says, “I long to become even a more pallid Negro than I am now” (5). That is, she uses her conscious, rational mind to project linearly toward a new future in opposition to the recursive rituals of the subconscious, irrational chorus, who keep returning with the reality she denies. In her constructed narrative, which has a beginning and progresses linearly to a resolution, she killed her past, freeing her to fulfill her dream of living “in rooms with European antiques…” (6). Yet as the play dramatizes, Sarah cannot transcend herself. The penultimate scene, in which the four selves mix and repeat their speeches in the room overgrown with the jungle, ends with the four laughing and shouting “as though they are in victory” (22) after they verbally recreate the scene in which she allegedly bludgeons her father, who has come to her for forgiveness. She knows that her dream of transcendence is futile, and knowing that she can neither accept nor reject the mixed heritage her light mother and dark father determined for her, by an act of will she resolves the conflict. She breaks the endlessly recurring rituals by hanging herself. In this interpretation she does with a rope what Lena does with a revolver; she kills herself. The ultimate scene, just described, is not as simple as it sounds. I want to examine it more closely through the vehicle of a 1995 production. Signature Theatre Company is a company that devotes a season to one playwright’s theatre. The fifth season, 1995–96, was devoted to Kennedy’s plays, a boon to the audience, most of whom, myself included, had never seen them staged. We knew her through reading her dramatic works and autobiography. Mixed in with us were those who knew her by reputation but had not read her. Judging by their reaction—the gasp, the nod of recognition, the talk as the crowd moved into the lobby and cafe during intermission— the ending is a linear resolution to the conflict within a madwoman. Sarah hangs herself, and the dialogue between the landlady and Sarah’s lover,


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Raymond, which closes the play, corrects her version of her relationship with her father. When the landlady remarks in effect that her death is for nought since she did not kill her father, who hung himself, Raymond corrects her. The father is alive and living in the situation to which she aspired but could not actualize: married to a white person “in rooms with European antiques…” (23). To these spectators, the landlady and Raymond exist outside Sarah’s dream. They missed, however, the play’s internal evidence. When Sarah first appears, she has the rope around her neck. The hanging, then, is itself a recursive ritual. The landlady “laughs like a mad character in a funnyhouse…” (8). And in an early scene, Raymond interacts with the Duchess, one of Sarah’s fragmented selves. The laugh and the interaction take the landlady and Raymond from totally independent existences and put them at least partly within the protagonist’s mind. The laugh and interaction therefore invalidate the two as authoritative frames of reference. Had the evening’s double bill been reversed, the spectators who saw the action as proceeding linearly might have thought twice before coming to that conclusion. The Signature Theatre Company paired “Funnyhouse of a Negro” with “A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White.” The latter is a play which juxtaposes live scenes from three Hollywood films with scenes from the life of a black family that has come to a hospital to stand vigil over one of their members, who has been seriously injured. As soon as the first scene from the film Now, Voyager plays, it is obvious the dialogue is not that of the film but is a mix of Hollywood dialogue and the black family’s history and anxiety for the patient. It is obvious too that the young black woman, Clara, like Sarah an aspiring writer, is imagining the film scenes. In each play in the company’s pairing, the real and the unreal, the unconscious and the conscious—to use Kennedy’s language for the shipboard breakthrough— interpenetrate each other. The interpenetration creates the ambiguity, even in the autobiography. A page following the text of People Who Led to My Plays contains this statement by the playwright: “My plays are meant to be states of mind.” Yet much earlier in the book, she writes, “My characters live in powerful, influential rooms, almost to the exclusion of the outside world” (59). “Almost” implies some interaction or intersection between the mind and the external world. Determining where the intersection occurs is the difficulty. Sarah claims to have bludgeoned her father. According to the landlady, he hung himself. Raymond contradicts them in asserting that he is alive and remarried. The rituals provide another perspective. The father is alive in the sense that his heritage is alive in his daughter.

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The interpenetration rather than the point of intersection explains the motivation. Even with a different father, Sarah still is the offspring of a mixed heritage in that her mother is a mix. No one claims that the mother is white; in the language repeated throughout the speeches, she is the lightest. The Duchess’ statement that her father, Sarah’s grandfather, was a “white man” (11) makes mother and daughter instances of Faulkner’s “strange mesh of dark kinship between the races,” quoted earlier. That Sarah’s father is identified with Lumumba and accused of raping his wife while they were in Africa suggests that he imposed his black, African, dream of redeeming the race on the family. His dream collides with the daughter’s 15 aspiration to pass for white, causing her to feel guilty for disavowing it. Yet she cannot repudiate the mix. Her room, both the physical and the mental space she inhabits, is a mix. It is a funnyhouse: a house of distortion in which she is living a lie and a house of mirrors in which she sees herself fragmented by conflicting ties and allegiances, cultures and energies. The mirrors and voices, internal and external, are the prisms and perspectives through which she is alienated from and connected to herself, for the separation and the connection are her reality. She cannot integrate her selves. At the same time, although she is isolated from society, she cannot isolate herself from her selves because they are connected. Her maternal grandparents forged a connection in her mother while her paternal grandparents forged one in her father. And her parents forged a connection in her. With interpenetration as the structural principle, linearity and circularity coexist as interpretations for Sarah’s torment. Because she can neither integrate nor sever her heritage, the denied selves consigned to the unconscious keep returning. In the linear interpretation, she hangs herself to end the ritual in which the rejected selves unite with the accepted selves to overpower her consciousness until she rends herself again by denying her black heritage. In the circular interpretation, the hanging is part of the ritual she suffers as punishment for rending herself. I favor the circular interpretation because it is consistent with the notion of hell as the unending reenactment of the past, but I cannot insist on its predominance. Whether she ends or continues the ritual, though, she is in her father’s words, a “nigger of torment” (22). From Later Life to “Funnyhouse,” the plays in this chapter dramatize an increasing tension in a confined space as the three protagonists can neither dismiss the chorus of revelers, portraits, and selves nor accept the bond that their presence implies. The lights come down on Austin as he looks longingly at the apartment where the revelers are partying but is unable to join them. Lena awakens to the recognition that the portraits are witnesses to a past she does not want to confront. Sarah welcomes two of her selves but


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dreads the arrival of the fourth. Having reached the summit of their flight and unwilling to duplicate the Professor’s descent in My Head Was a Sledgehammer into the ground of their being, they increasingly suffer pangs of conscience until Lena kills herself and Sarah kills herself once or repeatedly. Given Kennedy’s interest in Greek tragedy, the tormenting selves are Sarah’s Furies, the embodiment of the multiple heritage she wants to repudiate but cannot. In the play that begins the next chapter, the protagonist does deny the Furies. The play is the first of three works that reinvent the tragedy of the House of Atreus as it is centered in Orestes and his sisters.


() &' C H A P T E R F I V E

David Rabe, Charles Mee, and Ellen McLaughlin While composing an afterword for the 1993 publication of his four Vietnam plays spawned by the war, David Rabe discovered the past to be alive. “Vietnam,” he writes, “rises before me as our communal manifestation of an urge toward a shadowy savagery innate in all human character but with specifics reflecting the individuality of our society, the true assertion of our 1 deepest, unacknowledged values.” He does not link the savagery and Dionysian energy in this passage, although the fourth play, The Orphan, does by linking Apollo and Dionysus. The afterword links the contemporary world and the ancient world, his theatre and the theatre of classical Greece. The penultimate paragraph states that the issues the first three plays raise are revisited in The Orphan but “not so much resolved as transmogrified and mythologized. These trends in the human psyche are viewed as ancient and eternal, as they return and evolve in order to reoccur ‘differently’” (196). The ancient and eternal truths that The Orphan mythologizes are those in Aeschylus’ trilogy, the Oresteia. Rabe’s play dramatizes them differently, however. Structurally his play is divided into two acts, not three, with the first act corresponding to the trilogy’s first play, Agamemnon. Both plays open with the spectators’ attention drawn above the performance space, the contemporary play to an image that only gradually comes to pervade the trilogy. Aeschylus introduces the image of the net early in Agamemnon when the chorus of Argos elders relates how, with the Greek fleet weather-bound at the harbor of Aulis in Boeotia and therefore unable to proceed to Troy to punish the Trojans for abducting Helen, the seer Calchas, in hunting imagery, predicted eventual success. Weaving hunting device with articles of clothing, the image becomes metaphoric and symbolic, but even though the chorus vividly recreates the gagged Iphigenia’s sacrifice as the condition to be met for the fleet to sail, the image is verbal until Clytemnestra has the 2 purple carpet spread before the king’s chariot upon his return from Troy. It

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does not fully materialize in Agamemnon as a nucleus of many of the trilogy’s strands until the wife appears with her husband’s enshrouded body in a scene which illustrates what Herington calls a basic principle of the playwright’s dramaturgy. “An Aeschylean dramatic work tends to progress: from verbal to 3 visual….” The audience for The Orphan sees the net as soon as the lights come up onstage. “A large rope cargo net hangs vertically upstage. Behind it and stretching downstage on either side of the cargo net are a series of ramps and platforms with rope wound around the ramps, the railings, the struts, the beams, their texture echoing that of the net” (89). The image dominates the production visually, but to appreciate how it webs the action metaphorically and symbolically, we need to understand what each play, Agamemnon and act 1 of The Orphan, excludes and includes. Aeschylus excludes a story available to him that Agamemnon by an act of insolence provoked the goddess Artemis into demanding his daughter’s sacrifice, and although the chorus recreates the sacrifice and Clytemnestra justifies her killing of Agamemnon as retaliation for it, the playwright excludes the story, dramatized by Euripides, that he lured the girl to Aulis on the pretence that she was to marry Achilles. He includes Cassandra’s vision, which connects Clytemnestra’s killing of her husband in the bath back to the curse on the House of Atreus, and her prophecy, which connects the killing forward to the coming of an avenger. Rabe excludes Cassandra and the herald as characters (and the nurse and the priestess from the subsequent plays) but includes all the other principal mortals (and Orestes, Pylades, and Electra from the subsequent plays). He even has two Clytemnestras, ten years apart in age. The cast also includes members of a contemporary family and characters named the Figure, the Speaker, and the Girl. The costumes too are generically contemporary rather than individualized: gowns, jeans, jumpsuits, and the like. The curse on the House of Atreus receives no more than a brief aside in Rabe’s play. At one point Agamemnon remembers that when he and his brother were boys, they played an adult game in which they pretended to be their father and uncle, the former cooking the latter’s children and the latter eating them and vomiting. The man laughs at the childhood recollection; the play, however, indicts him for more than a lapse into depravity. Act 1 incorporates not only Iphigenia’s death but also Agamemnon’s killing of another of Clytemnestra’s children, this one before they were married. That is, Rabe includes material Aeschylus excludes. In Iphigenia in Aulis, Euripides dramatizes the events and motives climaxing in the sacrifice at the Boeotian harbor to appease Artemis. The relevant material occurs after Clytemnestra, learning that marriage to Achilles

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was a pretext to have the daughter brought to Aulis, confronts Agamemnon. Trying to persuade him to change his mind about sacrificing the girl, she reminds him of the circumstances that led to their marriage: And this reproach I first hurl in your teeth, That I married you against my will, after You murdered Tantalus, my first husband, And dashed my living babe upon the earth, 4 Brutally tearing him from my breasts.

Despite legitimate cause for hating him, Clytemnestra goes on, she became “reconciled” (1157) to their union. Since as he knows she has been a good wife and mother, why, she asks, would he want to kill Iphigenia? As Philip Vellacott analyzes the argument, which runs for 62 lines, the motivation is selfishness. Clytemnestra interprets the crime as against her “rather 5 than against Iphigenia.” When Agamemnon responds, it is not to anything his wife said about the loss of her first child but only to the compulsion put upon him to act. Rabe develops the killing of the first child beyond the mother’s reproach in Euripides’ play. In an attempt to dissuade her husband from killing their daughter, Clytemnestra One, the younger of the two queens in The Orphan, reminds him in a narrative of the day that he killed her first husband and their infant son. Of course he remembers, but he counters her narrative with his interpretation of her behavior that day. According to her, she extended the boy toward the conqueror to ask pity on the two of them. According to him, she offered the boy as a sacrifice to win him. “It was your wish in your eye,” he insists. “You held that child up like a gift” (116). The image of the child as sacrificial victim merges with other images of blood spilled to which the action of The Orphan keeps returning. When Clytemnestra One accuses him of wanting to “slaughter” Iphigenia, Agamemnon corrects her choice of words: “I sacrifice!” No, Clytemnestra Two exclaims, “I SACRIFICE!” (122) as she plunges a knife into the tub, eliciting a scream from their daughter, whose throat has just been cut above the stage. Both return from the dead, a feat duplicated by Orestes’ transformation. A young man when act 1 opens, he takes his father’s place in the tub, where he is killed, and is unborn at the act’s end, the seed gestating in the queen. Pregnant, she should go home, the king advises her, so that the men can concentrate on punishing Troy, the reason for their gathering at Aulis. In the Argive chorus’ recreation of events ten years earlier, Agamemnon returns to Aulis too, and like the nets that entangle Iphigenia and Troy, Agamemnon and Cassandra, the prophetic warnings and visions with the related sacrifice and rapine converge on the ironic homecoming to coil the

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action. Yet it also moves directly from the beacons signaling the Greek victory to the king’s treading on the purple carpet to the closing of the palace doors. Thus the recursive action in memory, dream, and vision drives the linear action, creating the play’s terror. The inexplicable is working its way 6 through human agents caught in the yoke of necessity. I am not suggesting that within the context of the trilogy, Agamemnon is hopeful. Both it and Rabe’s play are nightmarish dramas of moral chaos. Yet compared with act 1 of The Orphan, Agamemnon is the more hopeful in that Cassandra foresees the coming of an avenger and the chorus prays to Zeus in a hymn that has become famous. Rabe creates another terror in his play’s first act. The inexplicable is working its way through humans, but it is a different inexplicable force from that of the Oresteia. Its recursiveness overpowers its linear thrust. After her initial greeting, the Speaker’s first words are the following: “In a place like this we all begin. Deep within the dark of another’s belly” (90). Like the trilogy, The Orphan opens in darkness, but except for the convention that lights must come up onstage for the audience to see in an indoor production, the scene remains in an interior darkness. I do not know whether Robert Fagles’ translation is the most authentic Oresteia in English, but it contains a passage that provides entrance to the interior darkness of The Orphan. When in Agamemnon Cassandra looks up at the palace roofs and sees the Furies, she says to the chorus, “They sing, / sing of the frenzy 7 that began it all.” It is as if Rabe developed act 1 of his play from that passage. The action swirls within Clytemnestra’s belly from which will issue Agamemnon’s death and Orestes’ birth and from the latter her death. Yet the scene is not simply her belly; it is the belly whence all life—“we all”— issues. I think Rabe reduces the curse to an aside for this reason: to avoid confusion on the part of the modern spectator for whom a curse would be confined to a person or a family.8 Act-1’s frenzy is the primordial chaos from which myth is born—Hesiod’s universe that predates the myth that Aeschylus’ imagination animates. Orestes’ entrance as a young man told that he must kill his mother indicates that the action has no beginning because it is already in motion. That it closes with the Speaker’s repeating almost verbatim her opening statements indicates that it continues without end. Between the theatrical conventions of opening and closing a scene is the theory of relativity’s spacetime continuum, introduced by the Speaker and the contemporary family, who ask the audience to consider the possibility that “events thought to be in sequence, are in fact, simultaneous” (91). The action dramatizes the basic concept of modern physics. Agamemnon returns from the Trojan War to be clubbed by Clytemnestra Two and Aegisthus posing as her servant while


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mention is made of his mistress, Cassandra, having her throat cut in the kitchens. The Figure as Apollo descends from the scaffolding to hand the two conspirators the net, which they throw over the king as Orestes rushes forward. All the characters, including Agamemnon and Iphigenia, respond to the ringing of a telephone while the Girl recounts her meeting with the cult figure whose groupie she would become. Resembling Charles Manson, he was known as Abaddon, the Hebrew name of Apollyon, the destroying angel of “Revelations. Chapter Nine. Verse Eleven” (169). Not only does the space-time continuum collapse the orderly sequence such as that which Cassandra sees in her vision in Agamemnon, it collapses the characters’ identities. Clytemnestra splits into two queens ten years apart in age. When Agamemnon realizes that Aegisthus kills him, he wants to be Aegisthus, who wants to be Agamemnon when he learns that Orestes avenges his father’s death by killing him. When the Figure is not the Figure, he is Dionysus-Apollyon or Apollo or Calchas preparing Iphigenia for the sacrifice. Orestes takes his father’s place in the tub as Clytemnestra Two and Aegisthus, standing over him, continue to address him as Agamemnon. They stab him as Clytemnestra One, echoing Euripides’ queen in Iphigenia in Aulis, argues with the standing king against their daughter’s sacrifice. Dissolving causal, sequential relationships into simultaneous, circular motion and individual identities into shifting role-appropriations, the action is the undifferentiated flux before self-differentiation. Rabe does not need a chorus of Argive elders because all the players are the chorus. They are in the participation mystique from which evolves the principium individuationis, the Dionysian energy from which is born Apollonian form. In this frenzy Oresteia players reenact an ancient tragedy with contemporary players not only relating modern horrors but becoming participants in the reenacted tragedy. The detached Manson groupie matter-of-factly tells of the cult members in uniforms that minimized detection going into a rich neighborhood to “kill some gooks” (103). The contemporary family members, however, become accomplices to the Aulis sacrifice by voluntarily delivering the letter Agamemnon writes to his daughter to deceive her into coming to the Boeotian harbor. Savagery characterizes this frenzied realm which collapses time, space, and identity. With events coincident and sites coextensive, act 1 of The Orphan swirls in humankind’s unconscious as well as Clytemnestra’s belly and primordial chaos’ participation mystique. As the realm of the irrational within the human being, the unconscious is savage. Throughout the act a variety of explanations for motivation is defended, each by someone who thinks of himself as rational but whose explanation is undercut by the savagery it engenders much as the curse on the House of Atreus is self-perpetuating. Calchas, who sees himself acting with “reason”

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(118), interprets the ornithomantic sign as demanding Iphigenia’s sacrifice. When her mother objects, he insists on his authority as the voice of Apollo, “His lips and tongue” (119). Agamemnon prays to the eight godheads in “planetary swirl” (89) above the stage, but they do not answer him. He valorizes war despite the absurdity of the provocation. The troops, idled by the absence of winds to propel them to Troy, are ready to fight among themselves because one platoon alleges that another platoon took its aluminum tent poles. To Clytemnestra, any man who would sacrifice his daughter for the opportunity to avenge an insult, real or imagined, acts not from reason but from pride, yet her cure for her husband’s pride is killing him. The Speaker advances scientific explanations such as electrical “impulses leaping to the brain” (111). The flowing of just one she likens to a “spark toward an explosion” (117). As deterministic as her explanation is, she balances it by assigning to the brain the function of instituting order by sorting out the impulses. Agamemnon counters by pointing out the burden under which humans, unlike the gods, labor. The sorting decisions are interminable and frequently instantaneous. And a wrong one is punished. In the absence of rational, moral control, explosions are the rule, not the exception, in the unconscious. Rabe elaborates in the afterword when he links the Speaker’s imagery with modern physics, the relativity theory of which the play dramatizes. “Violence,” he proposes, “is not rational. It is not mechanical. The well-made play reflects the Newtonian clockwork universe. What I was after is more like nuclear fission in which the explosion of something miniscule unlooses catastrophic, ungovernable devastation” (184). In the absence of Apollonian government, recursive act 1 closes as it opens: in the Dionysian frenzy that sacrifices a human victim in an attempt to appease the terror of the ungovernable inexplicable. Yet gathering strength is an explosion that will transform act-1’s circular, chaotic universe into act-2’s linear, orderly universe. From deep within the unconscious, the Figure becomes “Dionysus, Apollon of the pit, prince of light and bearer of darkness” who becomes Apollo (124). He embraces Clytemnestra because from deep within the womb comes Orestes. In words that are prophetic, the deity welcomes the avenger: “What friends we will be! Apollo and Orestes” (125). Act 2 opens with the explosion, which is nothing less than a cosmogony. With the two Clytemnestras clutching their bellies as the Speaker inventories the birth of plant and animal life culminating in man, Orestes appears within the tub in imagery that connects him to act 1, which corresponds to Agamemnon, and to act-2’s closing scene, which corresponds to the Eumenides. Act 2 compresses the second and third plays of Aeschylus’ trilogy with the opening scenes corresponding to the middle play, the Liba-


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tion Bearers. His appearance “in the placentalike gory net in which his father died” (126) connects Orestes with his origin and heritage in the House of Atreus. The Speaker’s likening a photograph of human brain lobes to “netting” (133) connects the son with his destination in the brain in the play’s concluding scene. Since The Orphan most resembles the Oresteia in the Agamemnon counterpart and least in the Eumenides counterpart, we have to examine the middle section, the Libation Bearers counterpart, to determine why the contemporary play diverges from its classical model as it dramatizes the hero’s quest. In both the classical and contemporary versions of the Orestes story, the middle section is the pivotal one. The trilogy’s second play opens with Orestes and Pylades at Agamemnon’s tomb. The son has returned home from Phocis, where he was reared in exiled, under Apollo’s order to avenge his father’s death. As he lays two locks of his hair upon the grave, he sees a procession of women approaching. Accompanying his sister Electra, the slave women have been sent by Clytemnestra to placate the spirit of her dead husband because the queen has had a dream in which she bore a snake that when she went to suckle bit her breast, drawing blood with the milk. Yet placating is neither Electra’s intention, as she makes clear when she pours the liquid into the grave, nor her brother’s. Once reunited, and with the chorus’ assistance, they enlist their father’s warrior spirit in the son’s cause. By play’s end Orestes is so tormented for having slain his mother that he flees to Apollo’s shrine at Delphi, but the god does not appear until the Eumenides. To his sister at the tomb, Orestes reports the charge given to him prior to their reunion. He knows who he is and what the heroic culture expects of him. Armed with his father’s spirit, he recognizes that he is the snake in his mother’s dream, and he leaves the grave for the palace but not before the chorus sings the trilogy’s transitional ode. In imagery of “torches” that “blossom” and the avenger’s wiping “out the stain of blood shed long 9 ago,” the women’s song celebrates a birth that reconciles masculine and feminine principles, sky and earth, Olympian and chthonic deities. Rabe repeates the imagery early in act 2 of The Orphan but ironically. Beginning with the act’s opening, the Figure as Apollo has to instruct the young man delivered from the tub in his mission of vengeance. He has to fill in the hero’s lineage, directing his attention to the tub, where he can put a lock of hair on his father’s grave, and to the hole in it, through which he can glimpse the House of Atreus’ progenitor, Tantalus, who suffers in hell. But the avenger designate has no “wish to acknowledge a relative in Hell” (129). After the Figure forces him to look, he grants the existence of a beast in the family tree but sees himself as having progressed far beyond the bestial.

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Orestes is not alone in initially rejecting his role in the drama. In act 1 when Aegisthus tells Clytemnestra Two of his dream in which she dreams of giving birth to a snake that she identifies as her son when she holds it to her breast, the older of the two queens denies the oneiric prophecy. Since Rabe’s Clytemnestra claims not to have had the dream that terrifies Aeschylus’ queen and since Rabe’s Orestes does not want to peer into the hole in the tomb, backing away after being forced to look, or invoke any spirit within it, the contemporary play would seem to have no function for libation bearers. They are present nevertheless but not as wailing women. The challenge facing a contemporary artist who seeks to recreate an ancient work is discovering contemporary equivalents to the work’s deities. Rabe succeeds by maintaining the trilogy’s outline while developing internal psychological realities. For example, above the stage in planetary swirl are “eight white heads” (89) to whom Agamemnon prays, but the godheads do not intercede on the king’s behalf in Rabe’s play any more than they do in Agamemnon, the difference being that they are dead in the modern world. Apollo, however, is very much alive, although the cast of characters for the revised version of The Orphan does not include the god’s name. The character named the Figure assumes in act 1 the roles of the complementary deities, Dionysus and Apollo, as well as that of Calchas, the interpreter of Artemis’ will, because act 1 is the undifferentiated flux from which act-2’s differentiated selves are born. It is the savage prehistory from which civilization evolves, the submission to the yoke of necessity from which conscious choice arises. In act 2 the Figure as Apollo has a more individual, personal relationship with Orestes than he does in act 1 because act-2’s Orestes is a more contemporary actualization than his act-1 counterpart. The Apollo power is not external to the hero but within him. It is the power within 10 civilized man that converts irrational energy into rational capability. As act 1 opens, Orestes rushes in. Told by the Figure, high in the scaffolding and not yet identified as Apollo, that he wants to kill his mother, the young man draws his sword but does not kill her. In the frenzy he is killed in the tub as his father’s surrogate. Emerging from the tub as act 2 opens, Orestes picks up the knife left for him by the Figure, who observes him from concealment, but when the two Clytemnestras flee screaming, the young man is confused. Greeted by the Figure, subsequently identified as the “God of Reason and the pit” (131), who begins to instruct him in his mission of vengeance, he resists the knowledge the deity imparts about his mother’s treachery. He resists peering into his father’s grave to see the family’s progenitor because even the hint of inherited savagery conflicts with that which his counterpart in act 1 lacks: a self and therefore a self-image. He is not innocent; he represses the contents of act 1 into his unconscious.


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When the hero enters in act 1, he admits, “I have been told I am Orestes” (90). When in act 2 the Figure greets him as Orestes, he replies, “Oh, I know. Of course” (127). And he feels “great” to be who he is: the cosmogony’s “culmination.” Whatever “darkness” moved in Tantalus that consigned him to hell “no longer moves in me” (128–30), the young man assures the deity, who agrees with his protégé, encouraging him to express his feelings in song. The blood having been wiped from him by the contemporary family members, who wave cigarette lighters, Orestes sings a lyric celebrating his birth that frees him from the stain of blood and all that blood signifies about the past. But this repetition of imagery from the Libation Bearers, which is ironic, does not repeat the great choral ode, the counterpart of which is still to come. For the purpose of comparison, I see no harm in applying contemporary psychological terms to describe Aeschylus’ hero, although they really do not apply in a work whose frame of reference is religious (and moral and political). They do apply to Rabe’s hero. He is a self divided by the ambivalence that divides his classical model, who is commanded to avenge his father’s death by killing his mother. In order to commit the act, Aeschylus’ Orestes with his sister and the chorus of libation bearers must arouse his father’s spirit in him while placating his conscience. The first part of the preparation he can do; the second he also can do but only until the act is accomplished. The Orphan dramatizes the psychological (and moral and political) journey through Vietnam-era America of a hero who quests for a resolution to the division within him that separates his self-image from the repressed reality of his human nature, his image of the new world of which he is the Apollonian culmination from the repressed reality of its Dionysian origin. The epigraph to the published edition (87) provides access even before the play is staged. “Let no one think for an instant,” reads a quotation from psychologist Rollo May, “that we, in our vaunted modern civilization, have 11 gone ‘beyond the primitive human sacrifice.’” Delivered from the tub-womb, Orestes quests for self-knowledge on the journey that every hero must make, a traditional determinant of which is parentage, so that his education is internal—learning about himself—and external—learning about the world. He is not so much arrogant as proud of being the beneficiary of a culture that appears to have left primitive “darkness” (130) behind. He thereby rejects in himself and the world the irrational energy from which rational capability is born. But while congratulating the quester on his evolutionary progress, the “God of Reason and the pit” within him will not let him rationalize away his and the world’s potential for savagery. Not yet anyway. Not until he fulfills his mission. Hence the deity sends to the young man the tutors Pylades and the contem-

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porary family members. Their mission is inculcation: to arouse in him his warrior spirit while placating his conscience to attune him to contemporary American life. Rabe’s contribution to 20th-century reinventions of the Orestes story is to play the first act as a nightmare, merging scenes and motifs from the Oresteia and Iphigenia in Aulis with events of the 1960s, but without indicating where it is occurring. The audience may be privileged in that it knows the story, but not until the hero arrives is the scene of the nightmare revealed. The drama is inside the psyche of a contemporary inheritor of Western civilization who rejects the inheritance because he sees himself as having progressed beyond its roots in savagery, what he later calls Western culture’s “structures and myths” (161). Yet his ambivalence tells us that his roots remain planted; the slayings continually recur in his mind. Until his resolution the action is recursive. Man’s masculine, warrior spirit sacrifices his feminine nature, only to have his feminine conscience retaliate, forcing him to accept his nature, heritage, and guilt or kill his conscience. Awakened from his euphoria, the hero, in whom merge classical avenger and contemporary quester, is disoriented by released images from his unconscious, in which Aeschylus’ and Euripides’ plays are stored, bleeding into impinging images from the external world and colliding with his self-image. Act-2’s Orestes has a finer sensibility than his act-1 counterpart. He associates his mother with his exile in that she sent him away to spare him any danger growing up without a father. Since she saved him, he wants to save her; he wants to believe her innocent of the heinous accusations. But his determination to see that justice is upheld is attacked by the latent savagery within him and the actual savagery surrounding him. Rabe creates a Vietnam-era atmosphere pervaded by savagery at home and abroad, in civilian demonstrations and military combat until the hero is caught up in a swirl that merges past and present, imagination and fact, underground rebellion and government repression. In one sense the action is more terrifying in act 2 than in act 1 because it is consciously motivated. In Agamemnon and the Libation Bearers, Aegisthus’ role is minor, his lines but a few in the middle play as he is summoned home to die at Orestes’ hand. In The Orphan, he is a fascist dictator diverting the nation’s resources to conduct war against the Persians, the Peloponnesians, and the Vietnamese. Head of a police state, he also wages war from his headquarters resembling a message center against underground factions spreading panic within the state. Yet the play is not an anti-establishment tract protesting America’s involvement in an unpopular war in which Rabe himself served. With mounting horror the Manson-cult member details the night she and the


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other members began their mass butchery while the conflict within Orestes intensifies. In the Libation Bearers, the audience learns that the conspirators mutilated Agamemnon’s corpse to prevent his ghost from pursuing them. In The Orphan, Orestes is sickened to learn that Aegisthus has mutilated his political prisoner, Electra, to keep her quiet. Her appearance with Iphigenia, both unscathed, for a family portrait is indicative of the son’s desperate need not to have to honor his father’s injunction to avenge him. When Agamemnon stabs Electra, however, the family disperses, revealing the disintegration of the hero’s mental and moral stability. The ambivalence undermines his moral stand. Enraged by the images bombarding him, he demands answers, at which time the Figure as Apollo reappears as leader of his followers, Pylades and the contemporary family members, who introduce the quester to another characteristic of the 1960s: the drug culture. They are the play’s libation bearers who feed hallucinogens into his mouth. When The Orphan was first produced, the criticism, most of it negative, focused on the second act, which was subsequently revised. Its setting the rational mind, its drama is the interaction of Orestes and the Apollo within him. The son is aroused enough to punish Aegisthus but not his mother. Should he, he may lose his Apollonian progress, a thought which agitates him. Now it is the deity’s turn to assure his protégé that he, Apollo, has a “feeling of kinship for people of the spirit” in which group he includes Orestes. “I am the issue of your dreams” (144), he soothes the quester. Thus while the tutors continue to assault his mind with drugs and images of the innocent victims, particularly those massacred in a Vietnamese village, in a Trojan-Vietnam War started by the generation of Helen and Aegisthus, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Apollo continues to assault his mind with an invective against the queen. To the sky god, she is a symbol of the swamp that is motherhood, the dank female flesh that ensnares the male spirit. Telling Orestes that he must choose, Apollo pronounces the oracle with its penalty for disobedience that Aeschylus’ Orestes received before the Libation Bearers begins. Just as the net image and Apollo become metaphoric and symbolic in The Orphan, so do Aegisthus and Clytemnestra. He symbolizes everything in the factitious, external world that is rotten, corrupt, and unjust while she symbolizes the natural, internal world. To kill his mother, the son has to kill his conscience, which he equates with her in the dream sequence immediately following Apollo’s invective. Despite having a knife put into his hand and Agamemnon’s barking at him, “Kill her!” (153) he cannot. He drops the knife for the babies that the two Clytemnestras give him, and he vows to protect them as his mother protected him. His conscience is all that stands

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between him and regression to Tantalus’ bestiality. Yet conscience will be sacrificed in a play whose impetus is sacrifice. Psychologically incapable of embracing his Dionysian origin, Orestes ascends into his Apollonian mind, hoping to find answers to his questions about the human condition. He climbs the cargo net to stare into the silent faces of the planetary godheads. They are dead, but below him converge the chorus of contemporary family members, “masked in white skull-like Godheads” and carrying “wands that will light and flash” (159). Alive, they are the figures of his brain who wave their wands in response to his questions. Elated, he severs his roots in the earth, renouncing its “structures and myths” (161) for the brain’s molecular structures whose lights register electrical impulses. He solves his decision-making dilemma by resolving that life on earth, which betrays his ideals, is not worth living. His brain, aloft in the pure air, can believe anything it chooses to, and it chooses to believe his nurse saved him when he was a child. Believing that, he can kill his mother. With the Speaker repeating passages spoken in act 1 and the three principal sacrifices—of Iphigenia at Aulis, of actress Sharon Tate and her friends in California, and of Vietnamese in the village of My Lai—blending into one sacrifice, the action comes full circle. At last the chorus sings the counterpart not only to Orestes’ song celebrating his birth but to the pivotal choral ode in the Libation Bearers. The song concluded, the family members disperse, converging once more before the final curtain. Wearing dark ski masks, they form a background for Orestes’ slitting of the throats of the two Clytemnestras, but though the color of the masks suggests the Furies, the wearers are not. They are cult members, gathered for another night of mass murders, and though frightening, their masks cannot compare with the hideous faces of Aeschylus’ Furies. And indeed they are not supposed to. When Orestes looks around apprehensively after killing his mother, the Figure as Apollo convinces him that he has nothing to fear from anyone or anything. “You have killed your mother and it means nothing and you have seen the nothing that it means” (175), the deity gestures. He is right. Without Furies there can be no reconciliation of the Aeschylean antinomies and no drama. Except for the final epiphany, the play is over. The third work in the Oresteia, the Eumenides is a play of reconciliation. Acquitted in the trial, Orestes departs for his patrimony in Argos vowing to ensure a permanent alliance between his city-state and Athens. The dreaded Furies, who hounded him to Athens, become beneficent goddesses, enthroned in the earth from which they and the city-state will thrive now that the feminine principle is reunited with the masculine principle, chthonic power with heavenly power. The trilogy ends with a procession in between:


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on earth. Resplendent in crimson robes, the Furies turned into Eumenides join in as flaming torches lead the procession through the democratic city. The Oresteia ends with a spectacle of sight and sound celebrating Athens’ continued prosperity. The Orphan ends with a renunciation of growth. Taking the golden rope Apollo proffers him, Rabe’s hero ascends with the deity into the planetary swirl to become another dead godhead. No Furies prevent him or pursue him because Orestes uproots himself from earth, in which the feminine principle is seated. With the two babies in his arms, put there by the two Clytemnestras, he could not kill his mother, seeing in her nurturing power the sustainer of life on the planet. Shifting the two babies to one arm while stroking the earth, he said then, “As you have cradled the seeds of trees and wheat, roses and clover my good mother cradled me in her center, as rich and grand and deep as you, I can not hurt her” (153). But he has since violated his nature. He has killed the feminine principle in which the conscience is seated. As he climbs with Apollo, he leans into the deity “for support” (175). Since he too will be a sky god, the lights come down on him singing in praise of himself, and the stage “goes to black” (177). For Fagles and Stanford, the Oresteia, which moves from the darkness of the opening of Agamemnon to the lighted procession at the closing of the 12 Eumenides, “is a rite of passage from savagery to civilization.” The Furies complete the conversion. They consent to modify the traditional conduct they uphold, that of blood vengeance, for example, in cooperation with humans, participating as members of a jury, to create a thriving polis. The conjunction of divine and human effort to democratically institute the changes in a legal process establishes the civilization, which redeems the savagery as symbolized by the court’s acquittal of Orestes and the Furies’ turning into Eumenides. The Orphan moves from darkness to a lighted procession, but the play is no rite of passage from savagery to civilization. In act 2 Orestes leaves behind act-1’s darkness, and the contemporary family members’ wands light a procession. But their procession forms electrical impulses that rise as thoughts to the hero as he stares into the faces of the godheads for answers. They do not speak to him; the notion of godhead does. The Speaker raises the possibility that consciousness is an “electrochemical property of the brain” while one of the family members tells him, “Climbing to the Gods, you climbed into your brain” (159). The discovery fills him with joy because it resolves his dilemma. Consciousness, or godhead, can convert whatever impulse it chooses to convert to thought. Consciousness converts act-1’s time, a dark “pool” (90) imaged as a movable tub in which events are “simultaneous” (91), to act-2’s eternity, the mind imaged as a white, stationary godhead that has passed

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beyond events. For the pressing question of what to do with his mother, Orestes’ consciousness decides that the nurse saved him when he was an infant. He therefore can kill the whore who killed his father. With the vengeance justified, he withdraws into godhead. Renouncing the past, mother, earth, and savagery, transcendent consciousness severs itself from all impulses. The play ends as it began: in darkness. With nothing to actuate, the lights of mental activity burn in momentary splendor before flickering and expiring. Like Foreman’s Professor, Orestes expends himself on his ascent to Apollonian mind. The Professor, however, chooses to fall back into his Dionysian body weighted with comic cothurni for the comic descent. Orestes follows the disembodied voice that calls to James in The Universe until it brings him to the nirvana he seeks. Freed from the problems of contingent life, he achieves the emptiness of transcendent form. With its hero detached from life, The Orphan is tragic. For Rabe, the war that spawned his four Vietnam plays was a watershed. “It was the swamp where history paused and could have shown us who we were and who we were becoming. In its flash and violence it was a probe into the depths, an X ray knifing open the darkness with an obscene illumination against whose eloquence we closed our eyes” (197). In this passage the “we” refers to America as a society. Since Orestes closes his eyes—literally by refusing to look at Tantalus until forced to and figuratively by fleeing responsibility at play’s end—Rabe’s hero is not an individual self but represents the collective self of the American society, whose disconnection from its historical and moral reality makes a divided self, a nation with a divided psyche. America’s division continues the tragic separation examined in the preceding chapter. The three individual selves discussed in that chapter suffer torments of the damned. The revelers, portraits, and selves represent the ground of the being that they cannot accept because it conflicts with their self-image. Yet since they cannot deny the chorus either, the enclaves into which they have withdrawn become their hell. In The Orphan, the collective self-image cannot accept the nation’s savagery, its propensity for violence. Since America will not descend into the ground of its being to acknowledge the savagery and convert it, the savagery keeps returning, as Sarah’s father does, in act-1’s collapse into the simultaneity of past and present. To end the recurring nightmare before it becomes a torment, the collective society kills its conscience as Austin, Lena, and Sarah cannot do and then separates the enclave from the ground to prevent the chorus of impulses from pursuing. From the ordeal America does not generate a new beginning in the wholeness of spirit and body but separates mind from body, consciousness from “unacknowledged values” (193). But the unacknowledged impulses do not


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stop pulsating. Confined to the body, they explode in violence in the next play. With the theatre lights back on, we are back on earth. Recreating the Oresteia, The Orphan reexamines the American experience in the Vietnam era. Another contemporary playwright extends the reexamination into the post-Vietnam era by recreating a classical tragedy that imagines a new history for the descendants of the House of Atreus after the matricide. Euripides’ Orestes is a play of transvaluation—of Athenian policies during the Peloponnesian War, the validity of the ancient myths, the majesty of Apollo—because the playwright transplants the Orestes story from the heroic times in which the Oresteia is set to his time. By having the Argive citizenry confine Orestes and Electra to house arrest while the assembly decides the fate of the matricide and his sister, Euripides implicates the entire society in the perversion of justice. Orestes by Charles L. Mee, Jr., also is a play of transvaluation but of the present age and not of the ancient myth. By recreating the classical tragedy on the ruined landscape of the contemporary world, he implies that the nightmare drama of moral chaos once again has found its audience: in late 20th-century America as it did in late 5th-century B.C. Greece. The classical Orestes is not the sole work to which the contemporary Orestes is indebted. In his note on the text, which credits Euripides’ play as the basis for his play, Mee explains that the “text for this piece was composed the way Max Ernst made his Fatagaga series of pictures after World War I, so that passages of the play were inspired by or taken from twentiethcentury texts by Apollinaire, William Burroughs, Cindy, Bret Easton Ellis, John Wayne Gacy, Mai Lin, Elaine Scarry, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, 13 Vogue, and Soap Opera Digest.” In 1920 Max Ernst and Hans Arp, two painters at the center of the movements known as Dadaism and Surrealism, collaborated on a series of collages which they called Fatagaga, an acronym for Fabrication de Tableaux Garantis Gazométriques (Manufacture of Pictures Guaranteed to be Gasometric). Since a collage is a startling juxtaposition of diverse images, a visual equivalent to a verbal metaphor, it is made up of images that are surrealist objects: What is a surrealist object? One might say roughly that it is any alienated object, one out of its habitual context, used for purposes different from those for which it was intended, or whose purpose is unknown. Consequently, any object which seems gratuitously made, without any other purpose than the satisfaction of its maker; fur14 ther, any created object that realizes the desires of the unconscious, of the dream.

Since a collage of surrealist objects is a landscape of the unconscious, the landscape of Orestes is that of act 1 of The Orphan but with different

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contents. Rabe’s play conflates three literary texts—primarily Aeschylus’ Oresteia but also Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and, in Aegisthus’ imprisonment of Electra, Sophocles’ Electra—to create a whole universe. Scenes from the first two swirl in act-1’s frenzy while act-2’s dictator punishes the heroine from the third, but together the three texts dramatize the myth through the matricide, the play’s turning point. The myth is not initially truncated. It becomes so only after the avenger discards his terrestrial Dionysian body, and his classical counterpart’s guilt and suffering, for his celestial Apollonian mind. Orestes is a storehouse of non-conflated verbal fragments. Had Mee not listed the texts in his prefatory note, the theatregoer would not attribute authorship to the fragments. An Apollinaire or Burroughs scholar would recognize excerpts from their works, but I doubt that John Wayne Gacy’s utterances have been collected. And even if someone were to recognize one of the serial killer’s remarks, it is unlikely that anyone would identify passages from Vogue or Soap Opera Digest. They do share a few traits. Recollected or hallucinated rather than acted, they have an oneiric quality characteristic of the unconscious, though an unconscious in suspension rather than in Dionysian frenzy. The images reveal a deranged violence consistent with the mental deterioration of the principals in the classical play enacted in fragments within the contemporary play. Thus it is predictable that as the imagery intensifies, the savagery will erupt, provoking the appearance of Apollo, whose epiphany resolves the standoff between Orestes and Menelaus in the Euripidean tragedy. The god’s appearance in Mee’s play confirms the landscape as collective America because he speaks “in the manner and accent of the current American president” (76). As Orestes in The Orphan develops a consciousness, he renounces everything which conflicts with his image of himself as civilized. Although he does not represent the President of the United States, as collective America the protagonist becomes a head isolated from its body, a government abdicating responsibility for the body’s savagery. Mee’s Orestes dramatizes the opposite situation, a play without a protagonist. As collective America the landscape represents a body whose head absconded, a society without moral leadership. Mee’s play takes place in the suffering body left derelict by the abdication. The stage directions call for a palatial beach house across a broad expanse of bomb-pitted lawn. On the lawn are four hospital beds “in two of which are damaged war victims” (29). In another lies blood-stained Orestes while at a centerstage table sits his blood-stained sister. Others in the scene are a seated war victim, a man in a wheelchair with his mouth taped, nurses


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dressed in black, and a forensics expert reporting the autopsy finding on Clytemnestra, dead six days, whose corpse lies on a slab. After a long silence, Electra speaks in an attempt to make the murder “cohere” (31), but like the disconnected texts which contribute to the surrealist landscape, her utterances are fragmentary. The do not cohere to the surrounding objects because she opens her defense by speaking the opening lines of a classical tragedy. The utterances do not cohere to one another because she can say no more than a few disjointed words or sentences before pausing, overwhelmed by exhaustion or wracked by sobbing. The utterances do not cohere to the events because not knowing which defense explains the events, she prefaces explanations with the expression, “You could say” (31–32). The only coherence initially is her utterances to their source, for she speaks from within it. She does not recite from a classical tragedy. She acts within a recreated classical tragedy that does not dramatize the whole myth, as the Oresteia does, but only a truncated section of it and that is not recreated continuously but in fragments, the effect of which, when coupled with the other fragments, is to further underscore the experience’s derangement. The tragedy is Euripides’ Orestes, which opens in Argos six days after the murder of the queen. Electra rises from the bed on which lies Orestes to speak a 70-line prologue. Despite showing the strain she is under, after a four-line generalization about the suffering that human nature is subject to, she traces the House of Atreus’ history from Tantalus’ crime to Apollo’s command to her brother to kill Clytemnestra, following which act he collapsed onto the bed, “wasted by raging fever / and whirled on to madness by 15 his mother’s blood—.” With the city assembling to decide their fate, she watches to intercept Menelaus, who has just arrived home from Troy, in the hope that he can persuade the assembly not to vote the death penalty. The prologue over, Helen, who arrived the previous evening and who has been inside mourning her dead sister, enters to ask Electra to pour libations on the grave on her behalf. Knowing how her countrymen feel about her for causing the war with Troy, she fears an angry crowd coming upon her outside the palace. For William Arrowsmith, “the Orestes is that rare thing, a work which fits no category or ready-made genre but whose real power and odd brilliance demand a place and indict the theories which oust it from serious consideration.” He locates its power and brilliance in its disconnection, its “Euripidean anachronizing”: In play after play, that is, Euripides uproots a myth from the cultural context of a remote and different time and intrudes it forcibly into a contemporary world,

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Drawing Upon the Past thereby altering its motives, its characters, and its meaning. By so doing, he effec16 tively contrasts the ideal with the operative values of his own society.

By transplanting the myth from the Oresteia, in which the hero’s matricide leads to the institution of justice, to his time, in which the institution exists, the playwright exposes not only the criminal motives of Orestes and his two accomplices, Pylades and Electra, but the ignoble motives of all characters except Helen’s daughter, whom the three conspirators take hostage. Helen’s entrance introduces the disconnection. Coming from within the palace, she approaches her niece and nephew, the one exhausted and embittered and the other disheveled and alternating between fits of stupor and madness. She speaks to her niece: There you are. Oh, dear Electra, Clytemnestra’s daughter…. But you poor girl, still not married! And how are you, dear? And how is poor Orestes? (71–73)

I have never seen a production of Euripides’ Orestes, but I can imagine a director playing the incongruity between the banality of Helen’s greeting and the seriousness of the situation as Theatre of the Absurd. I can imagine a director cracking open the drama’s surface to release extravagantly dressed, bizarrely behaving subconscious forces as in Witkiewicz’s Theater of Pure Form. That is exactly how Mee conceives the scene in his Orestes. The supposedly grieving Helen enters in “canary yellow Chanel suit, carrying flowers” (34) chattering about the beauty treatment she applies to her skin to stay lovely. When she addresses her niece, she says essentially what her classical counterpart says, including the commiserating remark about not being married. Mee’s Orestes is that rare thing that outdoes its source. The theatregoer at a performance would not suspect that Electra’s incoherence is not in the original play, since it is consistent with the woman’s physical and emotional condition. Neither would one suspect that she disorders her counterpart’s prologue narrative unless one knew Euripides’ Orestes by heart. Once Helen enters, however, the disconnection is apparent in Menelaus’ wife’s dress and self-absorption and also in the other characters in the collage. Two of the damaged war victims recount a nightmare vision of the torture prisoners undergo, yet they do not speak to Electra and her aunt, and the women do not respond to them but continue recreating the classical tragedy, as do Orestes and his sister after he awakens. The stage directions read that the scene is “more than one of love between siblings; it is romantic. But it is also archaic; this is a ruined fragment of the Greek play in the midst of the modern world” (38).


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Since the Greek play of which the scene in Mee’s play is a fragment is itself an archaic world transplanted in a later time, we must return to that time, that of Euripides’ tragedy. The best entrance to Euripides’ Orestes is through Tyndareus, father of Clytemnestra and Helen. When Menelaus arrives at the palace, he is shocked to see Orestes, temporarily recovered from his latest bout with madness, a suppliant at his knees imploring his uncle to intercede for him before the vote is taken. Before committing himself, he engages his nephew in conversation to gauge the assembly’s sentiments. It is in the midst of their dialogue that the young man’s grandfather enters. For Tyndareus there is no moral issue to debate with Menelaus, who takes the position that family members should honor their kin especially when they are in desperate straits. The older man does not condone Clytemnestra’s murdering Agamemnon, but since 5th-century Argos, the time in which the action is set, has a criminal-justice system, Orestes should have taken her before the court. By exacting vengeance himself, he committed a more heinous crime than she in that matricide is the negation of “pity…humanity” (527). Justice is taking its course, he concludes, surveying his grandson’s stricken appearance, and he warns his son-in-law not to interfere with the law, which was instituted for the very purpose of determining the penalty for transgression. His fury with his grandson notwithstanding, Tyndareus upholds what should be the play’s moral center were it not that as soon as he finishes, Orestes appeals to him with a defense uprooted from the Oresteia: that since the male seed begets life while the female womb merely incubates it, he felt obligated to avenge his father’s death. Once having started, he raves on with arguments so specious, so foolish—accusing his mother of having a lover, his grandfather of begetting a defective daughter, Apollo of ordering the killing—that Tyndareus too loses control. Now he demands the death penalty for both grandson and granddaughter because Electra, who has been excluded from the exchange between the men, must have incited him to mur17 der by spewing venom about their mother in his ears. With Tyndareus’ exit, the play no longer has even the semblance of a moral center. Menelaus expresses sympathy for his nephew but rejects his abject entreaty for physical intervention, protesting that he lacks the troops to combat the assembly. Instead he offers to intercede with Tyndareus to moderate his vote, a vote that the audience subsequently learns acceded to expedience rather than asserted principle, and one which Menelaus himself made no attempt to moderate. Feeling himself betrayed by family and polis, Orestes’ already precarious mental state and moral nature disintegrate so that from this juncture until the closing epiphany, the action descends into

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cowardice and vindictiveness, irrationality and criminality. Pylades proposes killing Helen to preclude Menelaus’ benefiting from their death. Electra then proposes taking his daughter Hermione hostage and threatening to kill her unless Menelaus disbands the Argive guard preventing entrance to and exit from the city. Tyndareus, whose entrance in Mee’s play duplicates that of his counterpart in Euripides’ play, also upholds the moral center when he indicts his grandson for coming “unhinged” from it: You remember nothing: not your parents, nor the values they held dear, not your country, nor the polity it once held in its grasp, or at the very least aspired to, not your history, nor your religion, nor even the most rudimentary tenets of ethics or gentleness (48–49).

I think that cultural differences between classical Athens and contemporary America account for the fact that Mee’s Tyndareus does not become irrational as does Euripides’ Tyndareus. Since theatre played a more vital role in the polis than it does in our society, Euripides could impugn his elder speaker without fear of impugning the traditional values the speaker professes to uphold. That is, I think that a Greek audience would have been able to distinguish between the speaker’s intemperance and the legitimacy of the values, even though they were dishonored in contemporary Athens.18 Whether I am right or wrong about Euripides’ theatre, Mee does not impugn his Tyndareus. Hence when he develops the “unhinged” metaphor, he speaks with an authority that personal intemperance would have undercut. The playwright has him image the disparity between language and the reality that language verbalizes. For example, the representative of a dishonored tradition images the disconnection between Orestes’ vaunted civilization’s self-perception and the primitive savagery at its core when he charges his grandson with finding the words to justify his mother’s murder. “This is your sort of civilization, then. It speaks nicely and behaves barbarously” (48). “Unhinged” is a metaphor at the center of another Mee play. The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador is set in a party of sybarites surrounded by the sounds of an encroaching revolution. The entrance of blood-splattered butler and maid prompts the host to inquire about the corpse they say that they discovered in the dumb-waiter. As the butler responds, he relates how 19 he has come “unhinged” from a world in which one is expected to maintain the decorum of form over the energy of substance. The metaphor works two ways. It takes a revolution to unhinge the sybarites, who cling to the decorum despite the mounting tension. After the butler answers the host’s questions, the latter tells him to “serve dessert” (86). In another sense the entire cast are already unhinged in that they have suffered, whether or not they are


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capable of admitting it, the separation of reality from their ideals. This is the sense that Euripides and Mee dramatize, and for each playwright the disconnection from a traditional moral center spells madness: a descent into irrationality which indicts not only the principal players but their societies. The descent is more thorough in the contemporary play than in the classical tragedy in that, from the opening, values have been so flattened that the characters honor no standard. Within moments of the hospital-bed patients’ description of tortures done to prisoners, and presumably they speak from experience since they are war victims, they remind themselves of the pleasure to be had from torturing helpless victims. Sickened by the recent events in her family, Electra nevertheless catalogues different points of view, including that of terrorists, which she can accept. In one of his calm interludes, Orestes relates his battering of a female companion. An image typifies the flattening of values and standards. In Brown Silk and Magenta Sunsets, “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” and act 1 of The Orphan, the ringing of a telephone or the knocking at the door strikes panic in the characters because it is a signal from a realm that cannot be denied. The realm may be conscience, but whatever it is, the signal proves the existence of another reality to be reckoned with. In Orestes, the ringing is nothing more alarming than another stimulus to react to. And Electra welcomes it because the caller is an astrologer with whom she wants to discuss her horoscope. Tyndareus is the lone principal who adheres to a traditional center. Unlike his classical counterpart, he does not lose control and become immoderate in his speech. He does not descend to the level of his grandchildren and son-in-law. On the contrary, he reminds his son-in-law of civilization’s obligations, ending his speech with an injunction to him to see that justice is served. To do that, Menelaus must take on the responsibility that Orestes in The Orphan jettisons on his flight from the world into himself as civilization’s culmination. “I’ll hold you responsible,” the elder speaker concludes. “Let us begin there to put the world to rights” (49). His words, however, fall on deaf ears. Euripides’ audience heard and saw Tyndareus’ descent from the principles he professes to uphold but only heard of the assembly’s descent to a tainted vote as reported by the messenger and by Orestes. Following the recreation of the avenger’s specious defense of the matricide to his uncle, Menelaus’ equally specious commitment to help his nephew, and Pylades’ accompanying his friend to the assembly, Mee’s audience hears and sees the tribunal in session. But I do not think that the explanation is simply that the contemporary stage has greater possibilities for scenic and lighting designs or a greater number of actors available to it.

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From the opening of Orestes, Mee juxtaposes visual and verbal images in a collage of surrealist objects to expose the collapse of a moral center, for even though the play recreates scenes from Euripides’ Orestes, the scenes, like everything else in the collage, remain fragmentary, or “ruined” (29) in the stage directions. Increasingly the images impinge on one another. First Electra and later Orestes consult by telephone with an astrologer; at one point the stricken matricide identifies the damaged war victims whose hallucinations intrude from time to time as his “fellows” (46). Yet the impingement of the surrealist objects, alienated to begin with and not cohering to one another, creates not interaction but effraction into one another’s sphere—creates, that is, the simultaneity and totality of the nightmare vision, the moral chaos. The trial scene illustrates the playwright’s dramaturgy. Performers cluster in groups from the front of the stage to the rear. Regardless of what each group is talking about, savagery is the common denominator. Because the groups speak simultaneously, dialogue from one can break in on another’s dialogue, such as when Orestes’ appeal to the Argive assembly breaks in on dialogue between damaged war victims. For most of the trial, however, the foreground text—of the nurses discussing sexual aberrations, for instance— blocks out the background text—that of Orestes’ defense—and thereby reveals the absence of ground common to both, a center uniting the groups in a standard that redeems the savagery. The two texts cohere only when the tribunal finds the brother and sister guilty. Cohering at the trial, the center begins to cohere visually and verbally throughout the landscape, altering the play’s composition and the spectator’s perception of the absent, or ruined, center. Elinor Fuchs traces a spatial principle, originating in the aesthetics of Maurice Maeterlinck and Gertrude Stein, that is challenging linear construction in the contemporary theatre. She calls this nonlinear structure with imagery from natural landscape a play as landscape. Mee’s Orestes is one of the four plays she considers, concluding that the spectator’s object of interest “is not the fate of individual charac20 ters…but the entire dystopic environment.” I agree with her, and I want to continue examining it to show how the centerless play develops a standard bearer but only to reject him. Euripides’ hero has redeeming qualities when he first speaks in that he accepts responsibility for the matricide and is guilt ridden as a result. Like his grandfather, his uncle, and the Argive assembly, he seems to honor a traditional standard of conduct. His and the others’ degeneration through the course of the drama from that standard reflects the culture’s degeneration and the tragedian’s transvaluation of the culture. By recreating in a contemporary setting the classical transvaluation of a morally bankrupt cul-


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ture, Mee indicts his own culture. The degeneration is complete when the formerly vacant center, filling with images cohering to form a collective society, develops an individual head, or standard bearer, to reject. The tribunal coherence of heretofore incongruous objects marks a conversion in the play because for the first time action occurs. The man whose mouth has been taped works the tape loose and begins to praise the imagination as the faculty capable of “making…connections” (63), but before he can use his imagination, one of the war victims kills him. To this point the spectator has been viewing a landscape of the unconscious characterized by a lack not only of development but of the motion that generates development. The unconscious has been static, not frenzied. The death activates the scene. As Orestes and Electra face each other in the knowledge that they have been given a death sentence, the stage directions read, “From here on, the piece takes on a slurred, dizzying speed” (64). It has to, to duplicate the ending of Euripides’ Orestes, for were motion not to start, the landscape, which is the Dionysian unconscious, would remain in suspension and Apollonian consciousness could not be born, as it is at the end of act 1 of The Orphan. Apollonian consciousness is the contemporary equivalent to the classical Apollo, god of reason, who makes his appearance in the epiphany that closes Euripides’ Orestes. In that play the matricide, who is now criminally insane, holds a sword to Hermione’s neck while threatening to slit her throat unless her father ensures safe passage for him, Electra, and Pylades. Menelaus also is mad in that he will not yield to the young man’s threat despite his torching the palace as proof of his resolution to wreak havoc on Argos. In this impasse appears Apollo ex machina. But the god’s resolution must be interpreted as another example of Euripides’ irony, for Apollo’s solution is to placate Menelaus by informing him that Helen has been transformed to a star in the heavens, to placate Orestes by betrothing Hermione to him and promising him acquittal at an Athens trial, and to placate Pylades and Electra by betrothing them to each other. The separation of political, military, and moral reality from the ideal is so irreconcilable—the insanity, which is the separation, is so pervasive—in Euripides’ Athens that the solution is itself insane because it is disconnected from the play’s conflicting energies. For Arrowsmith, the solution is “no so21 lution.” For Vellacott, The play is a magnificent climax to the series of protests which for a generation Euripides had continued to launch against the war; first, against the dereliction of honourable and humane standards of behaviour which resulted from the first years of conflict; later, against the suicidal folly and blood-lust which, long after the real causes of the war had ceased to be relevant, made Athens again and again reject

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Drawing Upon the Past opportunities for peace, and continue to inflict upon her civilian population hard22 ships, bereavements, and anxieties which grew worse every year.

As Vernant and Vidal-Naquet study Greek tragedy, it originated in the clash between the values of a mythic past which had been heroic and noble and those of a real present which was democratic. By establishing festivals for competitions in tragedy open to its citizens, the democratic city “turned itself into a theatre. Its subject, in a sense, was itself and it acted itself out 23 before its public.” In his study of the Great, or City, Dionysia, Simon Goldhill comes to much the same conclusion that the Athenian dramatic festival was “fundamentally and essentially a festival of the democratic 24 polis.” He focuses on tragedy as dramatizing the competing obligations of the self and society in which individual behavior puts the society at risk. How does a contemporary playwright create political theatre in a culture in which theatre is not a civic event, not the forum for civic discourse that it once was? One way is by imaging a collective body that generates an individual head. As political theatre, The Orphan begins unified but ends fragmented because the play’s moral division, the division following the matricide as opposed to the structural division into acts, rends the collective hero. Not only does the United States fail to integrate its governing head and acting body, it chooses to ignore the widening gap between its ideals and its reality, a gap which is the measure of the nation’s moral disintegration. Mee’s Orestes begins fragmented, a body of savage images collaged from the morally ruined heroic past and the morally ruined serial-killer present. Following the cohering trial scene, the action speeds up in the Dionysian unconscious to deliver Apollo. Wearing a “conservative gray suit” (76), he is consciousness as executive, the governing head who should provide the leadership in integrating the nation. But though he speaks “in the manner and accent of the current American president” (76), he is rejected by his constituents who either leave the stage or ignore him for other activities until his bodyguards “pick him up unceremoniously” (78) and carry him out. His words are rational, but his speech is insane because in the midst of the “smoking ruin,” the “smoldering fire” (78) that is American civilization, he eulogizes the heritage of values and ideals that has brought the nation to its present enviable state. The play ends as it begins: in fragments. The nightmare of moral chaos is savage and recursive. Mee’s Orestes dramatizes unambiguously what Euripides’ Orestes dramatizes ironically. Mee has the god removed unceremoniously. In the En Garde Arts production that critic Fuchs cites, the standard bearer was actually dumped unceremoniously. And he was played by a boy rather than a mature


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adult, casting which suggests retarded growth or irresponsible youth. Tyndareus invokes a moral standard in the founding ideals, but he knows that the society has become unhinged from it. Eulogizing the heritage as if the society were still hinged to it, Mee’s Apollo could be Rabe’s Apollonian Orestes visiting earth decades after having rejected it for transcendent selfhood, or godhood, who believes that any speech, original or borrowed, that he delivers will fit the occasion and charm the audience. The body unhinged by the rejection, the unacknowledged savagery intensifies until it invokes Apollo. Now the situation is reversed. The body rejects the head as irrelevant, a vestige of a bygone, ruined age. Once the voice of reason and moderation reduced to political cant, he no longer provides leadership in a world in which savagery is the norm. As one of the war victims says at play’s end, “Every man must shout: there’s a great destructive work to be done. We’re doing it!” (79) With neither Apollonian consciousness nor Dionysian energy in touch with the other, the nation remains divided between its ideals and its reality. Taking for its subjects characters whom the division sacrifices, the next work reconnects myth and history, mind and body, self and society to end the savagery. The perspective is a fresh one. It comes from within the House of Atreus but from family members who have been history’s victims. That the perspective is a feminist one also is especially appropriate because the feminine principle is the ground that Rabe’s Apollo and Orestes reject. “I suppose I’m interested in redefining the concept of history from a female perspective.” The voice is that of playwright Ellen McLaughlin, writing in the program notes for the Classic Stage Company’s production of her trilogy, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, in the winter of 1995. She admits that plays about the House of Atreus are not ones usually used to examine notions of history, but, she continues, the cast allows for a “complete human range of relationships to history.” Having defended her choice of subject matter, she then notes the second oddity about it. The cast has only one male: Orestes. The program insert also includes plot summaries of the three original plays her trilogy reimagines as well as production information. Iphigenia and Other Daughters opens with Iphigenia in Aulis, but McLaughlin’s play bears no resemblance to Euripides’ play with that title. Euripides’ tragedy dramatizes Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, at the seaport of Aulis to appease Artemis so that the becalmed Greek fleet can sail to Troy and the Trojan War. The cast includes the male roles of Agamemnon, Menelaus, Achilles, an old servant to Agamemnon, and a messenger. The female roles are Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, and a chorus of women from Chalcis. In the Charles R. Walker translation, in the University of Chicago Complete Greek Tragedies, the text is 1531 lines, with

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Artemis’ last-minute deer substitution a later interpolation. The mother and daughter do not arrive onstage until line 602, until almost 40 percent of the play has been performed. If we subtract the choral descriptions and comments, the first 602 lines are a dialogue between Agamemnon and his servant and one between him and his brother. They establish the pretext the commander-in-chief adopted to have Iphigenia sent to the seaport, that she would marry Achilles, and his ambivalence toward the sacrifice. Clytemnestra does not learn of the deception until a chance encounter with Achilles. When Iphigenia learns the hopelessness of the situation and her father’s dilemma, she offers herself as victim to save Greece from the ignominy it would suffer were Greek men not to punish Troy. The Classic Stage Company performs in a rectangular, floor-level space thrust into the audience. The lights for the performance of McLaughlin’s reinvention came up on the space strewn with pebbles to suggest a desolate coastline leading to a mound of rocks on stage right rising to a cliff. Two characters were onstage, the only two in the play. Clytemnestra in floorlength gown paced back and forth in the rear aggressively looking about her. In front of her, on a chair across from the audience on the rectangle’s long side, sat a girlish Iphigenia in a white dress, legs pulled into her body and looking about her with a combination of curiosity and bewilderment. Scattered titters could be heard in the audience, for the initial impression contained a comic dimension. It would not have been out of character had the girl sucked her thumb. Spectators who read the plot summaries in the playbill insert recognized in the absence of men in the contemporary Iphigenia in Aulis a difference between it and its classical counterpart. Spectators more knowledgeable of Greek theatre and culture also recognized the incongruity in the presence of two women, one regal, alone on a stretch of land—away, that is, from the 25 traditional locus of women’s power in Greek theatre, the hearth. They have been summoned to the male world. The incongruity establishes the drama’s foundation. Contrasts between the women and between their world and the male world build the drama. Mother and daughter speak but not to each other. The text of the trilogy’s first play is alternating interior monologues with each character expressing her thoughts and emotions. They react differently and express themselves differently partly as a result of their experience of the male world. The queen has experience of it; it is new to the virgin. Iphigenia speaks first, her verbal images creating a mood equivalent to that created by the visual scene. The place is “windless” and “eternal,” a place of “terrible clarity” where nothing “can be changed.” She senses that she may not be a bride because no activity is taking place. “Nothing can

David Rabe, Charles Mee, and Ellen McLaughlin 26

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happen here,” she muses. She is wrong. Something will happen, but it will be within her perception of herself. The difference between daughter and mother is apparent from the moment the latter speaks. The daughter verbalizes impressionistic images. The mother connects her verbalized images into sentences, as in her attitude toward soldiers, one of whom, even though the heroic Achilles, she believes will marry Iphigenia: “And one of those boys, one of those eager, beardless, ignorant hopped-up lonely bastards is waiting for her” (3). Clytemnestra has a much stronger sense of herself than does Iphigenia and therefore a stronger sense of herself in the scene. She recalls the journey down the mountains to the plains; she is aware of the military environment. A queen, she feels the insult in not being properly met and attended to . And she becomes increasingly agitated to the point that she pants as the deception moves to its “terrible clarity.” Although time passes in this first play, there are no scene changes. The monologues record the passage, but it occurs outside of the space the two occupy. Iphigenia, for example, wonders why her parents “thrash at each other in the woods” (5), why Clytemnestra weeps, and why Agamemnon avoids her eyes. Iphigenia does not have a sense of herself. Whereas the mature queen and mother sees herself as the subject connecting herself to the scene, the virginal daughter sees herself as the object to others who connect her to the scene. Her second speech, as well as every speech thereafter, has a hallucinatory quality to it. In her musing she becomes “visible” (3) only because whenever she and her mother go near an encampment, all the men stop to stare at her. Otherwise she is invisible or, as she says, “No one in this dress / I am not here” (4). Hence she thinks of herself as a symbol, a “something” to the silent men, whose eyes turn “in their sockets” as she passes (3). The one connection she makes prior to her assumption of her role is to identify with a deer the men slew. She had to turn away from the carcass because in its open, mirroring eyes she saw herself “dead” (5). In death she discovers herself. The contrasts of pacing mother and seated daughter alternating images and speech patterns in an eerily silent space build to a climax. Iphigenia rises and begins to ascend the mound of rocks to the altar on the cliff. Without the confrontations, arguments, or bravado that characterize Euripides’ tragedy, the daughter discovers the role assigned to her. She is the sacrificial victim. Never having had a sense of herself, she accepts the role, for without a connection to the real world around her from which she feels insulated, she is non-existent, as absent as the wind. McLaughlin’s Iphigenia in Aulis is a slender play yet rich in irony. In her opening speech, Clytemnestra recalls the descent, presumably from the pal-

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ace at Argos, to the port of Aulis. Mother and daughter descended into a male world where men have mobilized for war, but they were summoned only so that Iphigenia could be sacrificed to the war effort. In the male sphere on ground level, the female has no function other than a symbolic one that the male assigns her. The men remain outside of the enclave set aside for the two women because they are engaged in the external action. The men are the actors in the drama that will create the history of the Trojan War. Despite the irony that the war cannot be fought without the sacrifice, the women are barred from the external action. Thus they internalize. The production designers deserve credit too for the artistic achievement that evoked a world within a world. Set designer Narelle Sissons comments in the playbill insert that the team sought to create a “sanctuary which, in its most epic moment could be the edge of the world, and at its most intimate, a sacred space.” The space is sacred in two senses. It is unique to the women, for just as they are barred from external action, the absent men are barred from internal action. Without voices the latter cannot reveal thoughts and emotions emanating from a space within them. In the playwright’s notebook section of the insert, McLaughlin gives the second sense when she identifies the time of the first and third plays as mythic, or timelessness prior to “ordinary, linear time.” For spectators unfamiliar with the eternal-recurrence characteristic of myth, the identification clarifies the mood and tempo of the first play, although they recognize the difference between the first and second plays once the second is underway. Iphigenia in Aulis has a stillness to it. The fretting mother paces in the background, but the seated daughter commands the foreground, gazing about her until she ascends the rocks to the cliff altar. Unlike the absent men, the women have voices, but they do not speak to each other. They are surrounded by a world in which interaction occurs, but Iphigenia records the observed interaction. Enclaved, she does not interact with the external world. Moreover, by voluntarily ascending to the black-shrouded figures who appear on the cliff, she implies that she is not the first virgin to sacrifice herself to the demands of that world. Although Iphigenia’s ascent initiates a reversal that the trilogy develops as it proceeds, the examination of the trilogy’s architectonics has to be delayed until the daughter whose name the title features reappears in the third segment. The second play is a reinvention of Sophocles’ Electra. The tutor and Pylades, who accompany Orestes on his return home in Sophocles’ tragedy, are deleted along with Aegisthus. There is no chorus. Until Orestes’ arrival, the drama is the interaction among the three women, Clytemnestra and her daughters, Electra and Chrysothemis, in a real place and time: 20th-century Europe between the wars, as McLaughlin traces the play’s genesis in the


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playbill insert. Real time is not immediately apparent, however, because Electra opens with conflicting images. Suspended on the rear wall, midway between sky and earth, are a domesticated Chrysothemis and a svelte Clytemnestra. They are suspended in mythic time. In monologues they verbalize their dreams but, like daughter and mother in Iphigenia in Aulis, not to each other. So long as they are immobilized above ground level, they do not interact with each other or with Electra, who enters below them in real time. Electra’s appearance indicates that she inhabits a different realm. Whereas Chrysothemis wears a housedress partly covered by a pocketed apron and Clytemnestra is modishly gowned, the rebellious daughter, her hair disheveled, wears clothes grimy from the activity in which she furiously engages. She enters carrying a rope, one end of which is attached to a stake she carries and the other end to the combat boot she wears on one foot. The other foot is bare. The set is now a courtyard. The rear wall is a palace entrance, a pit yawns in the center of the pebbly ground, and a garden grows in front of the mound of rocks. Electra’s digging in the pit immerses her in real time, and while she digs, she speaks to the audience and her sister and mother. The implication is that her voice penetrates their dreams in mythic time to provoke them into joining her on ground level in real, or ordinary, linear, time. In the playwright’s notebook section of the insert, McLaughlin discusses the attitude of each woman toward herself in relationship to history. Except for a few comments, she excludes Iphigenia, who exists outside of history in mythic time, and Orestes, who as a World War I veteran has been a part of history and as his father’s avenger will continue to play a part. Based on the attitudes of their Sophoclean counterparts, the contemporary attitudes are dramatized not only in what the three women say but imaged in each one’s relationship to the field of history: the ground on which in real time men mobilize their armies and fight their battles. Chrysothemis cultivates the ground. Clytemnestra situates herself on a chair placed on it. Electra digs in it. In the notebook section, McLaughlin confides that Chrysothemis is the most difficult of the three to encounter “because she enunciates the truths” the playwright fears; the middle sister is the voice McLaughlin hears within herself. Aloft, Chrysothemis dreams of her younger sister’s wrecking the garden by constantly digging graves for their father’s absent corpse. Awake and on the ground, she tends the garden. Nurturing life is the role for which she was culturally indoctrinated. While she tends and Electra digs, she reminisces about the time she had to learn “to push” her “own pram” (17) because had she not, no one would have done it for her. Only boys have things

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done for them; only boys receive preferential treatment. Alone, daydreaming about childhood, she remembers how Orestes enjoyed liberties not permitted his sisters. She knew then that he would grow up to leave for the external world, which “was not for” girls (23). The preceding paragraph is a straightforward summary. Since Chrysothemis does not believe that women are a part of history, she judges Electra crazy for wasting her life on the impossible ideal of achieving justice. When her younger sister asks her to help kill their mother, she refuses but not because of moral principles. A pragmatist, she sees nothing accomplished by another killing. “It won’t work” (19), she reiterates her objection. For her, justice is an abstraction that has no relevance in the garden niche she has carved in an otherwise insignificant existence. By themselves summary paragraphs minimize the work’s artistry. To the irony of Iphigenia in Aulis, Electra adds subtlety. Earlier I mentioned a reversal that begins at the end of the first play. Actually there are reversals within reversals. Iphigenia’s mythic time is contained within the real time and history of the Greek army surrounding her at Aulis. Since the real time of Electra is framed within the mythic time of the two Iphigenia plays, the middle play reverses the opening play. In real time Chrysothemis mirrors Iphigenia in mythic time. Like the first-born, the middle sister sees herself as “always on the margin” (18) of life. An even more telling self-perception is “unremarkable” (17), for it is the equivalent to Iphigenia’s self-perception of being “invisible” (5). Like her older sister, the middle sister on occasion speaks in disconnected, impressionistic images, as when she dreams of the younger sister’s digging: “Gaping, misshapen holes, scalloped by the fingers, broken nails pawing…” (9). And like her departed sister, Chrysothemis forgoes a role in history. She recognizes Orestes, but she chooses to ignore his presence. Electra ends with Electra’s exultation alternating with Chrysothemis’ itemizing her domestic duties as she looks away from the palace. Clytemnestra and Electra are the other pair of mirror images, but they oppose each other in their perceptions of themselves in relationship to history. Aloft, the mother dreams of the life and death that issued from her. She dreams of the four children she delivered: a perfect Iphigenia, a “pale” imitation of the first-born in Chrysothemis, a “misshapen” Electra, and the boy, Orestes, who will return, “spear flashing.” She knows he “will come” for her (10) because the part she played in history is so notorious that on ground level she can sit in a chair across from the pit with a cup of tea to bask in her role. She can reenact the stabbing of Agamemnon for Electra. She can even offer the knife to her, confident that the daughter is powerless to usurp her role. When Electra lets slip a cliché about the crimes that she, Electra, has seen, her mother seizes the locution. “The crimes you’ve seen,”


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she sneers (13), going on to relate how she held the dead Iphigenia in her arms as she watched the fleet sail from Aulis. “My history against your history, in perpetuity” (14), she hurls scornfully in Electra’s defiant face. Given the trilogy’s architectonics, Electra can only be defiant. With the configuration of the legend of the House of Atreus fixed in Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon and Orestes’ avenging of the killing, the characters can only change internally. Electra strengthens her will, as manifested by the digging, while waiting for the one opportunity history gives her. Clytemnestra’s dream is prophetic. Orestes returns. Although McLaughlin maintains the legend’s configuration, she takes details from different versions. There is no interaction, for example, between mother and son in Sophocles’ Electra. There is in the Libation Bearers of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which is more of a model than Sophocles’ tragedy for 27 the contemporary reunion of the two outside the palace. Whether the motivation is proud determination to solidify her place in history or willful determination to deny Electra a place, when McLaughlin’s Clytemnestra cups the back of Orestes’ head while connecting him with the pain of childbirth, the implication is clear that she recognizes her son. When she invites him into the palace with the words, “Come, my egg,…let’s see if we can find what you came for in this house” (32), she invites her destiny into the house, which becomes her tomb. Electra is the trilogy’s centerpiece, and Electra the character is the trilogy’s center. She does not want to escape from history. As the playwright explains in the insert, being outside of history traditionally has been women’s terrible fate. Consequently the youngest daughter digs furiously and indefatigably for a role so that when the stake to which she is attached comes loose from the pit, rather than run away from the palace courtyard, she plunges it back into the ground. Because she is outside of history and justice, she believes in them with all her being. She has to believe in them because she has nothing else; they validate her otherwise deprived life, unknown outside of the estate and contemned within it. Just as the stake is her visual image, an existential tenet is her verbal image. “What I have suffered has meaning,” she defends herself to her sister, “only if I continue to suffer it. I am necessary. I believe that” (21). Were the suffering to stop, the self that she digs to sustain would disintegrate. In a McLaughlin masterstroke, Orestes’ damaged state enables Electra to realize herself. Since men are suspicious of the feminine mind, the Greek woman’s role is in her body. Clytemnestra uses her mind and body to ensnare Agamemnon upon his return from Troy, but her sanctioned role is delivering children, as she reveals in her oneiric monologue while she is suspended above the ground. Iphigenia sacrifices her body to the role men have

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designed for her. Chrysothemis voids her mind so as to be able to have a role tending the garden. An unloved “monstrosity” (21) on the estate, Electra cannot have children and will not duplicate her sisters’ surrender. With her body unfulfilled, her mind correspondingly develops. It is, then, the seat of her suffering, but it also is the source of her strength. The masterstroke is in having Orestes yield to his sister because he is a veteran of warfare, that of World War I. The hero of Aeschylus’ and Sophocles’ tragedies rejoins his sister and incorporates her into the plan to avenge their father’s death, but neither work suggests that the avenger is experienced in killing. In both works he first must visit his father’s grave to invoke the dead man’s spirit for assistance. In McLaughlin’s trilogy, Orestes is the only male to appear onstage, yet he represents all males in that he is a veteran of history. As a veteran he is surfeited with blood, so exhausted in mind and body that he no longer possesses a will. In Sophocles’ version, unlike Aeschylus’ trilogy, Electra had her brother taken away on the day of Agamemnon’s murder so that he would grow up to return as the avenger. McLaughlin follows Sophocles but has Orestes’ knowledge of his role in history part of the explanation for his exhaustion. While a combatant in trench warfare, he had the additional burden of knowing he would have to kill again after the war. He begs his sister to release him from the burden, but the audience knows the request is impossible. Given their states, the recognition scene is psychologically credible in that each recognizes herself/himself as well as the other. Likening herself to a “severed head” waiting for her “reluctant body to finally come back…and do something,” she takes possession of her brother. Pressing his hand around the knife, she speaks softly in words that resonate, “Complete me” (30). Upon his arrival, he used the same image. He had been “severed” (26) from his life because it had been chosen for him, not by Apollo as in the Oresteia, but by his sister. Standing with her in the courtyard, he knows the day of reckoning has arrived. He is powerless to resist, and though the act is heinous, he comes to it steeped in the butchery of warfare. Each completes the other. Electra’s severed mind, hypertrophied by suffering, has a killing machine to actualize its agenda. Orestes’ severed body, seasoned in the trenches, obeys another control center giving it orders. Once mind and body, sister and brother are reunited, the denouement is swift. The mother comes to the courtyard to play her last hand, inviting her son into the palace. She always will be Clytemnestra, but the balance of power has shifted. Electra has empowered herself. With a bloodied Orestes in the background, she and Chrysothemis alternate their voices in a fuguelike ending, the one looking away while history is made, the other trium-


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phant in having caused history. “ME,” Electra cries, “WITHOUT ME, NOTHING WOULD HAVE EVER HAPPENED” (34). The third play is entitled Iphigenia in Tauris, a reimagining of Euripides’ play of that name. The original opens with a prologue in which Iphigenia sets the scene and recapitulates the events leading to Artemis’ substitution of a deer for her at the moment of sacrifice at Aulis. She was transported to the barbaric Taurians, where for years now she has been a priestess of the goddess preparing foreigners who set foot on the shore for sacrifice in the shrine’s interior. After the momentary appearance of Orestes, who, accompanied by Pylades, has been sent by Apollo to Tauris to retrieve a statue of Artemis with the god’s promise of an end to his suffering, Iphigenia is joined by the chorus of Greek women who assist her in preparing the victims. Together they grieve not only for Orestes, of whose death his sister dreamed, but for themselves in servitude in a barbaric land, separated from their families, unable to marry and have children. Their minds are weighted by rancor; their bodies, by the bleak, sterile ritual of death they are forced to enact. The contemporary version’s set is the one used in Iphigenia in Aulis. Aulis has become Tauris with the cliff altar where Iphigenia was to be sacrificed Artemis’ shrine. Only the theatregoer conversant with Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, however, could recognize the classical tragedy in the reinvention. The daughter who ascended the mound of rocks in the trilogy’s first play appears with a chorus of five girls, but although she recapitulates her flight after the deer substitution and alludes to a shrine, she mentions none of the names such as Helen against whom her classical counterpart spews her hatred. Neither does she mention barbaric rituals until in passing she notes that she and the girls are expected to kill any man who approaches the shrine. The six regret not being in Greece, but the tone is more bittersweet than bitter and Greece consists of disconnected sensory impressions rather than connected experiences. Greece symbolizes a real place in real time for Iphigenia and the chorus but not connected experiences for them because they had none to remember. The third play is in mythic time with Tauris a metaphor for the feminine psyche transported from reality on the “threshold of consciousness” (39) and thereby denied participation in history. “I was never really a woman,” Iphigenia complains in her opening speech, “And now I will never have the chance” (36). A mound of rocks culminating in a stone altar on which life is sacrificed is an appropriate image for the six in that their human development has petrified. Removed from life, dressed in virginal white, they have formed into statues, neither immortal nor mortal but “stand-ins for Artemis” (38). All that they can do is wonder what they

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“might have become” (37) had they not been spirited away on the verge of consciousness and womanhood. “Spirited away” (36) is the image Iphigenia uses in her opening speech to recapitulate Artemis’ transporting her to Tauris following the Aulis deer substitution. She uses another image when she says that she feels she was “put away” when she “threatened to become interesting” (38). Only a few moments intervene between the two images, but in those moments Tauris has become a metaphor for the female psyche denied participation in life. Who therefore bars girls from participation? Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris has more than one reason for the alienated priestess’ unhappiness. The gods, Artemis in her case and Apollo in her brother’s case, demand human sacrifice. She lives among savage barbarians. 28 At Aulis her father brought “death / And the taste of blood, not kisses,” to her lips by deceiving her into believing she was summoned to marry Achilles. After the Taurian herdsman reports the capture of two strangers, who unknown to Iphigenia are Orestes and Pylades, he urges her to pray to Artemis for “more sailor-boys from Greece” (337) to feed her revenge for what was done to her at the seaport. McLaughlin’s version eliminates or diminishes these reasons. Artemis and Apollo are named but have no reality in the contemporary transvaluation. Tauris is not barbaric. On the contrary, it would be “heaven” were it not so “dull” (36). Men certainly are to blame, for her father’s deception brought her to Aulis. Yet except for Orestes, men do not appear onstage in the trilogy and are barely alluded to after the first play. The third play does not direct rancor at any specific man: not at Agamemnon or Menelaus or Calchas. Vellacott analyzes Euripides’ heroine’s love-hate relationship with 29 her father in his introduction to Iphigenia in Tauris. The reinvention omits this relationship along with the heroine’s fits of resentment and vindictiveness. Moreover, mothers are as guilty as fathers. Iphigenia’s image of a girl’s being “put away” when she threatens to become interesting recalls Clytemnestra’s threat in the middle play to institutionalize her youngest daughter to get rid of her. Since Electra is interesting in her recalcitrance and since Iphigenia acknowledges that her mother was “interesting” (38), the implication is that once a woman gains power, she does not share it with younger competitors. The culture is more responsible than any individual or social unit. When Iphigenia and the chorus first mention the ritual, they admit to killing men, against their instinct for kissing them, to serve “something” (40), not Artemis, whom they already named, or a barbaric king, whom the reinvention omits. Should McLaughlin’s nemesis, Chrysothemis, be asked to identify the “something,” her answer based on her attitude in the middle


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play would approximate cultural indoctrination. Girls are not brought up to think of participating in a man’s world. When the chorus capture the mad Orestes and bring him to the priestess who, anxious to talk to a man, questions him about his madness, the two discover that they have much in common. They are both victims of cultural indoctrination. From the time he was a boy, he was “beaten into submission” (43) to accept warfare as his natural vocation. He was “taught” (43) as a son to obey his militaristic father, then as a soldier to obey his military orders, and finally as an instrument of Apollo to obey the commands to sacrifice his sanity by killing his mother and his life if necessary by retrieving Artemis’ statue from Tauris. His sister confesses that she “was schooled in sacrifice as well” (43). In fact, they are experts in “compliance” (42), having forfeited their lives and happiness serving others—serving “something” that is not themselves. The recognition scene in the contemporary Iphigenia in Tauris outdoes the recognition scene in the contemporary Electra. The two recognize each other and their wasted lives but also the possibility of a new future. We must return momentarily to Iphigenia’s reversal that ends Iphigenia in Aulis. The victim is herself to blame for surrendering to cultural indoctrination. When she intuited her role as victim in the first play, she accepted it without question. The instant, however, that she began the ascent without coercion, she opened the possibility of accepting responsibility for her life. The reversal that ends the first play sets in motion reversals that generate the trilogy’s ending. Descending from the cliff altar to ground level, where Orestes’ trussed body is deposited, Iphigenia descends from mythic time to real time. Instead of preparing him for the sacrifice, she releases him. Sister and brother will return to Greece. According to the biographical information that each artist supplies for the program, the middle play, Electra, “premiered as part of an Orestia” in 30 Los Angeles the spring prior to its inclusion in the Iphigenia trilogy. I hope the playwright keeps it where it is because it is the centerpiece of the conception that informs Iphigenia and Other Daughters. By thrusting her stake into the ground and digging in against all odds, Electra defies the conventional wisdom that a female does not belong in the real—that is, male— world. She reverses women’s traditionally subservient status to direct the administering of justice. Electra’s mind directs Orestes’ body, but Electra does not end the trilogy. Iphigenia in Tauris does. And Orestes’ arrival in the third play does not repeat the avenger’s arrival in the middle play. Electra realizes herself by handing the knife to her brother. Iphigenia realizes herself by releasing her brother to realize himself. They combine her wasted body and his wasted

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mind to create whole life. The discovery of their love for each other and for themselves as deserving of whole life frees them to return from victimhood to the “center of the city” (47). Without the help of Athena, who intervenes in Euripides’ play to restore order and secure safe passage from Tauris for the Greeks, the two return under their own power expressed as love. Iphigenia and Other Daughters does not end in sweetness and light. McLaughlin’s comic bent does not permit that unreality. The trilogy ends as it opens—with a comic touch. Virginal Iphigenia stands in the pose that as a statue she will assume in Greece while mad Orestes, his eyes flitting in and out of focus, lays his head upon her feet. Neither does the playwright’s sense of tragedy permit her to change the legend’s configuration. Her two Iphigenia plays retain the feel of the tragedy of wasted lives. Yet following the lead of Electra, whose successful fight for women’s right to be inside history making it happen is the trilogy’s pivotal drama, Iphigenia and Orestes effect a change in perception, theirs and ours. Like Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Tauris opens with a monologue, but unlike the interior first play, the third play moves outward as sister and brother move toward each other. When they recognize themselves and each other, they realize in a fugue-like celebration that they are “performing a legend / And the legend is performing” them (45). They also recognize that they can “pass through” the “stone wall of history” (46). They can return from the peripheral sphere to which they have been relegated politically and culturally. A verbal nuance heralds their choice. The word “something” punctuates each of the three plays. In the first instance, italicized for emphasis (3), Iphigenia accepts her role as a symbol fashioned by men. She does not insist upon her reality as a person. In the second instance, also italicized for emphasis (30), Electra infuses Orestes with the will to act. Death actualizes the first two instances. In the third play, however, the word takes on a different shade of meaning. The “something” (40) for which the priestess and the chorus sacrifice is muted; the emphasis is gone. The echo of death is fading, replaced by a new sound. In the mutual exchange of dialogue, sister and brother choose “Something like / Love” (48). Since they are dying, the choice is ironic. Yet there is more than irony operating here because by not doing anything and dying in Tauris, they also end the repeated killing. Love makes the “hole” (46) in the wall, but the trilogy’s architectonics enables Iphigenia and Orestes to pass through the hole. Without Athena to intervene for them, they choose to act for themselves in the life that is left to them. In her contemporary, female perspective on history, McLaughlin re-centers the myth, not to change history, but to change the perception of


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it. By making the reimagined Sophoclean tragedy the trilogy’s middle play, she re-centers the myth in Electra’s staking herself in the drama’s action until she forces linear movement. It is impossible to see the trilogy performed and not see Iphigenia’s and Orestes’ passing through the wall of history inspired by Electra’s making herself an actor in history. While the gain is no more than a breakthrough, it is a gain nevertheless because the trilogy’s design encloses history’s linearity in myth’s circularity so that action in each play impacts on the one following it. In Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia accepts her role as history’s victim to allow the Trojan War to be fought. Surrendering to the myth’s recursiveness, she remains in mythic time. In Iphigenia in Tauris, she and Orestes accept the responsibility for ending the recursiveness by passing from mythic time to real time in the “center of the city.” In the intervening real time, Electra breaks into history, not to change the outcome, but to cause it. The architectonics retains the myth’s features, the legend’s configuration, and the tragedies’ plots. Yet reinventing and re-centering change the perspective in more than one way. The first is that for history to change, its victims—those excluded from it or sacrificed to it—must act. The second is that they do not have to act with the motivation of the dominant culture. It also is impossible to see the trilogy performed and not see Iphigenia’s and Orestes’ love ending Electra’s desire for vengeance, the motivation pervading the middle play. In the first play, the victim’s perception is that “Nothing can be changed” (2). In the third play, the reunited victims change their perception and the audience’s perception and end the repeated savagery. Killing does not have to be the sole reason for wanting to create history. By restoring love as a motivating force in human activity and by interpenetrating the realms in which humans act, McLaughlin’s fresh perspective prepares for the next chapter. By that chapter’s end, the “sliver of light” (47) that is “something like / Love” will have become a golden disc, interaction will have become a healing experience, and comedy will once again coexist with tragedy.


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John Guare Though it does not recreate a classical play, a 1967 one-act play presents a condition fundamental to John Guare’s theatre. “A Day for Surprises” takes place in a workroom in the New York Public Library. An assistant, female, rushes into the room to tell her supervisor, male, to look out the window. One of the stone lions has left its base to enter the library and devour another employee, Miss Pringle, in the ladies’ room. While he is unable to contain his shock at the astounding event, the assistant reveals that the devoured staff member is not the lion’s first victim. “There’s a lot of lonely girls 1 in this town, Mr. Falanzano,” Miss Jepson reminds him. He then relates to her his relationship with the late Miss Pringle. They were lovers but not precipitately. Since neither was experienced, they spent months reading about sex, yet even when they judged themselves ready, they protected themselves, he with 127 condoms and she with 11 diaphragms, 682 pills, and three 100-foot “rolls of Saran Wrap” (110). To their surprise she conceived, but not surprisingly not a fetus but a set of books. As he admits to his assistant, he has no semen in him, only the “flour and water of [the] library paste” with which he works. “My life has been lived in books” (111), he despairs until she pastes them together, his hand on her breast, at which time the lion returns to its perch outside the library. Their plight is the familiar one of singles who live and work in an impersonal urban environment that defeats personal interaction. Since they are social beings, they attend the cultural activities that attracted them to the city in the first place. Yet now they are not only insulated from interactive experiences, they are alienated from their needs, on the verge of being swallowed by the activities which substitute for personal relationships. Until the assistant saves them, they see themselves carried along in the undifferentiated crowd that flows through the modern metropolis. “A Day for Surprises” is not the only one-act play of the 1960s to provide entry into Guare’s imaginative world. The female character in “The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year,” generically named She, confides in He,

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after he speaks to her, “I have been in this city eleven months now and you 2 are the first person I’ve spoken to. That’s spoken to me.” The protagonist of “Muzeeka” puts these characters’ yearning and frustration into words when 3 he says, “I want to connect in some way.” The “Muzeeka” protagonist speaks for Bananas Shaughnessy, the wife in The House of Blue Leaves. A manic-depressive who has attempted suicide, she must be medicated. When she reacts violently to the discovery that her husband, Artie, plans not only to leave her for his mistress, Bunny, but to commit her to an institution, he forces pills into her mouth. They calm her momentarily, but they also derange her emotionally. What begins as her plea for the right to her emotions intensifies until she is almost hysterical and he has to force more pills into her mouth. An act-2 image crystallizes her disconnection from herself and the world around her. She vacuums the floor with a cleaning tool detached from its power base and slung over her shoulder. All of the characters are disconnected from their true selves. The play’s action takes place on October 4, 1965, the day Pope Paul VI, in New York to address the General Assembly of the United Nations for peace in Vietnam, must pass through the borough of Queens and the throngs of people who line the streets for a glimpse of the pontiff. Three nuns, having lost the binoculars with which they were spectating from the apartment-house roof, ask Artie for permission to watch the event on his television set. Once inside the Shaughnessy apartment, however, they are distracted by peanut butter in the kitchen, because they are not allowed any in the convent, and disappointed by the domestic beer Bunny gives them and by the lack of color in the set, because they are accustomed to imported beer and color television. And when two of the nuns are killed in an explosion and the third, who has changed into a warmer dress, is offered money to stay in the building and care for Bananas, she accepts, shedding her religious habit for the creature comforts that money can buy. When the Hollywood director, who comes east to claim the body of his fiancée killed in the explosion as a prelude to a period of secluded mourning, learns that Bunny is a great cook, he asks her to take his late fiancée’s place on filming location with him in Australia. Despite her insistence for almost two full acts that she, the impetus for Artie’s dream of becoming a Hollywood songwriter, is passionately pledged to him and his dream, she accepts and leaves with director Billy. The characters in “A Day for Surprises” are alienated in that they create selves to fit the cultural activities in which they find their sole opportunities for even the semblance of a social life. The characters in The House of Blue Leaves are alienated in that they create selves from media images of the rich

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and famous (as Paul, the mysterious stranger in Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation, appropriates the identity of Sidney Poitier’s son). In the 1971 introduction to The House of Blue Leaves, Guare puts this self-inventing within the context of the dream that humiliates. His theatre elaborates. The false American Dream disconnects the dreamer from his true, historic self by fostering the perversion that he can create an instant self from the popular culture’s ambient images. When the dreamer discovers that the perverted Dream betrayed him—that it and he are impostures—he is humiliated. Most of Guare’s characters do not suffer humiliation. They pursue a dream so long as it promises self-fulfillment. When it does not, they find another dream to pursue whether or not it is grounded in reality. Most of Guare’s characters therefore do not suffer madness, a consequence of committing oneself to a dream or self-invention impossible to realize. Unable to reconcile the self-invention with reality, the characters who do suffer humiliation withdraw into another time or mental state, or they retaliate against those who provoked the humiliation. Absent without leave from the army, Ronnie Shaughnessy has come home but without informing his parents because he wants to wear the discarded altar-boy cassock of his childhood as a disguise for gaining access to the pope, whom he plans to blow up with the mock gift he bears. To the audience at the opening of act 2, he explains as much of his motivation that he himself understands. When he was 12, director Billy visited his long-time friend, Artie, while conducting a talent search for a new face to play Huck Finn in a film version of Twain’s novel. Seeing in Billy’s visit his opportunity to break into films, the boy performed every routine he could think of when the visitor arrived. But instead of a contract, he got the reaction of a man who took him to be retarded. Humiliated, Ronnie withdrew into his room and the festering resolve to exact revenge. Artie supplies the additional information. He named his son after Billy’s father. No one supplies the following information, but it becomes obvious. Unable to gain access to a Hollywood studio, Ronnie turns his wrath on the one figure of authority, the papal father, whom circumstances bring within his reach. He goes AWOL to intercept the pope near his home, changing the plan only when he learns that Billy’s fiancée is in the apartment and expecting to join the director for the trip to Australia. He gives her the package to give to Billy. That it explodes in the elevator, killing her and the two nuns, is simply one more ironic twist in a play that surprises up to the final curtain. Ronnie, who was a 12-year-old without acting talent when he aspired to be a movie star, is not present in the closing scene. His father is. Artie is a middle-aged zookeeper without composing talent who aspires to be a song-

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writer. While his mistress fuels his dream of performing in local clubs until she has him believing that the two of them can join his boyhood friend in Hollywood, American culture bombards him with images of instant success and fulfillment. Neither mistress nor culture heeds the zookeeper’s reality. Were the play not partly a comedy, the songs would be an embarrassment and his rationalization of their failure to win over the audience, as in the opening scene, a sorry self-deception. Even when Bananas makes him confront the fact that his song, “I Love You So I Keep Dreaming,” is really his lyrics to “White Christmas,” he does not relinquish his dream. Humiliated, he retaliates by phoning the institution and arranging to have his wife committed that day. He is thrust into reality only when Billy and Bunny leave him behind in Queens while they follow their dream to Australia. His reality is Bananas, the play’s most interesting character for two reasons. Beneath the madness is a lucidity so that when she uncovers “White Christmas” in her husband’s song, for example, she uncovers depths to herself not immediately perceptible to the audience. As Swoosie Kurtz, who won a Tony playing her in the 1986 revival, said in an interview, “‘She’s so fragmented and so disjointed…then, she’ll drop one of her incredible lines.’” Kurtz also identifies the second reason. “‘When I started out,’” the actress recalled the first rehearsals, “‘I had no idea who she was or how she got that 4 way.’” The clues to Bananas are her recollection of the onset of madness and a separate remark she makes. According to her, two years prior to the day of the play’s action, she was driving in midtown Manhattan when she stopped to offer a ride to four celebrities waving for taxis: Cardinal Spellman, Jackie Kennedy, Bob Hope, and President Johnson. When they refused, a fight broke out involving all of them. That night, talk-show host Johnny Carson told the story on national television. Humiliated, she withdrew to the roof in a blizzard, where she remained until her husband rescued her. Although the story is itself mad and the time contradicted by Artie, who asserts that she was ill for months before going onto the roof, the story connects with a remark she makes. As her husband tries to explain to Bunny why he cannot simply pick up the phone and dial Billy’s home in California, Bananas breaks in with this statement, “He was always my much better friend than 5 yours, Artie.” He contradicts her, but she has revealed her fear. She has lost her sense of self, and the explanation cannot be that Artie has taken a mistress—although his neglect of her aggravates her condition— because when he finally phones Billy, he tells the director that he has a girlfriend whom he met only two months ago. Neither can their son’s leaving be the cause—although it too aggravates her condition—since he left for basic training only weeks before the time of the play. From Artie’s reference

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to a time in the past when he and Bananas had fun together and his justification to Billy for taking a girlfriend—that his wife is dead to him—the implication is that her condition began years earlier. Her husband’s commitment to a career change as songwriter and performer could have separated her from herself and him. She had to have verbally supported his aspiration because she withheld her knowledge of the “White Christmas” duplication until the eve of his abandonment of her. Yet her story about the drive through Manhattan and her remark about Billy’s being her friend reveal her abortive attempt to invent a self conferring upon her the celebrity status that would keep pace with Artie’s invented self, that would make her desirable first to a club performer and then to a Hollywood songwriter. Failing in the attempt, she reverts, not to her self as wife and mother, which she has lost, but to the self of a form of life which in her fear and madness she believes desirable to her husband now that he has failed to create a new self. For Kurtz is surely right when she said in the interview 6 that the character she played “‘knows she’s losing him.’” And losing him will demolish what is left of her disordered self. When Billy and Bunny exit the apartment, they leave Artie behind with Bananas. He has no future as a songwriter; neither does he have a mistress. What he has is a life with his wife and the hope of their creating, through interaction, new selves grounded in a new reality, a new relationship. When she promises to be “different” for him, he “smiles at her, hopefully” (86). Bananas is the only character who knows that she is sick, that she is disconnected from herself and personal relationships. Unlike Bunny, who sought the pope’s blessing for Artie’s music because at the time it constituted her hope for a new future in Hollywood, his wife sought the blessing to be made whole again. By herself she cannot connect with life, which she desperately wants to do. Unhinged and now stranded, what she does is understandable, for she is totally dependent upon Artie for her sense of self and wants to please him. Assuming the position of a dog on its haunches, she barks, rubs her face against his legs, licks his hand. She will be an animal for her husband, a zookeeper, and a happy animal because she has him back as he was before songwriting and Bunny. Not mad in the play’s opening scene, Artie is by the closing scene. His dream frustrated, his reality as a zookeeper married to a madwoman intolerable, he strangles his wife. Only now is he released from his ambivalence trying to mediate between her and Bunny and the lives they symbolize for him. The curtain comes down on his performing, not for an unappreciative audience in a local bar and grill, but in the House of Blue Leaves, the institution to which he would have committed Bananas had she lived and to which his act commits him.

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The consequence of Artie’s act invests the play with the finality of tragedy, despite a cast of characters who belong in a farce. Billy’s leaving with Bunny removes any possibility Artie has of going to Hollywood while Bananas’ simulating animal behavior unhinges him in his effort to create a new self. In her madness his wife has reverted to an earlier time when they were happy, but he cannot return to that earlier time. Unhappy as a zookeeper, he has no choice but to create another self. His commitment to songwriting can explain Bananas’ attempt to keep pace with him and the subsequent humiliation, which is a nullifying of the self, when she failed. His commitment also can have aggravated the son’s humiliation, sending him, unstrung, in search of a father figure on whom to exact vengeance. Unable to reconcile his need for a career change with his wife’s need to have him as he was before the career change, Artie kills Bananas. But the tragedy is not complete until the closing scene. The final, terrible irony of The House of Blue Leaves is the inevitable consequence of a conflict in which Artie can neither deny his need to express himself nor his responsibility to his wife’s need. In the one state in which he can fulfill himself, the one state that resolves the conflict, he performs his songs in a mental institution. The consequence is inevitable only because Artie accepts responsibility for his act. He would not be mad if he did not. Not one of the three who exit the apartment for new lives—Billy, Bunny, and the nun—goes mad. They escape the consequences of their actions by renouncing their vows for other vows. Throughout the play Artie feels responsibility to Bananas. The following is a typical revelation, before his wife humiliates him with the “White Christmas” appropriation, of his wish not to have to abandon her. As he enters the apartment from the motorcade spectating, ahead of his wife and mistress, he reflects on the fact that, despite their hostility, the two women were holding each other in the press of sidewalk spectators. “Wouldn’t it be great,” he wishes, “if they fell in love and we all could stay…” (54). The three cannot remain together because Bunny is pushing Artie to pursue his dream whereas Bananas wants him to be as they were before the dream. His accepting responsibility for killing Bananas separates him from Billy, Bunny, and the nun. It links him with Gurney’s Austin, Gibson’s Lena, and Kennedy’s Sarah: the characters in the tragedies not recreating the House of Atreus, although there is a tantalizing evocation in a family whose members are so cursed that they all go mad. The first half of the play’s title recalls the most famous House in Western dramatic literature, whose curse is antecedent to the action of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, the trilogy Guare cites in his introduction to the 1971 play. Responding to the criticism that his play is cruel or unfeeling, he argues that no play from the Oresteia on has ever

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reached the cruelty that cannot be avoided in life. His interest as a playwright, he continues, is dramatizing the avoiding of humiliation, the “core of tragedy and comedy and probably of our lives” (5). The House of Blue Leaves is no reinvention of Aeschylus’ trilogy, yet throughout his work, the American playwright alludes to Greek theatre and mythology. The allusions increase as we move through his theatre until he recreates classical tragedy in contemporary terms in a conflict that does not change. Characters are divided within themselves by opposing obligations. Tragic characters cannot connect, or reconcile, the obligations, or allegiances; characters in comedy can. At least one character in the next play can. Another full-length play of this period, Marco Polo Sings a Solo is a comedy according to the author’s note, which opens with a summary statement about The House of Blue Leaves. Unlike the characters in The House, those in Marco Polo have unlimited possibilities for creating on the eve of the millennium. Where do “people who had all the money in the world, who had all the talent they needed to turn those dreams into reality” go for a structure from which to create? To the self, the “ultimate structure” with which 7 they are obsessed. The plays end differently too. Each ends with the protagonist, a husband and father, in a spotlight addressing the audience. But the first, now a widower, performs his unchanging talent from within his isolation; the second knows that to change, he must leave his isolation and join the living audience. The unlimited possibilities do not account for the difference, for they contribute to the obsession and the isolation. Something else must account for it, something that happens to the second protagonist for him to reverse the direction, making the play a comedy. The set, the speeches—all the elements of Marco Polo Sings a Solo—establish the obsession and the ensuing isolation. The play takes place in 1999 on an Arctic Circle iceberg off the coast of Norway, where the protagonist, Stony McBride, is making a film about Marco Polo and to which come the other characters. Some are and some are not involved in the filmmaking, but all are doing what Marco Polo is doing in the film: exploring a new world. The guide through the new world of the 21st century—the measure of reality for each—is his or her self. As Diane McBride says to her director husband, “You can invent yourself” (102). In the language of the author’s note, the “dreams” they turn “into reality” are themselves. They are exemplary selves who replicate themselves because all that they have ever known is success. They are Olympians whose limitless selves have never failed them. Even when they are mutilated, as two are, they suffer no pain. For Diane the issue is that of control. Mind so controls life that not only can it invent a self but it can invent it apart from

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matter and history. “No,” she says. “This is not my life. The clock has not yet started ticking on my life. I’ll let life know when I’m ready for it to begin” (136). The closest that astronaut Frank comes to concern for the world after upsetting its ecology is considering it as a possible site for his next adventure. “The world on one hand. Me on the other…. The world. Me. The world. Me” (130). With all but one character in Marco Polo, he rejects the world’s reality to invent himself anew, remaining on the iceberg as a Norwegian peasant. Stony is the lone character who, according to the author’s note, “can live” (87). He does not choose between himself and the world but connects the two by taking his reality into the world’s reality. A statement he makes early in the play tells why. “We are what we grow out of” (101). The closing scene completes the statement and the comedy. As the lights go down on the exemplary selves in the penultimate scene, a spotlight comes up on Stony. The something that happens that enabled him to reverse direction occurred earlier. On his space travel, he was exhilarated to discover the ability to replicate himself. He fled the cloning planet, however, when he realized that each “me” was no different from the other “mes” that popped out “screaming to be heard” (128–29). He will no longer sing a solo, for he is the contemporary Marco Polo who with his son will explore interaction in the world external to the self. By going “out there where you live” in the “present,” he addresses the spectators, he connects with them to create comedy’s new society. Together they will grow into a new future. “My plant nature. Our plant nature,” he holds up his hands in which two “green plants appear.” Together they will “celebrate” life (137). Artie Shaughnessy’s madness continues the movement toward tragic isolation begun in Gurney’s Later Life in the irreconcilable division between Austin’s culturally developed self and his elemental need to connect with life. Artie allows Bunny and the culture to seduce him into believing he can invent a self that does not grow out of his reality. Stony’s entry into the ground of his being continues the movement toward comic reconciliation begun in this section of the book by Electra’s digging into the ground in the middle play of Iphigenia and Other Daughters and Iphigenia’s descending from the altar to her brother on the ground in the trilogy’s closing play. Since Stony reenters the world of physical and social bodies in an act of reconciliation, we will look at one more Guare comedy before reentering his tragic vision. In the 1986 preface to the volume containing The House of Blue Leaves and Bosoms and Neglect, the playwright alludes to the Oresteia: In a sense, that’s what the plays are. Insurance that the original wound never goes away, that the original crime is never forgiven, is always about to be performed, and is always always in the present tense (xiii).

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An outline of Bosoms and Neglect would seem to support the argument that the play is a reimagining of Libation Bearers, which moves from Agamemnon’s grave, where Orestes and Electra are reunited after years of separation, to the palace, where Orestes must exact vengeance on Clytemnestra for their father’s death. Act 1 brings a man together with a woman who questions why he took so long before acknowledging her, for they are 8 “Brothers and sisters” who “share family secrets” by visiting “Pater Noster” (193). After he leaves her, he goes in act 2 to his mother, whom he tries to get to kill herself. Before they reach that point, she wishes that her dead husband were with her. “So you could kill him again?” the son asks (225). The outline, which ignores much of the interplay between the characters, is not a fabrication. It is, however, skewed to reveal the presence of the Oresteia, but now that it is revealed, I want to correct the misleading way that the outline suggests that it is present. Aeschylus’ trilogy is not a work recreated in the American play with parallel structural and/or textual details, despite the few similarities quoted above, but a work that provides a thematic base with which the American playwright imaginatively connects his theatre. In the Oresteia a crime is repeated until divine power intervenes to stop its repetition. As the prefatory passage to Bosoms and Neglect indicates, the thematic base that Guare adopts is the repetition of the “original crime” but changed from the slaying of a family member to its contemporary equivalent: the neglect of the member’s need to create a self. Although the mother undergoes an operation to remove a cancerous tumor and the son and the woman suffer physical wounds during a fight, the “wound” referred to in the prefatory passage is psychological. Act 1 takes place in the apartment of the woman, Deirdre, who questions the man, Scooper, about his delay in acknowledging her because as patients of a noted psychiatrist, they are “Brothers and sisters” with the other patients and the psychiatrist is their “Pater Noster.” It is their first contact outside his office, and as they talk it is apparent that they are in analysis because they have trouble relating to people and the trouble stems from each one’s relationship with a parent. That is the family secret that each one has, a secret furthermore which each keeps secret, not only from the other, for they are singles cautious about committing too quickly, but from himself/herself. Of course, they talk about the relationship but not as it is. And true to life, each has an insight into the other’s problem before accepting its application to himself/herself. Disconnected from themselves, they are variations on the supervisor in “A Day for Surprises” who lives in books. Surrounded by the books in Deirdre’s apartment, Scooper admits his disconnection. “We’re the subsidiary characters in everybody’s lives…,” he erupts. “I bring my life to Doctor

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James and we turn my life into a lullaby until I am as fictional to myself as any one of these books are to me” (217). When he starts to destroy the books, she stabs him. They fight, pausing to watch the psychiatrist, whose office is across the street, leave on vacation with his family and then resume until realizing that analysis has not helped them. He understands that he must go back to his “mother” as Deirdre understands that she must go back to her “father” (219). Recovering from the stab wounds in act 2, Scooper joins his blind mother, Henny, in the hospital where she is recovering from the surgery. No stranger to hospitals, she was in and out of them for years for attempted suicide. Toward the end of the act, they are joined by Deirdre, also a patient as a result of the fight. When she denounces her fellow patient, threatening him with her Mafia father whom she says she visits regularly in the prison to which her testifying against him committed him, Scooper verbalizes the insight he had in the previous act. As soon as he says, “You don’t have to kill me to make up for all the years he didn’t pay any attention to you” (242), the pieces of the puzzle that is Deirdre fall into place. She herself begins to shed the self-deceptions and subterfuges behind which she has hidden herself. Her father is not a Mafia don but a librarian. He is not in prison but in a nursing home to which she committed him and for which she is riddled with guilt. Scooper’s insight is that she did not originate the crime of isolating another but the father did by neglecting her when she was a girl. Her development stunted, she perpetuates the crime by neglecting him. When she is driven by pangs of conscience, she attempts to assuage the guilt by visiting him and reading to him. The love-hate relationship between daughter and father Bosoms and Neglect verbalizes. The same ambivalence between son and mother the play dramatizes. It opens with a prologue in which Scooper in Henny’s apartment discovers that his 83-year-old mother has had cancer for two years. The two acts reveal why he did not know about her condition. He neglects her. Yet he does not originate the neglect. In the prefatory metaphor quoted above, the “wound” is in her. She neglected him, stunting his development and sending him into analysis and a dead-end affair with his business partner’s wife. For most of the play, Henny seems to be a character who has made a creative life for herself. In act 2 her answers to Scooper’s probing questions about her reasons for marrying and her relationship with his late father are witty and earthy. The wound, the crime, should have ended with her. Two responses must be made. Her adjustment to the circumstances of her personal life came after the damage was done to her son, and the crime did not originate with her. In the play’s closing scene, she suddenly remembers a

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repressed incident in the past. The audience already has heard the incident as Scooper experiences it, and he does experience it because it haunts him. To Deirdre, Scooper relates a persistent dream in which in a strange city without the father, his mother picks him up and repeatedly hits a man with him while screaming, “You neglected me!” (202) At play’s end Henny remembers the time when she took young Scooper to show him off to the man she loved who neglected her by not marrying her because his family disapproved of her. Married to Scooper’s father, she took the boy to Boston to show the first man what he missed by not marrying her. But once in his presence she lost control, grabbed her son, and pushed him in her ex-lover’s face while screaming the words that her son would like to turn back on her. Scooper knows that the years spent putting her in hospitals after her suicide attempts caused his problem with women his age, just as he also knows that she neglected him because she was sick. Rebuffed in her thirties, glaucomatous in middle age, she had to be sick to attempt suicide so many times. Henny’s physical sickness erupted in her apartment, prompting her son to call a doctor. His mother “had so neglected herself that the disease was sick of not being noticed” (181), Scooper tells Deirdre the day after the prologue, the day Henny is to undergo surgery to remove the cancer. Her psychological sickness, the result of another person’s neglecting her, erupts in the hospital. The psychological wound is both a curse and a blessing. The wound’s curse is that it festers. Nullifying the individual’s attempt to create a self, it disconnects the victim not only from his/her tenuous self but from his/her concern for others. In an unguarded moment, Deirdre discloses to Scooper that his neglect of her in Doctor James’ office, although he confesses that it was unintentional, drove her crazy. She then relates the incident that sent her into analysis. She attacked her lover when he informed her that he was returning to his wife. Deirdre hopes that Scooper felt sympathy as he waited for her session with the psychiatrist to end. But she receives none. “There’s no sympathy in a doctor’s waiting room,” he explains. “Only me next. Me next” (211). Rebuffed in his need to be, which is why he is in analysis, he rebuffs her in her need to be, isolating them from a relationship the basis of which is empathy. As a result of neglect done to them as they were growing up, Scooper and Deirdre are disconnected from their deepest selves. Yet with Bananas Shaughnessy, they know they are sick. That recognition brings them to analysis and the opportunity to redeem the past, though not on the psychiatrist’s couch or, as we have seen, in the waiting room. Her dress swaying in the breeze led Scooper to follow Deirdre that morning into a bookstore, just as her awareness that he had noticed her legs led her into the bookstore to

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wait. When he finally spoke after years of ignoring her in the psychiatrist’s office, she invited him to her apartment and the reopening of the wound. The wound’s blessing is that it erupts. In the apartment they hide behind the facades of their invented selves. They prevaricate. They misunderstand each other. But they also reveal themselves in bits and pieces until they are sexually intimate. When his business partner’s wife phones him, however, to cancel her flight with him to Haiti because her children have chicken pox, Scooper reacts to the rebuff. He rips Deirdre’s books with the protest about their being “subsidiary characters” in others’ lives. Feeling rejected, especially after the intimacy, because he would leave her for his mistress if he could, Deirdre stabs him. With Doctor James on vacation, each must confront the cause of the psychological wound. They do in the hospital after attending to their physical wounds. In the apartment the two bandy about the words “imagination” and “connection.” They even quote, though not accurately, the famous line in E.M. Forster’s Howards End: “Connect. Only connect” (211). But only when they address the psychological wound do they connect with each other and with Henny, whose erupting physical wound opens the play and whose erupting psychological wound closes it. Although the audience does not know what happens to Scooper and Deirdre because Guare’s theatre does not end with tidy resolutions, the two are headed in the direction of recovery. For years they have been talking about the past to their psychiatrist and not to the persons who caused the wound in the past until they are all in the hospital, at which time Scooper defends asking his mother penetrating questions: “If I can straighten things out with you, maybe I can do it with all women—” (230). Just as the physical wound cannot be treated until it manifests itself, the mental wound cannot be treated until it manifests itself. Since the parent’s neglect, or the failure to interact, rebuffed the self, causing the wound, interaction is the remedy for bringing the past and the wound into the open air to be confronted and healed. Moreover, interaction resuscitates humankind’s two salvific powers. It is the modus operandi of the powers that connect. In the final image of Bosoms and Neglect, Henny reaches for Scooper as the epiphany of the Boston episode decades earlier fills her consciousness. Back home that evening, she had to accept her failure to win the man she had wanted, but as she looked at her sleeping son, she prayed for a better life for him. Scooper is not in the room, having left with Deirdre, yet he and his mother reconnect through the power of the imagination, which actualizes her past in the present, and the power of love, which enables her to share her pain and hope as she was not able to with the cancer.

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In the contemporary world’s disjointed, secular culture, imagination and love are salvific. Paul, the mysterious stranger of Six Degrees of Separation, defines the imagination as “our link, our most personal link, with our inner lives and the world outside that world—this world we share.” In the absence of an intervening god such as Athena in the Oresteia—and Six Degrees refers to Aeschylus and the birth of theatre—the imagination is “God’s gift” to 9 humans, enabling them to empathize with one another. In a culture which rewards individual accomplishment while professing communal values, a culture in which self-fulfillment is of paramount importance, neglecting another’s self is as Deirdre knows, “always betrayal” (202). It is the equivalent to the ancient crime of killing another’s self, a crime repeated until redeemed by love. Love in Guare’s theatre, however, is not reductive; it is a mystery. Guare so grounds the mystery of love that it complicates characters’ taking responsibility for their lives, which they must do to be whole and to move forward. The ground is sexual desire. Experienced in the body, it brings selves together, uniting them in a new society, but it separates them from the old society too. Connecting and reconnecting, love creates a comedy such as Bosoms and Neglect. Disconnecting, it creates a tragedy such as The House of Blue Leaves. The final Guare play to be examined combines comedy and tragedy. One of the two adults in Four Baboons Adoring the Sun posits the play’s two universes. They are the realities to be connected through interaction or disconnected through division. Husband and father Philip characterizes the first, A, as the universe of adults, a universe of “facts and reasons and explanations,” and the second, B, as the universe children live in without “past” 10 or “rules.” Imagination is still a power capable of uniting the two realms, but in this play it is allied, more so than in other plays, with the power of love grounded in desire. When wife and mother Penny interrupts Philip’s characterization of universe B to tell him that she is not interested in “childhood,” he explains that the universe is not that of childhood but that in which children live. A “rival universe,” it is not a realm to which the adult regresses but one which is always present if the adult can only recover it. Philip goes on to say that it is “mythic” (21). This is the time of McLaughlin’s two Euripidean reinventions in her trilogy, a time prior to historical, or linear, time. Since myth is the eternally recursive—the timeless—in time, universe B is the eternally present reality within the adult though buried under the consciousness of historical time. The meaning of the past is evolving in Guare’s theatre. For different reasons Artie in The House of Blue Leaves and the Olympians in Marco Polo

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Sings a Solo want to realize a future removed from the present and the past. Zookeeping and Bananas are suffocating the would-be songwriter. The Olympians feel themselves so possessed of ability that they direct all their energy toward outdoing their past accomplishments. Before Artie’s madness, Stony’s remarks in his closing monologue about his erstwhile colleagues would apply to Artie and them. They are “waiting, waiting, always for rebirth” (137)—for the future that never arrives. Characters in Bosoms and Neglect, however, cannot live fulfilling lives in the present until they uncover the past repressed because it is painful. With the past revealed, they can confront it, integrate it into consciousness, and go forward into life. The heretofore buried past is like the plants in Stony’s hands about which he says, “We are what we grow out of.” The past in Bosoms and Neglect is the deepest self from which Scooper, Henny, and Deirdre are disconnected. In Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, the deepest self is repressed not because it was neglected but because it was outgrown in the process of self-development. Since the past that individuals “grow out of” is the past that lies buried under humanity’s accretions of civilization, archaeology is a metaphor for uncovering the mythic realm, which in Guare’s imaginative world is not dead but waiting to be revived. Philip and Penny are two archaeologists who had known each other before the play opens. Meeting again at a professional conference, each unhappily married and a parent, they fell in love, divorced their partners to marry, and left together for an archaeological dig. The action of Four Baboons takes place in storied Sicily, a Greek colony in the ancient world and the home of gods and goddesses, one of whom appears when the lights come up onstage. The semi-nude Eros rises out of the “smoking primordial ooze” (3). Eternal, he knows 17th-century opera, for he sings Dido’s lament from Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas. Primordial, his revival duplicates his original incarnation in Hesiod’s Theogony. The third of the triumvirate from which issues the divine genealogy, the Greek poet describes him as the “fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise 11 counsels of all gods and all men within them.” Although he is onstage for much of the action, the characters do not see him or hear him when he sings his lines. “I do not control things,” he announces himself; “I simply urge them along” (3). He cannot “control.” Were he to, he would be in universe A, the realm of conscious control of the emotions. Yet he does “urge” because he is an elemental impulse that “overcomes the mind and wise counsels.” Shining around the audience the golden disc he carries to see who will be next to discover his power, he “catches…in his light” (4) Philip and Penny, who have come onto the stage, now transformed into an airport.

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The couple have uncovered universe B. Love, especially with a new partner, transports adults to that universe. With Eros reborn, the lovers’ senses are reborn; they experience the world as new. Philip and Penny uncovered the buried universe during the ten weeks they have been in Sicily discovering Eros in themselves and each other. They also know that in the airport they are in universe A because they wish they were on the baggage carousel making love “for eternity, revolving around and around” (5). Uncovering universe B is not difficult. Recovering it until it is reconciled with universe A is difficult. The couple are in love, yet they cannot yield to Eros’ urge because they are in the airport for a purpose. They want their children with them, yet they are Apollonian individuals who have formed histories with their sons and daughters that they do not want to repeat as they nervously and excitedly await the passengers from the flight from America. They also know they have an obligation to children who are minors, in a foreign country, not speaking the language. Thus the adults are divided selves. The children are a Dionysian chorus. Speaking metrically, the nine are initially indistinguishable from one another. Penny’s youngest even has to be reminded that when they take names for their Sicilian adventure, he is to pick from the boy bag. In the union of their two bodies, Philip and Penny obliterate their consciousness of their past unhappiness, but they want to obliterate it with their children. Since as parents they cannot lose themselves in the chorus, what they can do with the arrivals is share with them the experience of a new beginning that atones for the failed past. To integrate the individual families into one family while the children enjoy Sicily, Penny has devised a game in which each one picks a personage to be from Greek mythology. Wayne, Philip’s oldest, becomes Icarus. When one of his brothers declares himself Icarus’ father, Daedalus, Philip asserts himself. He is the father. That he feels he must assert himself indicates that he has not yet integrated the two universes within himself. To integrate the families, the parents have to integrate the two universes within themselves and within the families. They are adults who cannot abdicate their roles. They can, however, share their perceptions of love, for instance, or responsible choices with their children—by having them “see Sicily through our eyes,” Penny assures her husband (13)—just as the latter can share their perceptions with their parents, thereby assisting them in recovering the children’s universe within them. To keep the channels open with their sons and daughters, Penny and Philip have to maintain a fine line between not neglecting them and not controlling them. They have to do the same, keep the channels open, with the children’s universe within themselves. To create a whole family, they have to heal the division within

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themselves and the division between the two families, for their offspring arrive with lingering hostility about the divorces and remarriage. Four Baboons dramatizes the reconciliation and sundering of the rival realities and conflicting obligations of self and family. It begins as comedy and ends as tragedy though with a redeeming epiphany. The comic note is struck in the airport with each adult’s delight in each other and each other’s children. The tragic note is struck in the same locale when Penny becomes isolated from the others spatially and temporally to address the audience in a different time period, not of the past but of the future, reflecting on the Sicilian experience three years earlier. Still in the airport, Philip and Penny become isolated to reflect on the experience, but now not only are they isolated from their children but also from each other. The reflection focuses on Wayne, who is at the heart of the mystery that every Guare play uncovers, a mystery usually revolving around a son’s relationships with the other characters. Wayne, Philip’s oldest at 13, and Halcy, Penny’s oldest at the same age, separate themselves from their brothers and sisters in the airport by not speaking metrically. They deepen the mystery after the entire group leaves the airport and stops at a seaside cafe. Following a tremulous sound and an ornithomantic sign associated with classical tragedy, they separate themselves again, this time to startle their parents by repeating lines they overheard in telephone conversations between Philip and Penny as lovers not yet divorced from their partners. Four Baboons does not bring the comedy to a climax and then develop the tragedy. Guare’s dramaturgy, at its most intricate, interweaves the two genres from the airport to the catastrophe through scenes involving adults and children that reveal images within images, realities within realities. While dramatizing the past reconciled in the present, the play presages the family’s sundered future. The play has three time periods, only one of which, with an exception, is dramatized. The first is the time prior to the Sicilian adventure. This time, the past, is the time the parents’ marriages were failing and their relationships with their partners and children strained. The exception is their renewing their friendship at a conference, which meeting led to drinks in a hotel lounge across the street and then a room upstairs. The exception is not mythic time, however. In the act of recreating the meeting for their curious children, Philip and Penny switch tenses as they decide between themselves what to include and exclude. Since they are controlling the scene as it unfolds, they are conscious of different time periods. The second is the time three years subsequent to the adventure. It should be the present time with Sicily in the past and the time prior to Sicily in the past perfect, yet Guare insists that it be thought of as the future. By

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writing in the stage directions for the play’s first shift that Penny turns to the audience “as if she is in a later time” (9), he keeps the Sicilian adventure in the eternal present, in mythic time, and performed, unlike the prior and subsequent times, which are told, each from a historical perspective. The third period is the eternal present of mythic time. It continually disintegrates into the past and the future, the first occurrence as early as the airport. Nevertheless the play achieves a wholeness for all the characters if only momentarily. Parents and children contribute to the comic reconciliation. Philip and Penny want to have their children with them, and the latter want to be reunited with their parents who left them to marry. The former want to share Sicily and the work that brought them together with their sons and daughters, just as the latter are excited at the prospect of exploring a new country with their new family. They all want to share the experience. And they do, enabling Philip to look back three years later on the archaeological dig as the “Past Present annihilated. Distances all one” (23). Parents and children also contribute to the tragic isolation. At the airport Penny assuages her husband’s guilt, for having hit Wayne when he found him drinking, by explaining that they are “saving” (5) their kids from disaffection by introducing them to Sicily’s glories but primarily to love. Their love will save their sons and daughters as it saved them from unhappy marriages and will save them from the guilt they bear for failing their children in those marriages. So eager to show the children the redemptive power of love, and not knowing that Wayne and Halcy eavesdropped on their telephone conversations, they accelerate their maturation, compressing the action into a weekend. Penny makes another ironic remark in the airport when in a passage quoted above she tells her husband that she wants the kids to “see Sicily through our eyes” (13). But for them to see that way, they must develop universe A, the adult universe. The children cannot remain children forever. To be whole, they must develop universe A and then integrate it with universe B. Philip is not excused from making ironic statements. When he explains to his wife that only by falling in love can an adult recover universe B, that of children, he fails to recognize that for a child to develop universe A, he must fall from the innocence of B into the experience of A. Falling is a motif throughout the play. Rivals to be integrated, the universes bring the generations into conflict too. Adults with a history, Philip and Penny are recovering the universe of myth. But since they cannot cease to be responsible parents, they exclude details about their hotel meeting from their children so that while the dig is annihilating the distinction between past and present, Penny and Philip are dividing time into segments to be revealed or concealed. Teens previously

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defiant of rules, Wayne and Halcy are cultivating the universe that develops a past, a history. But since they cannot cease to be curious adolescents, they imitate the lovers’ telephone courtship, first at the cafe and then at the dig. In the second occurrence, they go so far as to call each other their parents’ names, shocking Philip and Penny, especially when the latter discover them in bed. Wayne’s tragedy is that he never becomes an adult. He takes his universe, the mythic realm in which children live, to its inevitable conclusion. He lives the myth. The plays I have been examining are critical of a false American Dream and a false idealism that encourage the nation and its people to invent themselves disconnected from their historical realities. Those characters who do, fly their Icarian imaginations into a sphere where their bodies cannot follow. The Olympians in Marco Polo Sings a Solo, for example, become lifeless spirits. Wayne is not one of them. Like many of Guare’s characters, he suffers from a confusion of identity, but his confusion is understandable. He is only 13. Intrigued by the presence of another eavesdropper on the telephone line and caught up in his father’s and Halcy’s mother’s transformation, he allows his active imagination to take wing. Yet he does not soar disconnected from his body. He infuses his mind’s image into his body, as only a young person would, to become his new identity. As Icarus he falls to his death. The two adults are not to blame, however, any more than the two teens are. The father and mother are not alone in waiting at the airport to introduce the new family to Sicily’s “grandeur—its majesty” (13). Eros also awaits the teens who by not speaking in meters as their brothers and sisters do are evolving beyond the chorus in their quest for self-discovery. When Eros, who cannot be seen or heard by the characters, sings, “Dreams of Flying,” in response to Wayne’s picking the name of Icarus, the teen repeats, “Dreams of flying” (15), which suggests that the sovereign power is awakened in him. The god is internalized in him, motivating him to quest for his sexuality, for just as Eros transports an adult to universe B, sexual desire transports a teen to universe A. Later Wayne and Halcy lie next to each other in their parents’ bed. They are not yet intimate, but they see themselves as being in love and therefore duplicating the adult behavior of their parents who spoke of their love and intimacy on the phone. Unlike Philip and Penny, who are shocked by the eavesdropping revelation and their being in bed, Eros is pleased. Leaning over the headboard, he sings, “What kept you so long? / … / It’s time and now’s the time” (35). No one is to blame for the sundering events. Four Baboons, named for a sculpture transfiguring four baboons adoring their sun god, dramatizes the nature of existence, which is comic and tragic. Eros unites lovers and isolates

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them from others. Guare’s choice of age 13 for the would-be lovers is believable. They are old enough to be interested in sex yet young enough to be open about it. Were they older teens, they would probably have some experience and therefore be more secretive about their relationship. It is their innocence that propels the action to its catastrophe. Anxious to be initiated into the mystery of the love their parents manifest, Wayne and Halcy ask them for permission to spend the night together. Had the father and mother been less open about their own relationship, they might have decelerated the teens’ urge toward each other, but they could not have prevented it, and they might have decelerated or even prevented the merging of the two universes and two families. After the divorce and remarriage, it was crucial that Penny and Philip be open with their children when they arrived in Sicily. Their reaction to the proposal is a closed one which alienates Wayne and Halcy from them, but whether expressed sympathetically or not, it is the reaction of responsible parents, and it alienates them from themselves and each other. Philip and Penny fall out of their loving, unified state and into universe A, that of rules such as a prohibition against 13-yearolds sleeping together. The merged universes having separated within them, they fight over which one’s child provoked the other one’s child into the monstrous proposal, sundering the family into children who do not know what is good for them and adults who do know. In the confusion the two teens scale the cliff toward the site of what was goddess Astarte’s temple. Earlier I called Gurney’s Later Life an American tragedy. For Sir Peter Hall, the director of Four Baboons, Guare’s play is an “attempt to write a modern Greek tragedy…[which] succeeded triumphantly” (xi). After being intimate with Halcy, Wayne steps into space, to plunge to earth and die. His age, his exhilaration at having passed the initiation into manhood, his absorption of the identity of the mythological youth whose soaring symbolizes for him the flight from adolescence all contribute to his transformation. But like other Guare characters, he remains a mystery, overwhelmed by a primordial force that is itself mysterious. Love grounded in desire is the mystery in Four Baboons Adoring the Sun. Like the imagination in Six Degrees of Separation and the wound in Bosoms and Neglect, it can be a curse or a blessing. Eros, the “gift / The gods gave to man” (57) enabling him to connect universes within and without the self, transports Wayne, but he never reaches universe A. As a result he never has the opportunity to be responsible in the fullest sense, despite his intention. Although he comes in conflict with adult rules, he never gets to integrate them in himself. He lives and dies in universe B. He does not playact a mythic personage; he becomes Icarus by plunging to his death.

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Philip, then, becomes the stricken Daedalus powerless to prevent the catastrophe, for sexual love also disconnects. Penny’s suggestion that they have another child thrills Philip. Wayne’s suggestion that he and Halcy have one angers him. Thus even before Wayne falls, his father falls from a unified universe into a self divided between the universes of parent and child. Three years later he relates what he saw as he and his wife, searching for their son and daughter, came upon them. “But over there, I saw two inept kids going at it in some insane parody of Penny and me. Universe A? Universe B? Instead of getting into the kids’ world, we had dragged the kids into our world” (60). Racked by grief and guilt for driving Wayne farther up the cliff, he verbally attacks Halcy for living while his son died, and he renounces his emotions. “I hate emotions” (67). He departs with those children who will go with him, leaving his wife, Halcy, and one of her brothers in Sicily. Erotic love separates the teens from the group. It fragmentizes Philip. It integrates Penny. Three years later she too returns to the terrible night when, with her husband, she pursued, driven by anger at the rebellious teens until she came upon them. Her anger overwhelmed by love, her narrative overwhelmed by a visual image, she revives the scene, presided over by Eros, on a stage designed around a disc that when not a blazing Sicilian sun revolved to reveal different images to the characters who could see them. Transported by Eros to the mythic realm of universe B, she perceives the teens as Dionysian energy in the participation mystique before they develop into Apollonian individuals. She sees Wayne as a deer drinking from a pool of water that is Halcy. Whereas Philip leaves by plane for the university, she returns to the archaeological dig. Whereas he withdraws from the ground of his being to analyze and evaluate the contents of digs that archaeologists such as his wife unearth in the field, she digs in the ground of her being. More in touch with herself than her husband is with himself, Penny sees in the deer and pool of water a mirror image. “What happened” to Wayne and Halcy, she tries to get Philip to recognize, “is what happened to us—” (61). As the closing scene of Four Baboons disconnects and then connects, the images of university and field, sky and ground complement each other, as does another antinomy. From the airplane above Sicily, Philip looks into Mount Etna’s volcanic crater and sees “blazing red flames below melting stones into liquid” (70). His view is Apollonian looking down on Dionysian dissolution and rejecting it because it symbolizes emotions he cannot control. Before he sees into the volcano’s mouth, his view is clouded; after he sees, the plane disappears in the night. On the ground Penny’s face, looking up in the gesture of the sculptured baboons, is luminous. Looking into the light of the ascendant sun, her view is Dionysian. The sun’s rays infuse the

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ground of her being. From the perspective of Eros, whose sung lines fuse his verbal images with Penny’s visual image, Apollonian Philip and Dionysian Penny are two embodiments of desire’s power. Ignoring the power or attempting to control it isolates. Keeping the channels open between universes for the power to flow between them unites and heals. The play’s closing scene reconciles the antinomies. The night ends in tragedy, yet night is followed by the rising sun that Penny looks into as Eros sings, “It always has risen / It always will” (71). In Guare’s theatre characters inhabit multiple universes with conflicting claims to their allegiance. Yet so long as they interact with the universes, they put pressure on the facade of the self to open, revealing the mystery within life. Whether imaged as a wound, the imagination, or love, the mystery unites the universes. Unable to reconcile the conflicting claims, Philip withdraws into his enclave. Penny, who is able to reconcile them, continues to interact. The nature of the reconciliation is the knottiest issue in this book. Whether we call the two universes historical time and mythic time, consciousness and the unconscious, Apollonian form and Dionysian flux, or any of the other antinomies, Four Baboons disconnects them in Philip and connects them in Penny. But how are they connected? Does the connection transform the union into a single universe or balance the universes within the union? Penny and Philip verbalize images that indicate a single universe. Penny says “forged” (8) and “transformed” (46) when referring to the merging of the two families into one. Looking back on the dig that Sicilian summer, Philip realizes that it “annihilated” (23) the past and present into one experience. Yet he could not sustain the annihilation of temporality. Philip may have expected too much of the union. He explains the universes to his wife, he praises love as the power that unites, and he looks back on the adventure as an annihilation of temporality. Yet once Wayne and Halcy assert their desire to unite in their own universe, his single universe fragments. Hence when Wayne dies, he confronts a past that he cannot integrate into his being. He accepts responsibility for his role in provoking the catastrophe, and he is strong enough not to go mad. The death abolishes mythic time, however, isolating him in the parental grief of universe A’s historical time. Penny integrates the two universes but not as a single universe. The vision that fuses Wayne as a deer drinking from the pool that is Halcy is a single image, but it is a mythic image, an epiphany of universe B that Penny carries within her adult universe A, as Ouisa in Six Degrees carries Paul’s epiphany within her consciousness. Of course, she does something at play’s

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end to strengthen the integration. Unlike her husband, who returns to historical time in the university, she remains in historical time in Sicily but digs to uncover mythic time. The image recalls McLaughlin’s Electra. The two women dig into history to change it. Electra digs to break into history, and Penny digs to transform it by healing it. McLaughlin unfixes myth to re-center it in history while Guare unfixes history to re-center it in myth for the same reason. Electra and Penny would agree that the digging must take place in the present and not be put off until the future, as the Olympians do in Marco Polo. The way to change life is by connecting the past and the present: historical time within mythic time or mythic time within historical time. Always here and now, the present contains the historical past. It evolves out of the past and carries the past, buried, within it. Revived, the historical past contains the mythic past from which it evolved and which it carries, buried, within it. The present redeems the past by actualizing the past so that one can see it from multiple perspectives, just as the past redeems the present by enabling one to see that what was lost can be retrieved. With perception altered, one can then alter the future, which grows out of the interaction of the past and present. Penny digs into the history of the love, the grief, and the guilt present in her. As the digging recovers the past, it recovers her universe B, which transforms Wayne’s and Halcy’s discovery of love into the eternal present of mythic time. She will carry within her universe A the mythic time to interact with the historic time in which she lives and loves. With each universe affecting the other, Penny’s integration is unified but not unitary. As a transition to a full examination in the next section, the preceding statement can be clarified by relating unitary form to fusing, which implies a single, fixed universe or form, and by summarizing two theatres instead of reviewing all of them discussed so far. The Ontological-Hysteric Theater can be said to fuse in that its founder fuses impulses with characterological qualities to create impersonated impulses in a setting that fuses contents of his mind with images from the external, sensory world to create a unique stage that is the analogue to his generating mind. Once that point is made, however, it must be said that within the stage the impulses collide and conflict, rise and fall. The spectator sees a field generating unresolved multiplicity, for the tensions and collisions create. Moreover, the image Foreman uses in I’ve Got the Shakes for metaphor-making, which is the essence of creating, is not fusing but bridging. Madeline X wants to bridge the parallel universes within and without herself. Finally, we can say about Foreman’s art that when impulses fuse into a fixed, unitary form as in My Head Was a Sledgehammer, the Professor falls

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into the ground of his being to dissolve the form and begin metaphormaking anew. Howe’s theatre does not replicate a unitary form. Cal in The Art of Dining fuses multiple ingredients into crepes carousels. Dinah in One Shoe Off mixes multiple ingredients into a salad. Fusion or mixture, the chefs generate their dishes in a hearth that is both an analogue to the playwright’s creating mind and a stage representation of a kitchen. Since the hearth’s sources are images from the playwright’s unconscious and traditional ingredients that a kitchen prepares, the possibilities for original creations are endless. As the multiple contents change, so does the form without, however, losing its identity as pancakes, salad, and theatre. The third and final section examines the relationship between a unitary standard and multiplicity in the personal, theatrical, and national selves. This third section is summational not only because of the three selves but also because the three plays bring together the elements fundamental to all the theatres in the book. Each play begins with a disconnection from the ground of the being or self. The vehicle for connecting in each play is images from Greek and Roman theatres. Moreover, the upcoming section connects with the one just concluded by opening with an adaptation in which desire is the mysterious ground of the personal self or being, as it is in Four Baboons Adoring the Sun.


() &' C H A P T E R S E V E N

Eric Overmyer, David Greenspan, and Richard Foreman In the published text of his Amphitryon, Eric Overmyer expresses his gratitude to David Esbjornson and Brian Kulick for asking him to adapt Kleist’s Amphitryon for the Classic Stage Company (CSC). Esbjornson was the company’s artistic director, and Kulick was the director of the 1995 production of the adaptation. In the playbill for the production, CSC, the company that staged McLaughlin’s Iphigenia and Other Daughters, identifies its mission as a dedication to “revitalizing classical theatre for American audiences.” Among its artistic goals, it lists making “classical theatre accessible to new audiences, especially young people.” Given CSC’s mission and goal, we first have to determine what Overmyer adapts in Kleist’s play to revitalize it, making it accessible to a contemporary audience, before we can examine the relationship between a unitary standard and multiplicity. As with all CSC productions, the playbill contained an insert supplying background information. The insert retells the myth that is the drama’s foundation and highlights a history of its dramatized versions from Plautus through Giraudoux and Behrman. The story is a persistent theatrical favorite. By naming his play Amphitryon 38, Jean Giraudoux in 1929 jokingly referred to 37 prior versions. In 1986 the myth was the basis of a musical not highlighted in the insert: Olympus on My Mind. The drama usually takes place in a day in the ancient Greek city of Thebes. With the Theban commander, Amphitryon, away at war, Jupiter impersonates him to enjoy a night with his wife Alcmena. The fun of a production is in dramaturgy that doubles characterizations. Sent ahead by Amphitryon to herald his return, the servant Sosia is denied entrance to the palace by Mercury in the servant’s guise. When the commander arrives, he denies having spent the preceding night with Alcmena, who denies having spent the night with anyone other than him. But since her lover is a god and the play a comedy (although the drama has been conceived of as a tragicomedy), Jupiter ends the confusion before leaving in triumph. The reunited

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couple are rewarded. They learn that Jupiter chose Alcmena to bear his son. Of the twins the couple will parent, Hercules is a demigod who will bring renown to them. The above outline is fairly constant for the many versions. The shift in the story’s development that affects Overmyer’s 1995 Amphitryon is the one in Heinrich von Kleist’s 1806 Amphitryon: A Comedy after Molière (Ein Lustspiel nach Molière). We must isolate the contribution the German playwright introduces into the story as Molière dramatized it in 1668 to appreciate the contemporary American version. The playbill’s subtitle for the 1995 adaptation is A Comedy after Kleist by Way of Molière. Since the published text adds to the playbill’s subtitle with a Little Bit of Giraudoux Thrown In, we also must glance at the 1929 version before we can enter the contemporary world. With the exception of the prologue that Kleist does not repeat, the first scene of significant difference between the Frenchman’s 1668 version and the German’s 1806 version occurs in act 1. In Molière’s comedy Mercury, impersonating Sosia, so pummels the servant in his attempt to enter the palace that he turns tail for the military camp. As Jupiter, impersonating Amphitryon, and Alcmena come outside, the god appeals to the wife to think of him as her lover and not her husband. To think of him as the latter implies that she yielded to him, not from passion, but from conjugal obligation. He prefers that she confine her virtue to the husband while giving her heart to the lover. She, however, cannot separate the two. Moreover, rather than inhibiting her, marriage permits her to yield to passion. The corresponding scene in Kleist’s version extends the dialogue until Alcmena promises to think of him, the lover, after the husband returns from war. She is not displeased, though. On the contrary, she attributes his insistence to the intoxication he experienced in the visit, an intoxication she shares. The second scene of significant difference occurs in act 2. After the husband and wife in Molière’s version exchange angry words about the preceding night, they part, he to secure a witness who will testify that he could not have been with her, she to be alone with her thoughts. When Jupiter as Amphitryon reappears to appease her, she lashes at him for his monstrous injury to her love and honor. He admits that the accusation of infidelity hurled at her was criminal but pleads that the husband and not the lover is the guilty party. She weakens as he submits. She forgives. Yet she cannot separate husband and lover. They are the same man, the one to whom she remonstrates. The corresponding scene in Kleist’s version is fundamentally different and follows from a scene Kleist introduces into his version. In the interim between Amphitryon’s leaving to secure a witness and Jupiter’s reappearance, Alcmena begins to doubt her senses. She now sees a J, where

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she saw an A, engraved on the gift which she had received the preceding night and which she used as proof in the angry scene with Amphitryon that he had given it to her. As a result of her doubt, the relationship between her and Jupiter reverses that of the two in the corresponding scene in Molière’s version. Kleist’s Alcmena apologizes to Jupiter as Amphitryon because she fears she has compromised their marriage. He does not remonstrate, but after persuading her that Jupiter visited her and gave her the gift, he leads her through an argument until she is forced to choose between the lover and the husband. He poses the following question. Suppose she discovers that the person she is embracing is the god and her husband appears; which one would she choose? After repeating the question to grasp its import, she replies, though still considering the argument hypothetical: I’d be so very sad, oh so dejected, and wish that he could be the god and you would go on being my Amphitryon 1 forever, as you are.

There are other differences between the two versions at which we will look. I want to summarize the main one, however, so that we can move to Overmyer’s adaptation of Kleist’s Amphitryon by way of Molière with a little bit of Giraudoux thrown in. In the judgment of Martin Greenberg, from whose translation I just quoted, “Kleist’s Amphitryon starts out in the beaten path too, of translation of a classic. Perhaps that is all he meant it to be at first, a translation of Molière, but then it turned—twisted—under his hand 2 to become this unexampled work….” By leading the wife through the argument until she can choose the god whose presence she feels, Jupiter empowers Alcmena to liberate herself from the maritality, a devotion to Amphitryon and marriage that borders on idolatry. In the scene in which she confided her doubt about the engraved monogram to her servant Charis, Sosia’s wife, she also confided her perception of a difference in Amphitryon the preceding night: I might have thought he was a portrait of himself, a painting by a master’s hand showing him exactly as he is, and yet transfigured, like a god! (44)

In that scene, separating the lover from the husband terrified her because it would mean she had committed adultery. She can separate them in the later scene only because Jupiter as Amphitryon assures her that since the god visited her in the guise of her husband, she is innocent and she thinks she is embracing Amphitryon. Nevertheless she does separate them. Liber-

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ated, she senses, as she did the night before, something in the man she thinks is Amphitryon that exceeds Amphitryon. Now she can choose, for in the hypothetical question, were the husband suddenly to appear, she would choose him whom she is embracing. The something is divinity, which transcends earthly experience while being incarnated in it. Jupiter is the divine element in love, marriage, and husband which transcends them although experienced in them. In other words, whereas Molière is a farceur, Kleist is a Romantic. As skeletal as the summary is, it allows us to proceed with the examination. Kleist’s Amphitryon opens in act 1 with Sosia before Amphitryon’s palace in Thebes, to which the servant has come from the military camp and where he pauses to rehearse his description to Alcmena of her husband’s victory. Overmyer’s Amphitryon opens with a prologue in two scenes, the second of which recreates the scene of Molière’s prologue, which Kleist does not repeat. The first scene recreates some of the atmosphere of the opening scene of act 1 of Giraudoux’s Amphitryon 38. Giraudoux’s opening scene takes place outside the palace but does not involve the servant. Jupiter and Mercury are watching the shadows of Amphitryon and Alcmena move as the husband and wife embrace. Since Jupiter desires the wife, Mercury advises the senior shape-shifter to assume the husband’s form after having a nation declare war on Thebes to draw the commander away from home. He, the junior shape-shifter, volunteers to assume the servant’s form. Overmyer relocates the scene on a cloud with the two deities looking down upon Alcmena as she passes by the window, alone because Amphitryon is away at war. Mercury suggests that Jupiter assume the absent husband’s form. The senior god then tells his junior to assume Sosia’s form. As the former leaves to transform himself, the latter descends into the prologue’s second scene to intercept Goddess of the Night. Incidentally, the CSC production had a single set consisting of a rotating gazebo-like structure in the performance space. When on the roof, the actors playing Jupiter and Mercury were on a cloud. When they climbed down the sides, they were outside the palace, two sides of which were open. Actors and actresses wore Napoleonic costumes appropriate to the era in which Kleist wrote. The set had a more pronounced debt to the German Romantic, however. On the interior walls of the building’s closed sides was printed the famous prayer Kleist wrote for the newspaper he edited. The prayer was reproduced, with a context, in the program insert. When Mercury intercepts the goddess, they are in Overmyer’s second prologue scene, which corresponds to Molière’s prologue. In the Frenchman’s prologue, on Jupiter’s behalf Mercury requests that Night slow down her appointed round so that the father of the gods, already with Alcmena,


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can prolong their night of lovemaking. Of course, there is more than the request. With Mercury’s complaint against poets for denying him a vehicular conveyance—Night has a chariot—and the two deities’ sly comments about sexual matters and the liberties the nobility, unlike the lower classes, can take, the 1668 prologue sets the tone for a witty, courtly comedy. Overmyer’s prologue sets the tone for another kind of comedy. The prevailing tone of Kleist’s play is ambiguity. Overmyer captures the ambiguity in Goddess of Night’s opening statement. She cannot stay and chat, she tells Mercury, because she is late. “It’s that damn full moon, it messes me up 3 every month.” She subsequently refers to tides and the cosmic timetable, but when she makes the statement, it suggests that since she is a feminine personification, her monthly period is affected. Jupiter also affects her. In her dalliances with him, he is no mere courtly monarch but a power she cannot deny. When Mercury inquires about his performance, she replies, “Insatiable…. They don’t call him father of the gods for nothing, you know” (5). As the second prologue ends, the power is already on earth. The Napoleonic costumes notwithstanding, the destination is the contemporary world. The goddess sends a sleepy Mr. Dawn, who enters carrying a container of coffee from a deli, back to bed for a few more hours. Overmyer’s prologue establishes not only the presence of the divine but some of its properties. It intrudes in human affairs by changing or transforming itself at will. That is, it is supernatural, since it can intervene in nature. It also is promiscuous and insatiable. Divinity’s intrusion is the source of ambiguity in Overmyer’s adaptation, which the playwright introduces in the prologue. And he reinforces the ambiguity in the first available opportunity in the play proper. The three versions—by Molière, Kleist, and Overmyer—begin act 1 with Sosia before the entrance to his master’s palace. In each version act-1’s second scene begins when Mercury as Sosia comes out of the palace and, unseen and unheard by the servant, remarks that he must get rid of Sosia before he bursts upon Jupiter and Alcmena in bed. Overmyer adds a series of questions. Addressing the audience, the contemporary Mercury ponders the gods’ penchant for sleeping with mortal women. “Peculiar, don’t you think? I mean, what is this fatal flaw? Aren’t goddesses good enough? It’s a puzzlement” (8). Mercury himself does not know the answer. Mercury’s questions take us into the play proper. We can put side by side the texts of Kleist’s and Overmyer’s plays, just as we can Molière’s and Kleist’s, to determine where the adaptation diverges from the earlier version. In general Overmyer shortens long passages between god and wife and husband and wife. The result is more rapid reaction to each other and therefore interaction between them. The interaction allows the playwright to change the emphasis from that of the version he is adapting. For instance, believing

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that they were together the preceding night, Overmyer’s Alcmena praises Amphitryon’s performance: “You made love to me like a god!” (34) The wording is slightly different from that of the corresponding scene in Kleist’s version, where Alcmena reminds her husband of what she believes was his excitement the preceding night: “You said you were a god” (36). The slight change in emphasis to how the wife feels supports the major change in this act-1 scene. When Kleist’s Amphitryon approaches Alcmena after a fivemonth absence, he is disappointed to discover that she is not overjoyed to see him and launches into a complaint against her lack of ardor. Stung by his reproach, she counters by reminding him that her lack of ardor is understandable given their night of lovemaking. Having discharged her conjugal debt the night before, she is spent. Omitting all reference to conjugal obligation, Overmyer shortens Amphitryon’s reproach. He does not shorten Alcmena’s defense; he makes a dramatic shift midway through it. After she reminds her husband that she gave all of herself during their night of “vigorous and joyful lovemaking,” she suddenly begins to flirt. Aroused, she suggests that if he feels “so inclined—” (29). He interrupts her before she can finish the thought. The dramatic shift to the revelation of the wife’s erotic nature epitomizes the contemporary adaptation of the Romantic adaptation of Molière’s courtly farce. Kleist’s Alcmena feels spent after a night of lovemaking. So does Overmyer’s Alcmena. But as she and Amphitryon interact, she begins to feel aroused because the “miracle of love” renews (29). Love renews in the early 19thcentury Amphitryon and the late 20th-century Amphitryon. How it renews each heroine is the difference between the two adaptations. Kleist’s Jupiter is pantheistic love. In the act-2 scene in which the deity leads the wife into a choice, Kleist’s Jupiter as Amphitryon instructs Alcmena in a sermon that the god visited her because she ignores his divinity, his “handiwork” (51), manifest in nature. She confuses the force creating the universe with the emotion she feels for her husband. Creative love transcends conjugal love and conjugal obligation. Although it is experienced in the sensory world, it is not limited to marriage. By the scene’s end, he triumphs because she chooses the love she feels in the embrace over that of her husband should he appear in the hypothetical situation. Her senses did not betray her the preceding night; her judgment did. Jupiter’s presence renews her so that she can feel his divinity: the power of universal, creative love. I think Overmyer starts with the assumption that a contemporary audience would find a sermon on pantheism somewhat daunting. I know it would find laughable the invoking of conjugal obligation as an authority for intimacy. More to the point, though, is the strong strain of surrealism in the

Eric Overmyer, David Greenspan, and Richard Foreman 4

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playwright’s work. Overmyer’s Jupiter is surrealist love: eros, or desire, de5 fined by surrealism’s founder as the “only motive of the world.” Hence we can appreciate the contemporary playwright’s reason for opening his adaptation with a two-scene prologue. Desire is divine. Intruding in human affairs, it liberates the person receptive to its power. Insatiable, it increases rather than depletes. Promiscuous, or irrational, it is mad love (l’amour fou). In the act-2 scene, Overmyer’s Jupiter as Amphitryon explains to Alcmena that the god visited her because he felt ignored. She confuses the only motive of the world, the motive creating the world, with the emotion she feels for her husband. Erotic love is creative love because it is life-affirming. It transcends conjugal love. Although it is experienced in the sensory world, it is not limited to marriage. By the scene’s end, he too triumphs but even more so than his Romantic counterpart. In each version the wife feels the love. In the angry scene, Amphitryon accuses her of adultery. Jupiter returns in the husband’s guise to calm her and assure her that she cannot be blamed for the god’s deception the preceding night. When she tries to flee in shame, he restrains her by holding her lovingly in his arms to make her feel worthy. The difference is in a passage Overmyer adds. Not only does Alcmena choose the god, she takes on his power. She completes the thought her husband interrupted in the act-1 scene. “Tell me you’re my Amphitryon,” she says, “and let’s go back to bed—” (50). The next time she must choose is the final time in the play. Amphitryon returns with people loyal to him for a confrontation with the impostor. When Jupiter as Amphitryon and Alcmena come out of the palace, the commander’s supporters are confounded. Once again, the wife chooses the god but not because of his divinity so much as the lack of it in her husband. Amphitryon in each play is a jealous husband come to claim his possession—his conjugal right—and Overmyer’s Alcmena rejects him as “rank and gross” (72). The mortal man does distinguish himself in each version. He reveals a nobility of character. He is not, however, the drama’s artistic center. Molière’s Alcmena does not appear in act 3. Kleist’s Alcmena does for the choice referred to in the preceding paragraph, and she remains onstage after Jupiter’s epiphany; annunciation of Hercules’ birth, labors, and apotheosis; and ascension to Olympus. Amphitryon then speaks to his wife, who is reviving after having fainted in his arms. Her response is the ambiguous “Ah!” (84) Alcmena has had a lover: a divine one but a lover nonetheless. She has been instructed to realize that love transcends maritality. Whether she feels love’s power in Amphitryon’s arms, as she did in Jupiter’s embrace, and reconciles with him or, having lost her innocence, will pursue love’s power out-

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side of marriage is for the individual spectator to decide. Greenberg, Kleist’s translator, sees her “back safely in the arms of her husband.” For the two translators of a volume containing three dramatized versions of the story, the actress who plays the role “can turn this entire work at the very last second into a shattering tragedy or into a conciliatory comedy,” although in their opinion Kleist “intended the latter.” In the judgment of another translator, 6 the 1806 “play could more properly be called a tragedy with comic scenes.” Overmyer maintains the shift to Alcmena as the drama’s artistic center but in contemporary terms, just as he maintains the maritality in contemporary terms. Before the god visits, the woman does not submit to conjugal obligation, but she defers to the male initiative. The visit liberates her. One passage can indicate the maritality and the shift away from it. In the angry scene between the husband and wife in Kleist’s Amphitryon, he asks her to relate what happened the preceding night. She does. In the corresponding scene in Overmyer’s Amphitryon, before she does, she teases him for wanting her to feed his ego: Not content with hearing me call your name to heaven over and over while we made love, or showering you with compliments after, or singing your praises to anyone who will listen, without a shred of matronly modesty or shame? (33)

While ostensibly praising her partner’s performance, Alcmena really reveals her uninhibited enjoyment of the intimacy. She reveals her sexual appetite, increasingly so until she takes the initiative and makes an explicit proposal to the god in the guise of her husband that they “go back to bed” (50). In the contemporary scene in which the gods depart for Olympus, the husband and wife embrace, speak each other’s name, and kiss. Yet their relationship is altered. Equal partners, Amphitryon adjusts to Alcmena’s reality. To her announcement that she is pregnant, he responds, “We’ll work it out” (75). There is no ignominy in their situation and not because they will parent Hercules. There is no ignominy because the love they bear is lifeaffirming. Their desire to be together heals the division they suffered. Theirs is not the sole situation in the surrealist adaptation, however. It is Molière who develops Charis, Sosia’s wife, into a character who interacts with her husband and Mercury as her husband. Kleist continues the development, coarsening it. Molière, Kleist, and Overmyer utilize the same dramaturgical principle of alternating scenes refined or coarsened depending on the participants. For the spectator or reader coming upon the dramatizations for the first time, paying attention to the way in which a scene elevates or lowers the concerns of the adjacent scenes provides entrance into the subtleties—of Jupiter’s arguments, for example.


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For some Kleist scholars, the Romantic’s coarsening of the Sosia-Mercury-Charis interaction while elevating Jupiter, especially in the scene in which he delivers his pantheistic sermon, creates a “loss of unity” or 7 a “disharmony” in the 1806 play that is not in Molière’s 1668 play. Overmyer emphasizes the disharmony. Mr. Dawn enters the prologue carrying a container of coffee from a deli. The stage directions for the set specify a “palazzo in Thebes—which looks surprisingly like Venice” (7). When the characters speak a foreign word, they speak Italian. The language of the 1995 adaptation is jarringly disharmonious. A word with an archaic flavor, “unbeknownst” (15), coexists with one from today’s newspaper, “consensual” (21). The characters indulge in poetic devices such as alliteration in “convoluted conceit” (35), “celestial cobwebs” (45), and “purloined pork products” (34). Their vocabularies include words not in everyday conversation. “Addled” (46), “dallied” (51), “colluding” (55), “cosseted” (60), “folderol” (63), “conundrum” (64), “suzerainty” (64), “flummoxed” (65), “mendacity” (70), and “cozened” (73) are ten such words distributed among six characters. None is exempt from the most pedestrian clichés either: “lay low” until the disturbance “blows over” (14), “pop a gasket” (23), and “ball and chain” (27). Charis is tired of hearing the “old song and dance” (37) from Sosia, who wants to carouse “until the cows come home” (65). When a subordinate officer enjoins Amphitryon to “hold” his “horses” until the assemblage has proof of his identity, the commander dismisses him: “You’re not the only oyster in the stew” (65). God that he is, Jupiter has the locution that climaxes the wit pervading the play. Before granting a wish to the couple in whose palace he dallied, he directs them to “pack up” their “cares and woes” (74), invoking American popular music 8 while signaling his ascent to Olympus. Developing Charis as a character in her own right and the disharmony between her and Sosia, Overmyer builds a parallelism into the play’s structure. Act 1 of Kleist’s Amphitryon ends with Charis alone onstage. As an attendant upon her mistress, she was present when the departing Jupiter as Amphitryon asked Alcmena to reserve her virtue for her husband but her heart for him. After Mercury as Sosia rejects her in the subsequent scene, the servant’s wife fantasizes splitting virtue and love in her own life. She fantasizes taking a lover. Act 2 ends with Charis alone onstage. She overheard the explanation of Jupiter as Amphitryon that the god visited Alcmena the preceding night. After the couple leave, she suspects Sosia may be a god in disguise, but once he reveals that he is her husband, she resolves not to be the doting wife anymore. Today his dinner will be cold. In act 3 she comes out of the palace with her mistress and Jupiter for the final scene, but she does not speak. Kleist is not interested in her.

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Overmyer is. In Kleist’s act 3, Mercury as Sosia tells the servant that he, the god, and Charis are on good terms again, but he does not elaborate beyond the fact that the wife is cooking his favorite meal. The audience can imagine whatever it chooses to. The contemporary playwright makes the corresponding material explicit by creating a scene in which the attendant can reveal her erotic nature. After Mercury leaves, Charis enters. She is happy to be cooking for a man who works “hard,” she tells Sosia, mistaking him for her divine partner. Patting his bottom, she kisses him and thanks him for not being “quick” this evening (68). Overmyer even creates a second scene for Charis. After the gods ascend and the reconciled couple go into the palace, she remains onstage in a scene which parallels the closing scenes of acts 1 and 2. But she is not alone. She kisses Sosia to get rid of him and then turns to the subordinate officer who shares the stage with her. They will share in another sense too. As they smile amorously at each other, Charis remarks that “once the gods have stirred the pot, things are never the same afterwards” (75). She will take a lover. About Kleist’s play translator Greenberg asks where the story happens. 9 His answer is the modern soul. So too is the modern soul the site of the contemporary adaptation. Kleist’s Amphitryon reconciles himself to his situation, but Alcmena’s spiritual state is ambiguous. Overmyer’s husband and wife reconcile themselves to their situation and each other, but Charis’ spiritual state is ambivalent. Just as the contemporary adaptation separates the attendant for a choice of action independent of that of her mistress, so it separates her internally. She splits virtue and love, dividing her soul or self between husband and lover. Charis blames the gods for the division, a consequence of their having “stirred the pot.” They do cause the division in the Romantic and surrealist plays. There is no division in Molière’s play—Alcmena does not participate in act 3—which is why critics argue against reading the modern crisis of 10 metaphysical identity into the courtly farce. Not only do the gods cause the crisis in Kleist’s and Overmyer’s plays, they cure it. Jupiter appears in Kleist’s dramatization of the myth to awaken Alcmena to his omnipotence. Since she worships her husband and marriage, the god separates her from them, dividing her soul and allegiance, to make her aware that Jupiter as love is divine. By themselves the husband and marriage are not; they are divine only because they partake of love’s divinity. For Greenberg the play is a comedy because Alcmena awakens. About the closing scene, he writes, “But she is back safely in the arms of her husband, who caught her as she fainted, an innocent and doting wife (thank god) no 11 longer. For innocent means ignorant.”


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Jupiter appears in Overmyer’s dramatization, but in the contemporary, surrealist adaptation, he actualizes his omnipotence to a greater degree than does Kleist’s Jupiter. By deleting the Romantic sermon as the god’s explanation of his power and by having him feel his power more so than does his Romantic counterpart, Overmyer emphasizes love’s irrationality: its inexplicable power to motivate. The divine messenger admits to the “puzzlement” (8) in the gods’ desire for mortals. The father of the gods is actually discomposed by desire. Momentarily frustrated before Alcmena chooses him, because he believed she would fall in love with him, Kleist’s Jupiter says in an aside, “Damn the deluded hope that tempted me / down here!” (54) In the corresponding contemporary scene, Overmyer’s Jupiter is more emphatic. “Damn! I’ve fallen in love with her, but her love for me was an illusion after all” (49). Surrealist love awakens Alcmena to the realization that in deferring to the culturally sanctioned gender roles, she divided her soul as evidenced by her conflict of allegiance. Having awakened her, Jupiter as l’amour fou liber12 ates her from this constraining disharmony to recover her repressed nature. Discovering herself—her freedom to choose—she discovers divinity. She discovers the “miracle of love” that renews her the morning after the night of lovemaking. That miracle also renews the marriage on a new basis. She and Amphitryon reconcile, even though she is pregnant by a lover. Surrealist love having healed the disharmony within them, they will “work…out” the disharmony between them. In healing the division in modern man’s soul, Romantic and surrealist love address the crisis of metaphysical identity, but the 1995 adaptation 13 works out the issue more fully than does the 1806 dramatization. When in act 3 Amphitryon first comes face to face with Jupiter, Kleist’s commander cries out in shock, “Almighty gods! Who are you?” (66) Overmyer’s commander also suffers shock but expresses it differently: “Ye gods! My mirror image!” (62) To the forces he gathered for an entry into the palace, Kleist’s Amphitryon refers to the impostor as the “son of darkness” (75). Overmyer’s Amphitryon uses the complementary postmodern term for mirror image: “the other” (69). When in the mirror stage of development the subject encounters his mirror image, he has a shock of recognition and alienation. He sees who he is and who he is not; he encounters himself and his other. No extended scene between Amphitryon and Jupiter ensues because such a scene would shift the artistic center from Alcmena to Amphitryon, yet what does ensue is consistent with the subject-other encounter in postmodernism and surrealism. In Foreman’s The Universe, James, the subject, and Mary, the other, recoil when they look into each other’s eyes. When after a series of comic

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attempts to possess Mary, James realizes that he cannot, he yields to the reality she embodies as his unconscious and descends into the ground of his being to generate the contents of creating. Overmyer’s Amphitryon experiences a comparable realization. To feel desire is to feel possessed by love as opposed to feeling that love, conjugal or otherwise, gives one the right to claim another as one’s property. Every person embodies the mystery of love: the divinity that possesses or motivates but cannot itself be possessed. Jupiter and Mercury are the other for the two couples in Overmyer’s Amphitryon. They incarnate a desire that obeys no rules or regulations. Alcmena is the first to encounter the god. Excited by what she thinks is a desire so strong in Amphitryon that he would risk his military career to be with her, she relates to him the next day how she never before “experienced such joy, such transports of physical ecstasy, such sheer connubial bliss—” (29). With each subsequent encounter with the god, she becomes stronger. She comes to accept the other’s power in her person, and that is the power to create oneself and the world one wants to inhabit. As Jupiter is about to depart, the husband offers him his “thanks” for the seed implanted in the wife, who adds two words not found in Molière or Kleist: “And mine!” (74) By reconciling with Alcmena, Amphitryon is the second to accept the other: the god in his wife’s person, the love that liberates from a culturally prescribed form. With the gods departed, Alcmena and Amphitryon will be each one’s other. Accepting the power to create one’s life and relationships involves risks, but to avoid risks is to live life meanly, to coarsen it as Sosia does—comically, but he does. The telling difference between Sosia and Charis is that she wanted her husband to be the god whereas he is content to settle into himself and foreclose the encounter with the other in his wife. Act 2 ends with his admission that he is “just Sosia, the same old jackass” he has “always been” (53). Act 3 ends with his acknowledgment of his identity. “It’s me” (75). Disappointed, Charis resolves to find the other elsewhere. Ironically Sosia has lines early in the play that suggest that he is more receptive than his master to the presence of the irrational. In the initial encounter with Mercury, who has appropriated his identity, the servant questions his own existence. He also has one of the drama’s great lines regardless of the version. The first time the audience meets Amphitryon, before he learns of Alcmena’s night of lovemaking, he interrogates his servant for a rational explanation why he returned to the military camp without having completed the mission of informing his mistress that her husband would be returning to her. No matter how hard he tries to account for his mirror image’s driving him away from the palace, Sosia has to reduce the explanation to this line: “I swear to you that I set out from camp for Thebes, a single So-


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sia, as there has been all my life, so far as I knew, and upon my arrival met myself…” (25). The line in Kleist reads, “I swear to you / I left the camp a single soul, and arrived / in Thebes a double…” (26). The line is a surrealist’s delight, for the encounter with objective chance-the other-irrationality overcomes individual solipsism. Surrealism is a collective movement. It needs antinomies to create metaphors and relationships; it needs communicating vessels for reconciliation. Love is mankind’s most fulfilling experience, the one most infused with divinity, for the reason that it effects reconciliation: I have never ceased to believe that, among all the states through which humans can pass, love is the greatest supplier of solutions of that kind [outside of ordinary logical attitudes], being at the same time in itself the ideal place for the joining and fu14 sion of these solutions.

Yet of the two couples, Sosia is the one not receptive to love’s power, the one whose sexual relationship with his partner is perfunctory, and the one who does not change. To Charis, on the other hand, Overmyer not only gives one of surrealism’s great images, he dramatizes her receptivity to the power to change. That receptivity justifies her presence in the drama’s closing scene. Looking in act 2 at the monogram whose changing letter has thrown Alcmena into a state of panic, the attendant says, “It must be some alchemical property in the stone itself which tricks the eye” (42). Alchemy is a quintessential surrealist image for the transforming power of language and love. Whether Charis and Sosia can heal the division between them only the future can tell. Yet whereas he in his coarsening cares only about his stomach, she arrests her coarsening by taking the first step toward healing the division in herself. By putting herself in act 3 in a state of readiness for mad love, she is aware of that part of her nature she repressed under the conjugal obligation to cook for her husband. Like Alcmena and Amphitryon, she too is free to “work…out” a reconciliation, at least with herself. At play’s end Alcmena and Charis are citizens of the contemporary age that rejects a unitary standard for determining one’s place, or identity, in society. By introducing the monogram with the fluid letters into their versions of the myth, Kleist and Overmyer make unreliable an objective standard for the determination. Rejecting a standard external to the self and biased against multiple segments of the society, self determines identity because even though it is divided, self if the only reality that the subject can know. Alcmena’s choice between two rival claimants to her allegiance is the heart of the play. She must choose between Amphitryon and her husband’s culturally sanctioned male standard for determining her place, on the one

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hand, and Jupiter and the god’s power, on the other hand. She accepts eros’ possession of her: the power that she has taken on from the god that gives her a new sense of self. Yet rather than imprisoning her in herself, eros liberates. The subject does not rely exclusively on the self—that too would be a unitary standard—but develops a new life through the continued interaction of the self with the non-self: both the external, sensory world and the other. In Overmyer’s Amphitryon, as in Guare’s Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, eros liberates the self from the isolation of solipsism. By stimulating interaction between multiple universes within and without the self, desire reconciles multiple universes. It connects people with themselves, other people, and the world outside them. Eros heals the division at the same time, as in Charis’ case, it causes it. But that is simply another way of saying that the conditions of contemporary life are not easily resolved. Nevertheless, they are put on a new footing. As a result of their division, Alcmena and Amphitryon begin to interact. They begin to relate to each other on a new, equal basis. So do Charis and Sosia. Now she will cheat on their marriage as she accuses him of doing for years. By rejecting the unitary male standard for a relationship, the women ensure that multiple forms of relationships will prevail. Although the three selves—personal, theatrical, and national—are implied in each of the three plays in this chapter, I want to conclude the examination of Amphitryon at the level of the personal self so that this final section is cumulative rather than repetitive. Overmyer’s adaptation introduces the issue of determining identity. The contemporary adaptation also dramatizes the healing of the disconnected self by awakening it to the ground of its being. The examination of the second play, in which mad love is again the enemy of an externally imposed, biased unitary standard, will pursue the implications for the personal and theatrical selves. The examination of the third play will pursue the implications for all three selves. David Greenspan’s Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain is a play in five acts, introduction or prologue, and epilogue. Of the five acts, act 3 is the only one to consist of a single scene: a cosmogony monologue. The monologuist is the granduncle, Saul, of a woman engaged to one of two brothers. As she, they, and the brothers’ father return from their trip to the theatre, Uncle Saul in his hotel room imagines a visit to the dentist’s office where the technician, Lynn, demonstrates good gum health to him by explaining oxygen’s action in killing microbes. As the old man imagines, his voice switches to that of the technician telling him earth’s history. The cosmogony monologue does not race through evolution to reach mankind. Most of it describes the ability of microorganisms for billions of years before the appearance not only of humans but of plants and animals to adapt to a


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changing environment by creating new life. Raising the question, “What if there was a devastating nuclear disaster—one that swept away all animals and plants?” the speaker can answer confidently, “Life would adjust—regen15 erating, mutating—reregulating the globe without us.” What makes adaptation possible is “fluid” sex (347). Interacting with Apollonian form, Dionysian fluidity effects transformation. The cosmogony monologue in Dead Mother is the opposite of the cosmogony monologue in The Orphan, which begins with the monologuist’s 16 description of earth’s emergence from a “burning ball of gas” and which ends with Orestes’ stepping from the tub, the centerpiece of Rabe’s play. The monologue, narrated by a character named the Speaker, opens the second act, which straightens out the play’s action and drives it linearly. Orestes gives his own interpretation for the linear progression, which he proves in his person. He is evolution’s “culmination” (130), the hero who transcends his family’s and mankind’s bestial origin. Consciously masculine, he rejects the feminine Dionysian flux for Apollonian form. He ascends with Apollo into the sky, there to be fixed in death with the other planetary gods. The monologue in Greenspan’s play opposes multiplicity to the unitary standard that emerges from the monologue in Rabe’s ironic play; fluid polymorphism to fixed form; and regenerating life to culmination, which implies the finality of perfection, or death in Rabe’s irony. Furthermore, just as Rabe’s Orestes actualizes his interpretation in his person, Uncle Saul actualizes in his person the fluidity of sex that can adapt to a changing environment. By alternating his voice, the actor speaking Uncle Saul’s lines is both male patient and female technician. “No thing is permanent,” the speaker as Saul says, “or fixed; it’s shifting endlessly,” the speaker as Lynn adds (348). The scene establishes the personal self as grounded in multiple determinants, multiple impulses; it is polysexual, for example. We will return to the scene because it does more than establish the personal self. The immediate concern, however, is identifying the threat to life that necessitates its regenerating itself. At the end of the act-3 monologue, Uncle Saul’s fluid sexuality performs the photosynthetic adjustment that life naturally makes to the technological threat raised by the specter of a nuclear disaster, but there is a cultural threat to the personal self in the form of a reductive standard present throughout the play. Act 2 of Dead Mother traces Western civilization’s reductive past through Greek myths to the historical triumph of a single standard. In a monologue Eris, the goddess of strife, verbalizes her indignation at not being invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, who in a dialogue reminisce about their courtship. Prometheus enters to reveal that his knowledge of the prophecy concerning Thetis, that her son would endanger Zeus’ supremacy,

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was instrumental in his release from captivity. He is succeeded by Zeus, who recapitulates a theogony from Eurynome’s birth through Kronos’ overthrow of his father, Uranus, and his overthrow of his father, Kronos. The supreme Olympian then explains that he gave the golden apple, left at the wedding by Eris, to Paris, one of mythology’s many sons dispossessed of life or patrimony because they are destined to challenge the father’s power. (Oedipus is mentioned in a later act.) Act-2’s final episode is the irreverent enactment of the Judgment of Paris. Interrupted while sodomizing sheep on Mount Ida, the son of Troy’s King Priam entertains Hera, who offers him wealth; Athena, who offers him wisdom and military success; and Aphrodite, who offers him Helen, Menelaus’ wife, the “most / beautiful woman in the world / and passionate” with whom he can “fuck. A lot” (342–43). Choosing the goddess of love as the fairest, he awards her the golden apple. The award is called the apple of discord because Paris’ abduction of Helen caused the Trojan War, alluded to throughout the play. Achilles, the chief Achaian hero in the war, is the offspring of Peleus and Thetis. The theater that the grandniece, her fiancé, his brother, and their father attend is “The Iliad theater in West Hollywood” (328). The “what’s his name” character in the play attended who “couldn’t get home for years and years…” (350) is Odysseus. The allusions continue through “Troy’d” in act 5 (371) and the “Trojan prince, Ganymede,” in the epilogue (385). Yet the discord associated with the apple goes beyond the Trojan War and into the very structure of society. Graves’ interpretation of the Judgment of Paris is basic to his thesis in The White Goddess. For the mythographer, the Judgment is misinterpreted when Paris awards the apple to any one or all three of the claimants. In the original myth in the matriarchal culture, the three goddesses are the white goddess in triad who awards the apple to Paris as the royal consort she has selected. The reversal of interpretation therefore signals the cultural reversal in which patriarchy supplanted matri17 archy. Greenspan’s familiarity with Graves’ reading of mythology is apparent from the epilogue when the speaker puts Zeus’ rape of the moon goddess in perspective. “Of course, in its original form, ‘the love chase myth,’ the Great Goddess would hound the Sacred King through his seasonal changes of rabbit, fish, bird, and grain of wheat—then finally devour him. With the advent of the patriarchal system the chase reversed; the nymph fled the god” (385–86). In The Greek Myths, Graves even considers Odysseus a “sacred 18 king.” Further evidence that the mythographer is a source for the play occurs in act 4 when Uncle Saul’s grandniece summarizes the plot of the play she and the others saw at the matinee performance. The wanderer whose name she


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cannot remember “finally got home but ended up getting killed by his son he never knew” (350). In the segments of The Greek Myths devoted to Odysseus, Graves recounts the episode not found in The Odyssey in which after returning home, the king is killed by his son by Circe, Telegonus, who then 19 marries Penelope. Act 2 of Dead Mother dramatizes the triumph of patriarchy as Western culture’s reductive unitary standard that threatens the personal self, since it is polysexual. The play’s first half dramatizes the adjustments that the two brothers, Harold and Daniel, make to the standard until the pivotal scene of Uncle Saul’s monologue. The brothers’ first two adjustments occurred in the past. In act 1 Daniel asks Harold to return a favor that he once did for him. At some time prior to the play’s action, heterosexual Danny substituted in bed for homosexual Harold with his fiancée, Sylvia, so that the two could marry. The favor he requests is that Harold impersonate their dead mother with his fiancée, Maxine, an orphan whose marital choice her granduncle Saul will not consider until he has met the mother. Danny cannot bring himself to tell Maxine that the mother is dead, a suicide while in the hospital, and Harold can impersonate her. He did once before, in the second adjustment. About the time Danny was substituting for him, Harold, perfumed in one of his mother’s muumuus, slid into bed next to his sleeping father and badgered the man into giving his consent to Harold’s marriage to Sylvia. The persuasion the impostor used was that if he, Melvin, withheld his blessing, he would have to leave the patrimony—the family business to which he devoted his life—to Danny, who would ruin it because he was no good at business, while Harold, who was good at it, would leave if deprived of permission to marry. Deprived of the sleep he desperately desired, Melvin consented. The third adjustment begins in act 1. Agreeing to impersonate their mother again, Harold goes with Danny to Uncle Saul’s hotel room. As might be expected in a play with wildly farcical and parodical action, such as the Jacob and Esau birthright episode, Melvin arrives. At Maxine’s suggestion he, she, and the brothers go to the theatre, where Harold assures his father that he is the ghost of his dead wife, Shirley. Before act 2 introduces the cultural reversal that supplanted matriarchy in the past, act 1 introduces patriarchy in the present. Melvin determines the constitution of the family by permitting or denying marriage into it. He determines the distribution of the estate. He dispossesses, not only sons of the family business, but his wife, committing her to the hospital, where she made good her threat to kill herself if he did. Patriarchy is a unitary standard because Melvin forces his sons to act patriarchally. A homosexual, Harold

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lies to himself that he wants to marry Sylvia. Since he cannot consummate their relationship, he has his brother substitute for him in a mythologically allusive scene in which Danny enters Sylvia’s bedroom from the trellis, a “human silhouette climbing in the sky…covering the moon…” (308). The moon’s ascendancy, which should herald the white goddess’ selection of a sacred king, silhouettes an impostor whose deception immediately satisfies but ultimately betrays expectations. The sons feel guilty for acting patriarchally. Danny cannot bring himself to admit that his mother is dead. Neither is he honest about his relationship with Sylvia; slips of the tongue hint at an ongoing bedroom substitution with his sister-in-law. In the bathroom in the hotel room, Harold is rent by the deception he practices. As the impersonation takes possession of his being, the revived Shirley in him accuses him of “pretending,” of being a “fag” who instead of going home from work goes to a gay park. “I hope you burn in Hell…” (323), his conscience stings him. The play will take us into the underworld, but first we must return to Uncle Saul’s polysexual monologue because it establishes the theatrical self (and the national self) as well as the personal self, and it performs the interaction that creates new life. In Greek theatre male actors played all the roles, but the implication of the pivotal scene in Greenspan’s theatre is that Uncle Saul is not playacting but is himself polysexual. In addition, just as the play’s first half dramatizes the triumph of the unitary standard that threatens the personal self, so does it dramatize the triumph of the unitary standard that threatens the theatrical self. One does not have to be a classical scholar to know that Greek theatre is not unitary. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander are distinct dramatists. Distinct or not, act 2 of Dead Mother presents Greek theatre as unitary. By performing myths culminating in the triumph of patriarchy, Dead Mother equates patriarchy with traditional theatre, the form of which is Apollonian in that it culminates in resolution to end conflict and in that sense is reductive. By performing the myths in “The Iliad theater” (328), the play traces the triumph of the patriarchal standard to the Greek world, a view for which there is historical support. In her study of the Greek tragic self, Ruth Padel writes, “The tragic thought-world was biassed to expect forces that threatened human life to be mainly female…. Animate, chthonic, dangerous female multiplicity is the background for destructive tragic passion, and underlines by gender tragedy’s general implication that the forces disturbing the tragic self, the male self, are not self, that hu20 man passion is nonhuman.” And a male standard continued to shape the 21 theatre into the contemporary era.


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Greenspan equates the “dangerous female multiplicity” that Padel studies with Dionysian fluidity, which interacts with male Apollonian form to create the multiple self. The coexistence of two genders within the self then creates the monologue in which Uncle Saul performs the photosynthetic transformation life makes to adjust to the threat of extinction by creating new life. Personal and theatrical, the monologue also interacts with the audience as represented by Harold, an onstage spectator. The gay brother is the first one of the theatre party to enter the hotel room in act 3. He stands to the side during the monologue. When Uncle Saul finishes, he turns toward Harold, momentarily touched by the light formerly illuminating the old man, and exhales on him. The exhaling in the momentary light begins the process of photosynthesis in the young man. The act-3 scene is pivotal because it reverses the play’s action. Act 4 dramatizes the liberation of the multiple theatrical self to create new life, and act 5 dramatizes the liberation of the multiple personal self to create new life. We will pursue the personal self first, which means that we must descend with Harold into act-4’s underworld to reach act 5. In the play’s first half, Harold is a divided self because he cannot accept being homosexual. He visits a park where gays cruise for sexual encounters, but he is guilt ridden as a result. Act 4 evokes the hell to which the face in the bathroom mirror in act 1 condemns him and to which he must go to release the ground of his being, or the repressed feminine in him. Uncle Saul’s hotel room transformed by the entrance of a harpooned white whale from Melville’s epic novel, Harold is led into a dream vision, the action of which the cast member playing Danny narrates while his guide uncovers the direction. She is Alice Toklas, companion and lover of Gertrude Stein, the latter Jewish, lesbian, and iconoclastic: three determinants of her identity which put her outside mainstream American creativity in the first half of the 20th century. As the author of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which in the guise of her companion she creates herself, Stein was her own Boswell, one of many allusions (Shakespeare and Rimbaud, Pound and Frost, among others) on the journey. The destination is heaven, “not up in the sky,” but “within” the earth and oneself. Hell, the reality to be confronted on the journey, is “your life,” Toklas instructs him. “Why dream a hell / that’s after life?” she asks rhetorically (357). The framework is the descent into the underworld as undertaken in three of Western literature’s epics. Dante’s Inferno cantica of the Commedia provides the greatest influence. Befriending Harold, who is lost in the “dark wood” (356) of the cruising park, guide Toklas builds Dantean models so that he can understand why he is made to feel guilty. Society is patriarchal; and authoritarian, monolithic patriarchy tolerates no nonconformity. Dis-

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cursively she explains that since homophobic society deletes or twists gay and lesbian accomplishments, no homosexual is born into a heritage; every homosexual initially feels isolated. Concretely she images false counselors who would cure gays and lesbians of their deviant behavior, converting them to healthy heterosexuals. These she consigns to Dante’s “Circle Eight. Cantos twenty-nine and thirty” (362), the bolgia of falsifiers: alchemists, evil impersonators, counterfeiters, and false witnesses. Leaving Dante’s circle, they enter Virgil’s green valley in book 6 of the Latin poet’s Aeneid. Here the hero Aeneas sees his yet unborn son Silvius, from whom will issue future kings of the Trojans in their new homeland in Italy. Greenspan’s Harold learns that the AIDS virus will claim his yet unborn nephew, the son of Danny and Maxine, partly because, the vision implies, a patriarchal society ignores a pestilence until it affects its own kind. Harold ends his descent where Western literature’s descent begins. On Homer’s shore in book 11 of The Odyssey, Odysseus converses with the shade of his mother, who in answer to his questions acquaints him with the situation with his family and estate in Ithaka from which the war and subsequent wanderings have separated him. Their encounter contains some of the most poignant lines in the epic, as in the following passage, narrated by the wanderer, which occurs after Antikleia tells her son that she died of loneliness for him: I bit my lip, rising perplexed, with longing to embrace her, and tried three times, putting my arms around her, but she went sifting through my hands, impalpable 22 as shadows are, and wavering like a dream.

In Dead Mother the hero is reunited with his “ashen” mother, Shirley, from whom he extracts answers to his three questions before surging “toward the surface” (366–67) of the quotidian world and act 5. Of the four returns executed by questers Dante, Virgil, Odysseus, and Harold, the latter’s is the most amazing in that he brings Shirley with him. Reviving her in the bathroom in act 1, he resurrects her for the scene described as the “showdown…at sundown: Melvin, Harold, Shirley—the father and the son, the holy ghost. Oooh, what a resurrection set!” (371) Photosynthesized by integrating the released Shirley in himself, Harold performs polysexually but not a monologue. As both son and mother in the same person, he confronts Melvin in act 5. As the son, he speaks to his father as he was not apparently able to prior to his descent. He accuses Melvin of forcing him into what for him were unnatural business and marriage arrangements to perpetuate the patriarchal society. As the mother-wife, she


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speaks to her husband as she was not apparently able to in life. She accuses Melvin of perpetuating the repressive ethnocentrism, inculcated by his parents, which can see only what it is conditioned to see and consequently cannot perceive other realities. He never made the effort to try to understand his wife and children, to accept them as individuals. When at scene’s end he accuses her, “You came back from the grave and tried to kill me,” she retorts, “Yea, well, good; we’re even. Good-bye” (384). Speaking as Shirley, she is referring to his committing her to the hospital against her wishes. Speaking as Harold and Shirley, she indicts him for the rigidity of patriarchy and its intolerance of any and every reality that threatens his unitary standard and his rule. Since the unitary standard originated in Greece, act-4’s epic descent returns to Greece to recover the past that the classical culture’s notion of masculinity repressed. Played by the cast member who plays Uncle Saul, Harold’s guide, Toklas, likens herself to both male Virgil, Dante’s guide in the Inferno, and female Diotima, Socrates’ teacher in the Symposium. She therefore uncovers the “dangerous female multiplicity” (Padel’s expression) which Melvin as a husband represses by committing his wife to a hospital. Harold resuscitates Shirley and the multiplicity in himself. Melvin does not, so that an image of Greek culture different from that of the myths in act 2 surfaces. Following the descent, Melvin’s standard, secure when he arrives at the hotel in act 1, is suspect. The epilogue is spoken by Sylvia in the gay park to which she has come following husband Harold’s disappearance. Musing on the resurrection images surrounding her—Easter “as in the Dante Comedy” (385)—she notes that the park is in the Eagle Rock district of Los Angeles, a realization that recalls to her the myth of Zeus in the form of an eagle carrying the youth Ganymede to Olympus. For mythographer Graves, the myth, which “afforded religious justification for a grown man’s passionate love of a boy,” celebrates the “victory of patriarchy over matriarchy. It turned Greek philosophy into an intellectual game that men could play without the assistance of women, now that they had found a new field of 23 homosexual romance.” This is the Zeus, played by the actor playing Melvin, who raped Athena’s mother, Metis, according to the goddess in the act-2 Judgment of Paris scene. He devoured Metis because the oracle declared that if her child was a boy, he would depose his father as Zeus had deposed Kronos. Forever on guard against usurpation of his power by the offspring of dalliances, he nonetheless indulges his desire for Ganymede. Supreme on Olympus, his rule is shaky in Los Angeles because his earthly embodiment, Melvin, not only does not know his family but is not honest with himself, in act 5

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flinching under the blistering attack on his authority. He is Apollonian, upholding set form. Harold goes in the opposite direction, into act-4’s Dionysian flux to release his feminine nature so that it can interact with his masculine nature to create photosynthesis. He “bursts into fire” (367) as he surges upward. The image is that of spiritual power: the heaven Toklas locates within him. He discovers the imagination, the faculty that connects incongruous images into metaphors. He is himself an example, for the photosynthesis begun at the end of Uncle Saul’s monologue is completed in “sunny” (368) Los Angeles. What began as an impersonation becomes a reality. Harold is polysexual: son and mother, male and female. The theatre in which Harold recovers the repressed ground of his personal self also recovers the repressed ground of its theatrical self. As the quest returns from the underworld to act-1’s hotel room, the whale gives the play’s aesthetic: Now at last the great grand theme—at last, the dithyrambic goal of evolution’s not refinement, darling, it’s expansion…. You wanna know the way this play works, listen up—this is the song of the smoggy road—this tells the whole, unstructured story (369).

Greenspan’s aesthetic invokes theatre’s archaic power as opposed to its refined development. In chapter 4 of his Poetics, Aristotle asserts that tragedy grew out of the dithyramb, or choral hymn associated, though not by the Poetics, with the cult of Dionysus. In Dead Mother the choral contents expand to create a whole but an unstructured one. Melvin’s value system is whole, but it is closed because it is structured according to the dictates of his standard. In terms of theatre-creating, Melvin’s form regulates the flow of the contents whereas Harold’s descent generates contents to flow into the form, expanding the play’s second half by reversing the first half, which is dominated by Melvin’s standard. The aesthetic statement summarizes what the play dramatizes. Dead Mother is a choral performance. The cast members are assigned numbers and multiple roles. Cast member 5, for instance, plays Uncle Saul, Prometheus, dental technician Lynn, and Alice Toklas. The drama begins with theatre’s basic act: impersonation, or role-playing. Not only does Danny impersonate Harold, who impersonates Shirley, the six cast members play their multiple roles in a variety of styles. In act-2’s Greek scenes, the only ones in which the performers are in costume and makeup, they wear the Aristophanic padded phallus. For act-4’s underworld descent, the men, dressed in “black, white, and gray” (355), stand at lecterns and, reminiscent of Charles Laugh24 ton’s staging of Shaw’s Man and Superman, read their parts.


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For most of the action, though, the cast in street clothes sit on the single set, a couch. The overall design of a stage empty except for the couch “center—immobile” (306) suggests Sartre’s No Exit, a play in which one of the three characters is homosexual. Condemned to hell on one or more sofas depending on the production, the three are unable to leave because each needs another’s validation of his/her false self in which to leave yet cannot receive it because he/she cannot give the reciprocating validation. In a room without mirrors because each is the others’ mirror, each can see the selfdeception in the others but cannot accept the truth of himself/herself. When in the epilogue of Greenspan’s play Sylvia “pushes away that damned couch” (384), she frees herself from the hell of the lie she lived with Harold, just as he freed himself by accepting himself. Freeing herself from the need for someone else’s validation of her, she discovers herself: “an equal ‘I’…a fleshed out ‘I’ in equal light” (385). Like her husband, she integrates herself by discovering her imagination in the scene in the second half which reverses the opening scene. Dead Mother opens with a prologue in which one of the performers plays a subscriber who, disturbed by what she perceives as a drift in the direction of gay theatre, expresses her preference for “more plays—with heterosexual characters” (307). Acts 1 and 2 reinforce her attitude in that they dramatize the triumph of heterosexual patriarchy, in history and the family, for in order to marry, Harold must trick Melvin into granting permission. Yet in the epilogue, Sylvia, despite feeling victimized in her marriage by her husband’s homosexuality, does not revert to the prologue’s anti-gay sentiment but expands her perception to collect classical, Christian, gay, and Jewish symbols of “new life, new beginnings, etcetera…” (385). Her opening words are, “Enter Character 3 as Sylvia. This is Sylvia’s epilogue. Attempt is made in monologue below…” (384). Because she speaks as the playwright creating the scene and as a character in the scene, her monologue is polysexual. She expands and integrates herself. She also expands and reconciles act-1’s moon symbolism with the play’s imagery. In act 1 she recalls the night when the man she thought was Harold came to her silhouetted against the “white blot” of the moon (308). In the epilogue, seeing the moon “full circle in the sky” (385), she reminds herself and the audience that historically patrilineal institutions overran matrilineal ones. The image does not suggest a reversal to the prehistoric matriarchal culture but a widening of consciousness to accommodate the two cultures as she accommodates the feminine and masculine principles within herself. Because he does not descend into the ground of his being, Melvin does not awaken his imagination. He cannot see the union of Harold and Shirley in his bed or the hotel room and not because the disguise is flawless. The

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performer playing the role does not dress in drag. Melvin cannot see Harold because once told that the person in the bathroom is his wife, even though she is dead, he believes what he is told. Verbal images, like all images for him, are simple and unambiguous. He cannot, in other words, make metaphors. Since his faculty for uniting incongruous images in new, initially startling, and ultimately synthesizing relationships is dormant, when Harold appears, Melvin sees Shirley. Moreover, the set is not naturalistic; it makes no attempt to imitate a hotel room or concentric circles descending into a pit. When not entering and exiting, or staging a reading, the performers sit on the couch on the otherwise empty set. By having Melvin see Shirley seated on the couch with him while the audience sees Harold, Greenspan’s dramaturgy enables the receptive spectator to see Harold-Shirley in the performer. By creating simultaneous incongruity in harmony and harmony in incongruity, the playwright’s techniques awaken the spectator’s imagination. Liberated from Melvin’s fixed cultural single-mindedness, the spectator perceives the theatrical multiplicity in the unity and the theatrical unity in the multiplicity. Thus Dead Mother extends the power to liberate the personal self from cultural encasement to create itself in Amphitryon to the theatrical self. It also extends the power to the national self, and although I do not want to pursue the examination, I cannot avoid a few comments. Since the whale states the aesthetic in Whitmanesque imagery, Greenspan’s play is a dramatic rendering of American identity and destiny, though from a late 20th-century perspective. The play’s political and moral dimensions are never more apparent than in two scenes that reverse each other. During the act-5 confrontation, Harold-Shirley accuses Melvin of hiring Mexicans who entered the country illegally, not for their benefit but for his. He paid them less than half the minimum wage. That accusation leads to the drama’s most damning judgment on his standard. It is “racist” (380). The father, who never hired blacks until forced to by law, perpetuates the attitudes of his European-immigrant parents. In his mother’s, Harold’s grandmother’s, prejudice, “shvartzers” (382) cause all social ills. The counterpart scene is Uncle Saul’s monologue. As he begins to speak, he describes the dental technician as a “colored girl” (344). Since he gives no other information about her nor attempts to simulate her color, because the staging does not strive for verisimilitude, the remark would seem to be gratuitous. It is not, however. If the audience accepts the actor’s embodying the two genders, it will accept the actor’s integrating the two races. When Uncle Saul says “colored girl,” the spectator whose imagination is awakened sees races and genders united in the white male actor whose initials are those of Uncle Sam.


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In Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain, Melvin represents a conception of American identity and destiny that is past. He is not integrated because his unitary, reductive standard excludes from his business anyone who is not like him: white, male, Eurocentric. Harold and Sylvia represent a conception that is present. They would like to integrate but do not know how to in the play’s first half. Uncle Saul represents a conception that is a future potential. Not only is he integrated, he shows Harold how to heal his divided self. Since photosynthesis is a metaphor for the imagination in action, or metaphor-making, healing comes from within the self through the act of uniting multiple impulses. The mother, or imagination, is dead in America, repressed by patriarchy and patriarchy’s business ethos, yet the death is not in vain. It forces Harold to impersonate Shirley, thereby initiating the journey to self-discovery. As he recovers his polysexual nature and imagination, engaged spectators take the journey and awaken their imagination. For example, the longer the audience sees male and female traits in Harold, dressed in everyday clothes, the more the audience becomes comfortable with the new image. The homophobia expressed in the prologue begins to dissipate. The longer the audience sees the union of white and black in Uncle Saul, the more the audience becomes comfortable with the image of a racially integrated society. Melvin’s racism begins to dissipate. Another audience perception is that since Harold’s descent goes into the self’s interior, the multiplicity and polymorphism of styles and costumes, orientations and preferences come from America’s multicultural interior. Consequently when Harold leaves to add these contents to America’s whole, unstructured story, he is adding minorities, the marginalized in Melvin’s Eurocentric conception, to mainstream America. The way to oppose the exclusive standard that threatens the life of the personal, theatrical, and national selves is to release the ground of the personal, theatrical, and national selves. Yet the question remains. When Sylvia collects classical, Christian, gay, and Jewish symbols of “new life” (385), is the “new life” unassimilated enclaves, or mini-nations, within multicultural America or integration in an American nation united ethnoculturally? The question of the “right to cul25 tural difference…is what the United States is surely all about….” This is the same question raised at the end of the chapter on Guare, there in terms of the image of fusing. The answer is the same too. I cannot make the determination. All that I can do is acknowledge Greenspan’s contribution to theatre-creating. Adjusting to forces that threaten theatre by attempting to restrict it to a culturally sanctioned form, Dead Mother recovers its elemental

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power in monologue and performance, expanding them in an unstructured whole. Amphitryon keeps open personal identity. Dead Mother keeps expanding the theatrical self. The chapter concludes with a play in which the interaction between a unitary standard and multiplicity—the one and the many— keeps open the national self. Early in Richard Foreman’s Symphony of Rats, the President of the United States, addressing the nation over the radio, discloses that he has been receiving cryptic messages telepathically but was reluctant to reveal the information because of the millions of people “for whom” he feels “re26 sponsible.” Later in the play, he admits to his advisers that for him each day brings a “bundle of responsibilities to things other than petty human happiness” (250). The change from “for” to “to,” which represents the change in his perception of his relationship to multiplicity, follows his descent into “elsewhereness” (241). “Elsewhereness” is the President’s metaphor for the generating field beneath experience. Foreman’s metaphor in the play is Tornadoville, the planet city “where nothing stands still.” A city of “depravity,” it paradoxically “gives birth, a holy spirit ignited, unlocatable, burning” (238) to the impulses that the mind receives as signals and converts to thoughts, language, and action. Tornadoville is the city to which the Professor descends in My Head Was a Sledgehammer and to which James in The Universe realizes he must descend. In its burning image, it is the counterpart to the underworld where Harold in Dead Mother “bursts into fire” before surging toward the surface. Though their surfaces are different, Dead Mother and Symphony of Rats are alike in that they combine three stories in one story, three selves in one self. Foreman’s President is a personal self, “someone no different from the rest of us” (205), as the playwright characterizes him in the preface. The personal mind or self must descend into Tornadoville to dissolve the formation of activity that blocks creative thinking and acting. The personal story is the most apparent of the three stories because the Ontological-Hysteric stage is an analogue to the creating mind. When formed, the self has ceased to be responsible to all the contents in the ground of its being. The usual explanation is that it develops those impulses which appeal to the self’s public or social image—as a professor or a theatre artist, for instance. Since the self’s activity has become so habitual and exemplary that it supersedes its energy, the mind must descend to generate fresh impulses. The mind must begin thinking and acting anew. The theatrical story is inseparable from the personal story. When the theatre work becomes so habitual and exemplary that it replicates itself because the form confers recognition on its creator, the playwright must de-


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scend into the ground of theatre’s being to release the chorus’ energy. The interaction of the energy with the surface physicality of the set and props, for instance, creates new forms and metaphors. In Tornadoville one of the two mechanical puppets tells the President, “Don’t have a mind, BE mind” (231). The puppet tells him not to be so conscious of his mind that it is separate from the impulses but to allow it to be a medium into which the impulses can flow. Upon his return he dances with “stupid girls with not much brain in the head” but with much energy in the body. “They dance good” (242), and so does he in the dance of manic theatricality discussed in the chapter on Foreman’s trilogy. Since he has surrendered self-consciousness to enter life’s currents, they flow through him equally. Pure energy, he actualizes the image with which William Butler Yeats closes “Among School Children”: “O body swayed to music, O bright27 ening glance, / How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Doing what Austin in Gurney’s Later Life cannot do—dance with a chorus of women in a movement that builds to a pulsating conga line—he is fused mind-body in the flux of existence until he separates the two by violating the dance’s pure motion. As an impulse with characterological qualities, he separates himself-the mind from the women-the body. He asks them, “What kind of life do you ladies lead?” (244) The music stops, he gains an identifying name, and he becomes the President. He becomes the impulse with characterological qualities which ascends above the other impulses. He becomes the individual actor who evolves from the chorus of impulses. He becomes the self’s central consciousness in the national story that is inseparable from the personal and theatrical stories. In the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, human nature is a multiplicity of impulses colliding among themselves and with stimuli from the external world and vying for attention within the mind. The conscious mind must choose from among the pulsating chorus because it cannot act on all impulses simultaneously. In choosing, it becomes the being’s central consciousness: as a personal, individual self, the Professor of My Head or as a national, collective self, the President of the United States. The conscious mind must choose because if it does not, the choices will be made for it. In Tornadoville one of the mechanical puppets tells the President to keep the impulses flowing—the “generators” of his being—“and the direction nobody in particular has to choose, because it chooses itself, on automatic pilot” (233). The statement is accurate only for the unconscious pole of pure energy that it represents. The other pole is that the central consciousness chooses everything. In fact, creativity occurs between the two poles in the interaction of the internal impulses, the mind as central consciousness, and the external world.

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For biological and psychological reasons, for example, some impulses exert greater force than others, urging themselves to be chosen. For aesthetic and spiritual reasons, for example, consciousness chooses, on the basis of its perceived goals, from among competing internal and external realities. In performance Ontological-Hysteric plays actualize choices. The prefaces to the published plays explain the choices made in their productions. Foreman calls Symphony of Rats a “political play” but not because of “ideological positions to which people subscribe” (206). I call the Ontological-Hysteric Theater political and moral, not because of ideological positions, but because it dramatizes the process of making choices. Symphony of Rats opens with an image of the President disoriented because he feels that alien messages are coming to him from outer space. Brooding on their strangeness, he discovers Tornadoville in inner space. The dance it generates images his recovery of and immersion in the flux of existence in which all impulses flow. He suddenly kisses the women, and he performs dance steps that he thought himself incapable of. The play closes with an image comparable to the one that opens the play. The President is apprehensive about the approach of cryptic signals in space as if he learns nothing from Tornadoville and the dance. He does learn, and what he learns is the paradoxical nature of freedom and responsibility. Once he separates himself from the dance, he leaves one of the play’s two poles to become an executive of his being because impulses rise as signals, forcing him to make choices from among them. Just as the Professor in My Head becomes more professorial with each pronouncement, the President becomes more presidential with each exercise of his office until he is the chief executive. He literally ascends. He climbs onto a desk and holds up a globe “in slow triumph.” With it, and not the women, he does a solo dance “reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin’s dance in The Great Dictator” (246). In his self-consciousness, he has reached the play’s other pole. Declaring that he will teach the public “about life,” he is determined to find a “solution” (248– 49) that makes sense of life’s different levels of reality, its parallel universes. For one moment as the central consciousness of the three stories and selves, he images the union that makes sense. He is in the full force of his power before he begins the reversal to Tornadoville. Freedom and responsibility explain his rise. By making choices, the mind creates the personal self it wants to be, its government, and the theatre in which it presents itself. The mind exercises, and thereby strengthens, its freedom to be. Making choices also creates the national self, its government, and its policies. The electorate exercise their freedom to create their national identity and destiny by electing a President whom they empower to direct the nation’s energy. The electorate are the irrational impulses im-


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pinging on the private, rational mind whose signals the national self channels as vocal signals to the President. In the preface Foreman identifies these voices as the multicultural constituencies that comprise the United States. Because the President cannot act on all the voices’ requests for action simultaneously and therefore must make choices and because he is free to choose, he advances selected voices. These are the voices of the dominant culture, made up of constituencies who secured his election and with whom he identifies. He knows that he is responsible for all the voices but responds to selected ones. Just as the Professor selects as graduate assistants students who will perpetuate his teaching, so the President selects as advisers those voices who will support his policies. Together he and they are the “WASP leaders of our society” (209). The consequence of exercising his freedom and responding to selected constituencies is that the President becomes isolated in the enclave that he and the leaders form. He becomes solidified in the form of the dominant culture and for another reason as well. Ambiguity and ambivalence, which are conditions of living in the “now” world that Guare’s Stony opts for in the closing scene of Marco Polo Sings a Solo, are not present in either pole of perpetual motion or stasis. No executive wants ambiguity or ambivalence in his organization. Every executive wants to be surrounded by team players who assure him that his policies are right. Without being a racist in the sense that Greenspan’s Melvin is, he avoids the multicultural voices that do not hum his administration’s tune. They make “noise” (207), and since he does not want to hear disruptive, divisive noise, he filters it out of his consciousness. He marginalizes voices he does not want to hear, or he blocks them out entirely. Achieving “self-transcendence” (252), the President becomes a unitary standard. In his moment of glory at the pole opposite from the dance of manic theatricality, consciousness becomes the reason for existence; the rational mind becomes the solution to the mystery of existence. Politically, his administration becomes the justification for the election. The President does make sense but only for the moment. In the play’s closing image, he is in a cabinet, his head protruding through a hole in the roof, looking “fearfully up to the sky” (258) as an approaching hum overrides the music. He has passed beyond the pole’s stasis and into tension. The nation’s priorities may have changed, requiring new policies. New voices may have emerged from an electorate in flux, shifting the balance of power. A force outside of the United States may be attacking, seeking to impose an external unitary standard onto the nation. Since the threat to the nation’s well-being is real and since he is the President, he must act despite the ambiguity and his ambivalence and with-

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out the real source of his power. Violating the mechanical puppet’s injunction not to “have a mind” but to “BE mind” (231), he has so developed his consciousness of himself as President of the ruling power structure that he has disconnected himself from the nation’s body that elected him. Marginalized by policies which deny them initiatives and advancement, their voices have become alien signals and cryptic messages. He no longer knows whether the electorate support him. The way that he can learn is to reconnect with the nation’s constituencies so as to be able to respond to their signals. As the passage quoted in the opening paragraph of the examination of Symphony of Rats indicates, in Tornadoville he learns he must be responsible not only for all the constituencies but to all of them. At one point on his rise to power following his return, he expresses his wish to “get outta this tight box of responsibilities…” (253), but he knows he cannot. Madeline X’s attempt to stretch out the present moment in I’ve Got the Shakes is impossible, as is James’ disengagement at the opening of The Universe. He has passed beyond the pole in which he made sense, in which his consciousness was the solution. Consciousness has become a burden. Freedom and responsibility explain his fall. Free to make choices, he can choose to fall into the ground of the nation’s being. That pole makes no sense, but it supplies the energy that he needs to perform the duties of his office. As he looks at the sky, the chorus gathers around him—a symphony of rats—singing to him to “Try to reach a place that / Can’t be named.” A place of “wildness” (258), it is Tornadoville. Moreover, he will not stay at that pole either, but it is good that he cannot. Wanting “to end suffering,” he learns in the city of “sacrifice and expiation” that the objective of suffering is not its end but its being made “fruitful” (239). In the imagery of Symphony of Rats, the Dionysian body’s rebirth expiates the Apollonian mind’s sacrifice. With its colliding electorate going off in all directions, the body does not make sense. The mind does, but the two need each other to convert energy into directed action. The function of the body-electorate is to convert mechanical energy into electrical impulsesvoices. The function of the mind-President is to convert the signals into policies and action. The signals will be ambiguous, and the President will be ambivalent about his responsibility to make choices, particularly since the choices are partly involuntary and his freedom is limited. To think and act creatively, however, he must reconnect the divided self by returning to the flux whence he came. The President will rise again, for it is the tension between the two poles that is creative. Neither pole of monistic mind and pluralistic body is by itself creative; the interaction between the two is. The one pole releases a


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multiplicity of possibilities. The other pole chooses from among them in the personal, theatrical, and national selves. Yet when the Apollonian mind separates from the Dionysian body that elected him, the President must descend to the generators of his power. In that healthy relationship between a unitary standard and multiplicity is the strength of democracy. The play’s closing image is a stunning image of the nation’s identity and destiny. A body representing all the nation’s constituencies gathers below the head that developed from the constituencies. United in complexity, the chorus actualizes the ground of the nation’s being that dissolves and renews the strength of the President’s leadership.


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Conclusion Since this book is a study of aspects of classical theatre in the contemporary American theatre, I will confine the concluding remarks to the theatrical self. One of the first things a theatregoer becomes aware of is the contemporary American theatre’s multiplicity, and I do not mean the number of artists, companies, and locations where theatre is performed. I mean the multiple contents within an artist’s or company’s work or theatre. Ludlam’s theatre is an example. The chapter that contains the playwright’s reinvention of Aristophanic comedy quotes the following playbill passage: “The Ridiculous Theatrical Company…has developed a style of ensemble playing which synthesizes wit, parody, vaudeville farce, melodrama, and satire, giving reckless immediacy to classical stagecraft.” Before proceeding, I want to put aside the issue raised at the end of the chapter on Guare and the examination of Greenspan’s Dead Mother. I cannot make a comprehensive determination about the union of multiple contents in the contemporary American theatre. The artists themselves are ambiguous. “Synthesizes” in the passage quoted above suggests a new, fused whole. Yet individual Ludlam plays contradict the notion of synthesizing. The marriage of a man and a woman reconciles the feuding families in the country-western musical, Corn, but the company’s founder never implies that the marriage of male and female determinants in the self is permanently harmonious, which would be an equilibrium, or creates a unisex. Changing stimuli upset the balance, causing one and then the other determinant to dominate, creating conflict, which for Ludlam is the basis of drama. I can make the following comprehensive statement. Ridiculous Theatrical Company creations are unified but not unitary. The works are as varied as the contents the style synthesizes. The company reinvents Wagnerian opera, film noir, naturalistic drama, epic drama, classical tragedy and comedy, country-western musicals, and so on, yet each play bears the company’s signature. The statement is also true for the individual theatres this book examines in that each is unified by the uniqueness that its creating artist

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brings to it without its being unitary. Still another statement is true. In the contemporary American theatre are many characters, like Kennedy’s Sarah and Rabe’s Orestes, who seek a unitary standard or, like Gurney’s Austin and Greenspan’s Melvin, who have made themselves unitary standards. For many reasons they reject life’s multiplicity. That they exist should come as no surprise given the contemporary world’s disconnection and fragmentation, for these are the realities on which the contemporary theatre is predicated. Yet the individual theatres that are the subject of this book reject such a standard. Arguing against a reductive “single source of human motivation,” Mee in the preface to a collection of his plays goes on to list a “complex of influences and forces and motivations” that constitute the contents of his theatre: So I try in my work to get past traditional forms of psychological realism, to bring into the frame of the plays material from history, philosophy, insanity, inattention, distractedness, judicial theory, sudden violent passion, lyricism, the National Enquirer, nostalgia, longing, aspiration, literary criticism, anguish, confusion, inability.1

Joan Schenkar lists the following as influences on her plays: Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, 19th and early 20th-Century highbrow Novels, Expressionist painting, Feminist theory and practice, Modernist literature (including Miss Barnes and Mr. Beckett), Post-Structuralist theory and code, the entire 2 Classic Comics series, and rock n’ roll.

Vivian Patraka, the editor of the collection of Schenkar’s plays, introduces the reader to the playwright’s metaphor-making from these and other influences: “from cannibalism and cooking, from pathology and freakishness, from gardening and comic strips, from fairy tales and Amazon myth, and 3 from performance and ritual.” It is the multiplicity of contents, however, that presents a problem for anyone trying to understand these artists individually and collectively; the sheer number overwhelms. But only if the multiplicity is addressed in its totality. An alternative way of gaining entrance or access to their works is finding a common ground in the contents and examining how the different artists create from this ground. The connection in the disconnection that this book studies is the interaction of aspects of classical theatre with fragments of contemporary culture. Both Ludlam and Foreman think of themselves as comic artists, build their dramas from colliding impulses, and have very funny visual images, but here the similarities end. Whereas Ludlam’s sets are naturalistic, his per-

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formers characters, and his story lines archetypal plots, Foreman’s sets are analogues, his performers undifferentiated impulses and the individual impulses that evolve from them, and his plays plotless. Yet knowing how either one reimagines the classic material he is using, whether Aristophanic play or the relationship between Apollonian form and Dionysian flux, gives the theatregoer a perspective with which to approach the other one’s work. Mee’s Orestes is unlike Rabe’s Orestes, who is unlike Aeschylus’ Orestes. And McLaughlin’s Electra is unlike anyone else’s Electra. Foreman’s chorus pulsates on and off the stage to engage in slapstick comedy with the principals. Kennedy’s chorus keeps reappearing, each time provoking greater urgency and terror. Gurney’s chorus remains offstage, and though the revelers sing, Austin does not join in; he remains on the terrace as the lights go down. Howe takes the audience inside the hearth to reveal bountiful dishes and communal dining—a love feast for those who share life and theatre. Kennedy’s Sarah, who cannot accept her mixed heritage, wants to be white. Ludlam’s Bluebeard, who cannot accept human nature, experiments to create a unisex. Not only is he mad, he is a failure. When Foreman’s Professor reaches the height of impulse development, he reverses direction and descends into the flux to release new impulses with which to generate new theatre. The second objective of a study finding connection in disconnection is that it enables the theatregoer to experience theatre being created because the study uncovers the generative sources of theatre. Once again we can take a passage from Mee’s non-dramatic writings as a point of departure. After listing the material that he brings into his plays, he continues, “And then I like to put this—with some sense of struggle remaining—into a classical form, a Greek form, or a beautiful dance theater piece, or some other effort 4 at civilization.” The material is the Dionysian flux, and the effort at civilization is the Apollonian form. Their interaction creates theatre. The interaction and theatre-creating are present from the opening of the book. To include radical—that is, Dionysian—contents in his play, Gurney’s playwright needs his father’s approval; the latter disapproves because he is an adherent of traditional—that is, Apollonian—form. The son’s interaction with his father, mother, and sister creates The Cocktail Hour. By introducing into their plays contents excluded from classical plays, Howe and McLaughlin modify theatre’s form; Foreman and Greenspan dissolve theatre’s form to activate new contents. Albee’s and Kondoleon’s game-playing, Ludlam’s cross-dressing, Overmyer’s doubling, and Greenspan’s gender-switching are contemporary forms for accommodating elemental shape-shifting. Howe, Ludlam, Guare, and Greenspan create dramas epic and domestic, symbolic and naturalistic, tragic and comic. Foreman, Gur-

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ney, Gibson, Kennedy, and Guare have so revitalized the chorus that it is as natural to contemporary theatre as it was to classical theatre. Albee, Rabe, Mee, McLaughlin, and Overmyer reimagine ancient myths and legends. Howe puts myths associated with Greek theatre into absurdist theatre while Kondoleon interpenetrates black comedy and the suffering of tragedy. Whether the released contents are aspects of classical theatre and the controlling form is contemporary or the contents are fragments of contemporary culture and the form is classical—or any combination of these theatre-creating elements—the ultimate interaction is between the past and the present. That is why I want to close by quoting from Oliver Taplin’s study of the ways in which the three Greek tragedians visualized their dramas: The present is what matters because that is where we are. But we have much to learn from the past, and we have every reason to be humble before the great artistic creations of the past. An age which refuses to learn from the past, or which uses it merely as inanimate raw material without regard for its integrity and life, is an age of tyranny, narrow-mindedness and arrogance.5

Thus the third objective of a study such as this one is that it renews acquaintance with great creations of the classical world that have been an enduring source of inspiration for artists in every age and particularly in the contemporary American theatre.

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Notes Introduction 1. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (1988; New York: Zone, 1990) 23. 2. Theater 25.2 (1994): 71–91. 3. Aeschylus (New Haven: Hermes-Yale UP, 1986) viii. Chapter 1 1. The Cocktail Hour, in The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays (New York: PlumePenguin, 1989) 46. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 2. Love Letters, in Love Letters and Two Other Plays (New York: Plume-Penguin, 1990) 30. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 3. What I Did Last Summer, in Love Letters and Two Other Plays 182. 4. The Old Boy, in Later Life and Two Other Plays (New York: Plume-Penguin, 1994) 245. 5. Rosette C. Lamont, introduction, Women on the Verge: 7 Avant-Garde American Plays, ed. Lamont (New York: Applause, 1993) viii. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 6. Birth and After Birth, in Women on the Verge 58. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 7. The Chairs, in Four Plays by Eugène Ionesco, trans. Donald M. Allen (1958; New York: Evergreen-Grove, 1982) 160. 8. The Killer, in Three Plays by Eugène Ionesco, trans. Charles Marowitz and Donald Watson (1960; New York: Evergreen-Grove, 1985) 7. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 9. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, amended and enlarged ed. (New York: Noonday-Farrar, 1966) 435. 10. The White Goddess 67. 11. The White Goddess 172. 12. Bernhard Zimmermann, Greek Tragedy: An Introduction, trans. Thomas Marier (1991; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) 7. Yet as Zimmermann points out, the meaning is controversial. For an introductory discussion of the connection between Dionysus and Greek tragedy, also controversial, see 1–15. 13. For an overview of the absence of women in the creation of the traditional Western theatre before the 17th century, see Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988) 5–36.

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14. From Naturalism in the Theatre, trans. Albert Bermel, in The Theory of the Modern Stage: An Introduction to Modern Theatre and Drama, ed. Eric Bentley (1968; New York: Penguin, 1976) 352–53. 15. The Greeks (1951; Baltimore: Penguin, 1957) 250–51. 16. Preface, Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays by Tina Howe (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989). 17. The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, vol. 4 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960) line 861. 18. In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 77. 19. “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” Nothing to Do with Dionysos?: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. John J. Winkler and Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992) 63–96. 20. “Playing the Other” 78. 21. The Art of Dining, in Coastal Disturbances 59. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 22. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype, trans. Ralph Manheim, 2nd ed., Bollingen Series 47 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963) 262. 23. One Shoe Off (New York: Samuel French, 1993) 90. 24. One Shoe Off, in Approaching Zanzibar and Other Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995) 145. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 25. One Shoe Off (New York: Samuel French, 1993) 90. 26. Approaching Zanzibar, in Approaching Zanzibar and Other Plays 75. 27. Introduction, Approaching Zanzibar and Other Plays ix. 28. “The Zoo Story,” in The American Dream and The Zoo Story (New York: Signet-NAL, n.d.) 30. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 29. Anne Paolucci, From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1972) 41, identifies the dog in “The Zoo Story” as Cerberus from classical mythology, and Matthew C. Roudané, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?: Necessary Fictions, Terrifying Realities, Twayne’s Masterworks Studies 34 (Boston: Twayne, 1990) 94, identifies the college town in Who’s Afraid…? as the city in the opening books of the classical epic, the Aeneid. Yet neither connects the images (though in a subsequent book of the epic, the hero, Aeneas, encounters the dog). 30. The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (1955; New York: George Braziller, 1957) 1:130. For the dog as the goddess’ epiphany, see Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper, 1989) 197. 31. Aeneid, in Virgil, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed., 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1934–35) 6.247. Hereafter book and line number to be cited in the text. 32. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New York: Signet-NAL, 1983) 17. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 33. Crowell’s Handbook of Classical Literature (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1964) 156. 34. The White Goddess 14. 35. The Greek Myths 1:17.

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36. For linkage of Artemis and Hecate, see Gimbutas 208 and Neumann 170 and plate 51, entitled “Hecate-Artemis as Whelping Bitch.” 37. C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R.F.C. Hull, vol. 5 of The Collected Works, ed. Herbert Read et al., Bollingen Series 20 (1952; New York: Pantheon, 1956) 369. 38. The Library, trans. Sir James George Frazer, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1921) 2:4.8–2:7.7. For the twelfth labor, see 2:5.12. 39. The Greek Myths 2:156. Jung agrees that the bringing up of Cerberus is the bringing up of the vanquished Hecate from the underworld. See Symbols of Transformation 369. 40. The question of Christianity’s vitality in the contemporary world is an issue that persists in Albee’s theatre. In his study of the predominantly Christian symbolism and ritual in Tiny Alice, William Willeford, “The Mouse in the Model,” Modern Drama 12.2 (1969): 135–45, identifies both the mouse divinity as Cretan Apollo and the Hecate dimension to Miss Alice although regretting the diminution of the goddess’ divine powers in modern life. Once can even detect the goddess in triad in Three Tall Women. Chapter 2 1. Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly, ed. Steven Samuels (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992) 99. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 2. Turds in Hell, in The Complete Plays of Charles Ludlam (New York: Harper, 1989) 54. Hereafter all references to Ludlam’s plays, collected in this volume, to be cited in the text. 3. Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. G.B. Harrison (New York: Harcourt, 1952). 4. For a discussion of the Thesmophoria, see Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (1977; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985) 242–46. 5. The Theatre of Aristophanes (New York: Taplinger, 1980) 60. 6. McLeish 76. 7. McLeish 153 considers it likely that a naked girl appeared in the role. For the view that the role was taken by a male dancer, see David Barrett, introduction, Aristophanes: The Wasps, The Poet and the Women, The Frogs, trans. Barrett (London: Penguin, 1964) 19. 8. I am not suggesting that the restoration of cosmic order and sexual confusion are the only serious matters in the play. K.J. Dover, Aristophanic Comedy (Berkeley: U of California P, 1972) 168–72, relates the play to pressing political and military issues of 411, the date of performance. 9. The Poet and the Women, in Aristophanes: The Wasps, The Poet and the Women, The Frogs 122. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 10. The Clouds, in Aristophanes: The Acharnians, The Clouds, Lysistrata, trans. Alan H. Sommerstein (London: Penguin, 1973) 119. 11. The Symposium by Plato, trans. W. Hamilton (1951; Baltimore: Penguin, 1965) 64. 12. “The Brides,” in Word Plays 2: An Anthology of New American Drama (New York: PAJ, 1982) 100. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 13. “Slacks and Tops,” in Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise: Selected Plays of Harry Kondoleon (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1991) 46. Hereafter quotations from plays in this volume to be cited in the text. 14. In February 1997 New York’s Theater for the New City premiered Half Off, a Kondoleon script dating from 1992, in which alienated, dysfunctional characters resolve their con-


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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

flicts by staging an amateur play. In November 2000 New York’s Rattlestick Productions held a Kondoleon Festival, the centerpiece of which was the premiere of Saved or Destroyed, dating from 1993. Rehearsing actors periodically break from their characterizations so that the play balances the two theatrical realities of character and actor. Love Diatribe (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1991) 5. Hereafter to be cited in the text. See, for example, the introduction and notes to Menander: Plays and Fragments, trans. Norma Miller (London: Penguin, 1987). Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957) 163. Roman Comedy (1983; Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986) 16. Frye 44. Frye 163. The Houseguests (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1993) 5. Hereafter to be cited in the text. “Fantasies and Dark Truths in an Artists’ Colony,” New York Times 20 Dec. 1994: C17+. The Little Book of Professor Enigma, ts., 54. Hereafter to be cited in the text. The problem is easily fixed by having Lowell, who earlier cut down her body, remove it. I do not remember who removed it in the production because the scene is frenzied. Theater for the New City may have adjusted the stage directions. The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 46 (1949; Princeton: Princeton UP, 1971) 86. Eliade 35. Preface, Coastal Disturbances. Chapter 3

1. Preface, Reverberation Machines (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1985) viii. 2. Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation, in The Theatre of Images, ed. Bonnie Marranca (New York: PAJ Publications, 1977) 16. 3. “Manifesto III,” in Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos, ed. Kate Davy (New York: New York UP, 1976) 190. 4. Vertical Mobility, in Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos 182. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 5. My Head Was a Sledgehammer, in My Head Was a Sledgehammer: Six Plays (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1995) 193. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 6. Symphony of Rats, in Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater, ed. Ken Jordan (New York: Pantheon-Random, 1992) 238–39. 7. What Did He See?, in Unbalancing Acts 302. 8 Prefatory material, My Head Was a Sledgehammer, Theater 25.1 (1994): 87. The version of the play included in the volume of six plays contains only slight differences from this version, which appeared after the 1994 production. 9 For an article-length exploration of the relationship between will and necessity in Greek tragedy, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy,” Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece 49–84.

Notes 10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20

21

229

The fullest treatment of the didaskalos’ role in training the chorus is Sir Arthur PickardCambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens, 2nd ed. rev., John Gould and D.M. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1968) 88–93. Although in time the training of a chorus became a professional business, the “earliest generation of dramatic poets taught their own choruses, inventing the dances as required; and both Phrynichos and Aeschylus were famous for their skill in this” (91). Richard Foreman, “Today I Am a Fountain Pen: An Interview with Richard Foreman,” by Elinor Fuchs, Theater 25.1 (1994): 83. Preface, Lava, in Unbalancing Acts 315. I’ve Got the Shakes, in My Head Was a Sledgehammer: Six Plays 308. Hereafter to be cited in the text. For an interesting discussion of the implications of the play’s ending, see Marc Robinson’s introduction to the volume in which the play is collected vii-viii. For a chapterlength study of Foreman’s theatre, see Robinson’s book, The Other American Drama (1994; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997) 150–77. Preface, Lava 315. The Universe, in Paradise Hotel and Other Plays (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2001) 19. Hereafter to be cited in the text. On man as an imbalance living in tension, see, for example, “Manifesto II,” in Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos 136–38. Preface, Lava 312. For an early discussion of art’s task as the putting into operation the process of generation that stands under social conditioning, see “Manifesto III,” in Richard Foreman: Plays and Manifestos 186–93. Preface, Lava 316. Though Lacan’s influence would seem to be pervasive in the mirror stage, other, desire, and Oedipal myth, it is impossible to pinpoint one overriding influence in Foreman’s works. In the preface to Lava, he mentions Lacan but also Derrida and Kristeva. For multiple influences on his art, see Arnold Aronson, “Richard Foreman as Scenographer,” Theatre Forum 10 (Winter/Spring 1997): 17–23. “The Carrot and the Stick,” in Reverberation Machines 218. Chapter 4

1. Another Antigone, in The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays 169. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 2. Helen H. Bacon, “The Chorus in Greek Life and Drama,” Arion 3rd ser. 3.1 (1994– 1995): 9. 3. On the chorus’ mediatory role, see Gregory Nagy, “Transformations of Choral Lyric Traditions in the Context of Athenian State Theater,” Arion 3rd ser. 3.1 (1994–1995): 48–51 and Claude Calame, “From Choral Poetry to Tragic Stasimon: The Enactment of Women’s Song,” Arion 3rd ser. 3.1 (1994–1995): 136–37 and 146–49. 4. Later Life, in Later Life and Two Other Plays 22. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 5. For the first criterion, see Albert Henrichs, “‘Why Should I Dance?’: Choral SelfReferentiality in Greek Tragedy,” Arion 3rd ser.3.1 (1994–1995): 56. For the second and third criteria, see Gregory Nagy, “Transformations of Choral Lyric Traditions…,” Arion 3rd ser. 3.1 (1994–1995): 41. For the fourth criterion, see note 3, above.


230

6. “The Beast in the Jungle,” in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, vol. 11 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1964) 359. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 7. Inferno, vol. 1 of The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. with comment by John D. Sinclair (1939; New York: Galaxy-Oxford UP, 1961). 8. Throughout his career Gurney has been dramatizing the conflict between characters of opposing values in single sets with limited casts who double roles. In the early plays, the consideration was economic. The fewer number of actors a script required, the greater the chance the play had of being produced. See introduction, The Cocktail Hour and Two Other Plays ix. The doubling is more metaphysical than economic in Later Life in that the dramaturgical technique creates a fluid chorus-society. Unlike Austin and Ruth, the “other characters are examples of human resiliency and changeability, dramatized by the fact that two actors are asked to play so many different roles.” Introduction, Later Life and Two Other Plays x. 9. Brown Silk and Magenta Sunsets, in 9 Plays by Black Women, ed. Margaret B. Wilkerson (New York: Mentor-NAL, 1986) 431. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 10. “Funnyhouse of a Negro,” in Adrienne Kennedy: In One Act (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) 5. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 11. “Owls and Rats in the American Funnyhouse: Adrienne Kennedy’s Drama,” American Literature 63.3 (1991): 507–32. 12. People Who Led to My Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987) 96. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 13. Sollors 513. 14. Sollors 512. 15. People Who Led to My Plays is a storehouse of insights into the creative process in Kennedy: how she transmuted autobiography into art. See, for example, her merging her father and Lumumba in her mind (119–20) and her deepening and depressing feeling that in Africa, to which her husband’s career had brought the family, she was “acquiescent to another person’s desires, dreams and hopes” (123) and not fulfilling her aspiration to be a writer. Chapter 5 1. Afterword, The Vietnam Plays, 2 vols. (New York: Grove, 1993) 2: 193. Hereafter all quotations from the afterword and The Orphan, also in vol. 2, to be cited in the text. 2. To be consistent throughout this chapter, I make the spellings of the proper nouns uniform, although they vary from text to text. For example, Robert Fagles and W.B. Stanford (see note 7, below) spell the mother’s name Clytaemnestra and the sacrificed daughter’s name Iphigeneia. Rabe spells the harbor Aulus. 3. Aeschylus 67. 4. Iphigenia in Aulis, trans. Charles R. Walker, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 4 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960) lines 1148–52. Hereafter line numbers to be cited in the text. 5. Introduction, Euripides: Orestes and Other Plays, trans. Vellacott (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972) 96. 6. See Denys Page’s definition of Greek tragedy in his introduction, Aeschylus: Agamemnon, ed. John D. Denniston and Page (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957) xx-xxiii.

Notes

231

7. Aeschylus: The Oresteia, trans. Fagles, introductory essay, notes and glossary with W.B. Stanford (1975; New York: Penguin, 1979) lines 1195–96. For a literal translation, see that by Herbert Weir Smyth, Aeschylus, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963): “Bear witness upon thine oath that I do know the deeds of sin, ancient in story, of this house.” 8. James C. Hogan, A Commentary on The Complete Greek Tragedies: Aeschylus (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984) gives an example of each. For a person, Monterone’s curse on the jester in Verdi’s Rigoletto (103) and for a family, genetic transmission in Ibsen’s Ghosts (46). 9. The Libation Bearers, trans. Richmond Lattimore, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 1 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1959) lines 589 and 651. 10. Rabe’s division into two acts has its basis in the division between the first play and the second and third plays in the Oresteia. See Gerald F. Else, The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy, Martin Classical Lectures, vol. 20 (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967): “It is no accident that most modern readers find Agamemnon more satisfying, more tragic, than Choephoroe and Eumenides. It is also a fact that the action is better organized and focused, as an actual sequence of events, in the second and third plays” (100). 11. Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence (New York: Norton, 1972). 12. “A Reading of ‘The Oresteia’: The Serpent and the Eagle,” Aeschylus: The Oresteia, trans. Fagles 19. 13. Orestes, Performing Arts Journal no. 45, 15.3 (1993): 29. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 14. Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard (1965; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) 185. 15. Orestes, trans. William Arrowsmith, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 4 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960) lines 35–36. Hereafter line numbers to be cited in the text. 16. Introduction, Orestes, trans. Arrowsmith, in The Complete Greek Tragedies 186–87. 17. I defer to Vellacott’s reading of Tyndareus’ changing the recommended penalty from exile to death. See Euripides: Orestes and Other Plays, trans. Vellacott 436, n. 318. 18. For the importance of the Great, or City, Dionysia, see Pickard-Cambridge, The Dramatic Festivals of Athens 57–58. For the estimated size of the audience, see 263. 19. The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador, in Word Plays 4: An Anthology of New American Drama (New York: PAJ, 1984) 85. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 20. “Play as Landscape: Another Version of Pastoral,” Theater 25.1 (1994): 50. 21. Introduction, Orestes, trans. Arrowsmith, in The Complete Greek Tragedies 190. 22. Introduction, Euripides: Orestes and Other Plays, trans. Vellacott 80. 23. Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece 33. 24. “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” Nothing to Do with Dionysos? 114. 25. See Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” Nothing to Do with Dionysos? 63–96, from which this line is quoted: “Yet the house [the property of the male], as we know, is primarily the proper domain of the woman, to which the social rules of the culture assign her, while its men go forth into the outside world to pursue manly accomplishments in war and politics” (76). 26. Ellen McLaughlin, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, ts., 2. Hereafter to be cited in the text.


232

27. For an analysis of the mother-son interaction before and after the killing of Aegisthus, see Fagles and Stanford, “A Reading of ‘The Oresteia’: The Serpent and the Eagle,” Aeschylus: The Oresteia, trans. Fagles 60–64. 28. Iphigenia in Tauris, trans. Witter Bynner, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 3 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1959) lines 370–71. Hereafter line numbers to be cited in the text. 29. Introduction, Euripides: Alcestis, Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Tauris, trans. Vellacott (1953; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) 28–34. 30. I do not know whether Orestia is a misspelling of Oresteia or McLaughlin’s way of distinguishing her work from its classical inspiration. Chapter 6 1. “A Day for Surprises,” in Four Baboons Adoring the Sun and Other Plays (New York: Vintage-Random, 1993) 108. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 2. “The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year,” in Four Baboons Adoring the Sun and Other Plays 95. 3. “Muzeeka,” in Four Baboons Adoring the Sun and Other Plays 125. 4. Harry Haun, “Swoosie,” Horizon June 1987: 33. 5. The House of Blue Leaves, in The House of Blue Leaves and Two Other Plays (1982–83; New York: Plume-NAL, 1987) 37. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 6. Haun 34. 7. Author’s note, Marco Polo Sings a Solo, in Plays from the Contemporary American Theater, ed. Brooks McNamara (New York: Mentor-NAL, 1988) 87. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 8. Bosoms and Neglect, in The House of Blue Leaves and Two Other Plays 188. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 9. Six Degrees of Separation (New York: Vintage-Random, 1990) 34. For an examination of the play as a contemporary reinvention of Euripides’ Bacchae, see Robert J. Andreach, Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998) 189–203. 10. Four Baboons Adoring the Sun, in Four Baboons Adoring the Sun and Other Plays 21. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 11. Theogony, in Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library (1914; Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982) 87. Chapter 7 1. Amphitryon, in Heinrich von Kleist: Five Plays, trans. Martin Greenberg (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988) 56. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 2. Introduction, Heinrich von Kleist: Five Plays xxix-xxx. 3. Amphitryon: After Kleist by Way of Molière with a Little Bit of Giraudoux Thrown In (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1996) 4. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 4. In Overmyer’s best known play, On the Verge, three time-travelers must seize contents of the unconscious (Terra Incognita) in order to proceed into the future. For an epigraph to a statement of aesthetic principles, the playwright paraphrases a passage in André Bre-

Notes

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

233

ton’s 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism. See “The Hole in the Ozone,” 7 Different Plays, ed. Mac Wellman (New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 1988) 448–52. André Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1988) 88. Greenberg, introduction xxxv. James H. Mantinband and Charles E. Passage, introduction to Kleist’s Amphitryon, in Three Plays in New Verse Translations, trans. Mantinband and Passage, University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature 57 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1974) 207–08. Marion Sonnenfeld, introduction to her translation of Kleist’s Amphitryon (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962) xi. Greenberg, introduction xxx for the “loss of unity” and Mantinband and Passage, introduction 206 for the “disharmony.” The allusion is to the first line of the 1926 “Bye Bye Blackbird,” lyrics by Mort Dixon and music by Ray Henderson. Greenberg, introduction xxxiv-xxxv. For an argument against the misguided interpretation of Molière’s Amphitryon in terms of a “metaphysical enquiry into the nature of human identity,” see W.D. Howarth, Molière: A Playwright and his Audience (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982) 181. Greenberg, introduction xxxv. In Breton’s two best known surrealist narratives, Nadja and Mad Love, the woman either approaches him or ensures that the encounter will occur. Here too, familiarity with Overmyer’s concern with identity in such plays as Native Speech and Dark Rapture assists the critic in his examination. Breton, Mad Love 42. Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain, in Grove New American Theater, ed. Michael Feingold (New York: Grove, 1993) 347. Hereafter to be cited in the text. The Orphan, in The Vietnam Plays 2:126. Hereafter to be cited in the text. The White Goddess 256–57. The Greek Myths 2:374, n. 1. The Greek Myths 2:373–75. In and Out of the Mind 161. For a non-theatrical study of Greek self-identity, in which classical Greeks “constructed their identities negatively, by means of a series of polarized oppositions of themselves to what they were not” (12–13), see Paul Cartledge, The Greeks: A Portrait of Self and Others, rev. ed. (Oxford: Opus-Oxford UP, 1993). Of the five polarized oppositions he examines, the second is male-female. Greek men were not female, which to them was categorically inferior to male. For an examination of Karen Finley’s performance piece, We Keep Our Victims Ready, which attacks the bias of the “one male god” culture (Finley’s expression), see Andreach, Creating the Self in the Contemporary American Theatre 1–10. The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (1961; Garden City: Anchor-Doubleday, 1963) 191. The Greek Myths 1:117, n. 3. Michael Feingold, editor’s note, Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain, in Grove New American Theater 299. Michael Ignatieff, “Fault Lines,” rev. of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, by Samuel P. Huntington, New York Times Book Review 1 Dec. 1996: 13.


234

26. Symphony of Rats, in Unbalancing Acts 217. Hereafter to be cited in the text. 27. “Among School Children,” in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, definitive ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1957) 214. Conclusion 1. Preface, History Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998). 2. Preface, Signs of Life: Six Comedies of Menace, ed. Vivian Patraka (Hanover: Wesleyan UP / UP of New England, 1998) ix. 3. Introduction, Signs of Life xi. 4. Preface, History Plays. 5. Greek Tragedy in Action (1978; Berkeley: U of California P, 1979) 180–81.

() &'

Index —A— Aeschylus Agamemnon 22, 127–34 passim Libation Bearers 70, 133–34 passim Eumenides 133–34, 138–39 Oresteia 141–45, 158 passim Albee, Edward “The American Dream” 45 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 35–37, 39–46 passim “The Zoo Story” 36–39 passim Aristophanes The Clouds 57 Frogs 85, 90 Thesmophoriazusae 49, 53–56 —D— Dante Commedia 112, 209 Inferno 36, 207–08, 209 Purgatorio 38 —E— Euripides The Bacchae 18, 22, 66 passim Iphigenia in Aulis 128–29, 136 passim Iphigenia in Taurus 159–60 Orestes 141, 143–50 —F— Foreman, Richard The Cure 86, 94, 98 I’ve Got the Shakes 93–97 passim The Mind King 86

Miss Universal Happiness 86 My Head Was a Sledgehammer 83, 86–93 passim Pain(t) 85 Pandering to the Masses 83–85 Permanent Brain Damage 92 Samuel’s Major Problems 86, 92 Symphony of Rats 89, 91, 214–19 The Universe 97–103 passim Vertical Mobility 84–86 passim What Did He See? 86, 89 —G— Gibson, P.J. Brown Silk and Magenta Sunsets 115–18 passim Giraudoux, Jean Amphitryon 38 189–92 Greenspan, David Dead Mother 202–14 passim Guare, John Bosoms and Neglect 172–77 passim “A Day for Surprises” 165–66 Four Baboons Adoring the Sun 177–87 passim House of Blue Leaves 166–71 passim “The Loveliest Afternoon of the Year” 165–66 Marco Polo Sings a Solo 171–72 passim “Muzeeka” 166 Six Degrees of Separation 167, 177, 183, 185 Gurney, A.R. Another Antigone 105–07, 114 The Cocktail Hour 5–13 passim


236 The Dining Room 6 Later Life 34, 105, 107–15 passim Love Letters 5–6 The Middle Ages 6, 10 The Old Boy 6–7, 114 The Perfect Party 115 The Snow Ball 10 What I Did Last Summer 6 —H— Hesiod Theogony 178 Homer The Odyssey 36, 38, 208 Howe, Tina Approaching Zanzibar 35 The Art of Dining 24–29 passim Birth and After Birth 13–24 passim One Shoe Off 24, 29–35 passim —K— Kennedy, Adrienne “Funnyhouse of a Negro” 118–25 passim “A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White” 123 Kleist, Heinrich von Amphitryon 190–201 Kondoleon, Harry “The Brides” 63–64, 69 Christmas on Mars 65 The Houseguests 72–74 passim The Little Book of Professor Enigma 74–82 Love Diatribe 66–72 passim “Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise” 64–67 “Slacks and Tops” 64–65 The Vampires 64

Galas 62 How to Write a Play 61–62 Medea 60 The Mystery of Irma Vep 62 Secret Lives of the Sexists 51–57 passim Turds in Hell 49–50 passim —M— McLaughlin, Ellen Iphigenia and Other Daughters 151–63 passim Mee, Charles The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador 146–47 Orestes 141–51 passim Molière Amphitryon 190–200 —O— Overmyer, Eric Amphitryon 189, 192–202 passim —P— Plato Symposium 58, 60, 209 Plautus Amphitryon 189–90 —R— Rabe, David The Orphan 127–40 passim —S— Sophocles Antigone 105 Electra 142, 154, 157 —V—

—L— Ludlam, Charles The Artificial Jungle 63 Bluebeard 58–60 passim Conquest of the Universe 51, 57 Corn 221

Virgil Aeneid 36–38, 41–42 passim

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