Full-on Fringe
Editorial
6:52 P.M. August 9, 2009
Bedlam, early evening. The place is nearly abandoned, chairs overturned on tables, that echoing sound of last night’s party still ringing in the rafters. I head out onto the roof. There are a few stragglers here beside myself, solitary at their tables, and the sun beating down. The sound of freeway traffic, not much else, a little wind.
The Fringe has moved on. There are two more shows tonight, and then the Guthrie shindig, which will doubtless roar on until the wee hours, until the place is littered with empty glasses and bottles and finally even the very last of the nocturnal creatures realizes it’s time to go home.
I’ve got that feeling like it’s the last day of summer vacation before school starts again. Now we all go back to the workaday world. Now we put on our regular faces and return to our seats. The regular theater season begins. And it’s another year before the Fringe comes swooping down on us like some many-feathered thing.
This rattlingly empty Bedlam is making me think about the sense of community that the Fringe creates, and the way that community provides a badly-needed reminder that theater is a communal thing, a living body of people working toward some semblance of an end. That end can be defined in many ways, but at least one aspect of it is the ongoing development of contemporary performance. The Fringe is a moment where people in the performing arts are reminded that they are not working toward that end alone.
All year long, performing artists I know wonder aloud what they’re doing. Why they’re doing it. If there’s really a point in making theater. If there’s an audience for what they do. There is a sense of alienation and isolation, and a sense that their work is always in question, the worth of it, the quality, the relevance. The Fringe should tell them something.
I’ve used the phrase “more than the sum of its parts” before in this blog, but I’m using it again—the Fringe is more than the sum of its parts. More than the individual shows, more than the performances or the performers or the crowds, more than Fringe Central, more than the reviews, more than what sold tickets and what went sadly unsung. These are eleven days where people in the arts—several arts—can spend time in close proximity to other people who do what they do, who want to know what they’re doing, who understand why they do it.
This isn’t an exercise in reassuring each other yes yes, we do matter, we do—it’s an essential space for the cross-fertilization of ideas, for the exchange of information, for conversation, for debate. It’s a space where people can find rejuvenation, inspiration, and fresh blood. The stage is a lonely place, as is the desk of the person who writes for the stage. The Fringe acts—I hope it does—as a reminder to people in the arts that their work is not frivolous, is not empty, and is not falling on deaf ears.
Thousands of people have poured out to see these shows. Some were better and some were not so much—but that isn’t entirely why we came. We came to participate in the raw material of theater, in the process. We came to be part of a community of people like ourselves, who love theater a little or a lot, who believe in any case that theater matters, and matters a great deal.
The Fringe is not polished, not fancy, not prettied up, and for that very reason it works. It’s raw and it’s fresh and it’s process writ large. It’s a moving, seething thing, working underneath the surface of traditional theater, forcing evolution where there might otherwise be stasis. The Fringe reminds us that theater is not all about the end product. The end product, while valuable to an audience, is not all there is. There’s a larger project, and that is the growth of theater as a whole.
That growth takes place in process, not in completion. Trial and error, conversation and argument, collaboration, curiosity, development, change—these are things that keep theater alive. It’s evolving, always, and the Fringe gives it space where it can morph and become a new thing.
And it gives us, the audience, a place to witness a living art as it changes before our eyes. Theater now isn’t the same as it was twenty years ago; the Fringe now isn’t the same as it was when it began. What remains, in both cases, is a community of people who, for the love of theater, gather to immerse themselves in it, to make it and see it, to discuss it, think about it, participate in it in a deeper way than they can at any other time.
Bedlam’s nearly empty now. It goes back to being Bedlam, and all of us who’ve crowded into it and into all these theaters for nearly two weeks go back to being our ordinary selves. But performance in the Twin Cities has gone through a sudden, noisy, inelegant, marvelous moment of growth. No telling yet what that growth will look like when it finds expression on stage. But I for one can’t wait to see.
10:56 A.M. August 9, 2009
It’s morning of the last day of the Fringe, and the sky’s heavy with waiting rain. I’m sitting here idly looking out the window, waiting for it to be time to head for the last of my shows, watching a kaleidoscopic montage of the shows I’ve already seen play out on the screen.
It’s supposed to rain off and on all day today. Fringers, including myself, will trek out with umbrellas and jackets pulled over our heads, intrepid and determined in our last-chance hunt for the show that will make us sit up and feel that thrill we feel when the work hits us just right. Grabs us by the throat, or slowly seeps into the blood, or sidles up to us and whispers in our ear. What is it we’re waiting for? How do we know when a show works? What is that (here’s a word I rarely get to throw around) frisson when performance meets audience and the two are perfectly matched?
We come to the theater hoping, waiting. We arrive with expectations we’re rarely aware of, and wait to see if the show meets them. But the best shows are the ones that go beyond our expectations, or move in a totally different direction, or engage a part of us we didn’t even know was there. More than walking out of the theater satisfied that we’ve gotten what we wanted, we walk out feeling a little bewildered, as if we’ve been given an unexpected gift.
That gift comes at a necessary and valuable cost. The best shows require more of us than that we simply wait, more than that we simply arrive and receive. They require that we move toward them as much as they move toward us. It’s a balance: the performer and all the artists responsible for the creation of the show do the bulk of the work required for this meeting between audience and artist to take place. But just as much as the artist is transforming him or herself, the audience must be willing to be transformed.
Sometimes this is a matter of being transported to another reality, as is generally the case in a traditional play—we are presented with a different world, and asked to enter in, accepting its premises, suspending disbelief. But in some ways, the function of this alternate reality is to carry us deeper into this reality, this world, and being asked to look more closely, not only at what could be, but also at what actually is. This is sometimes hard art, not always comfortable for the audience, not always easy for the individual who is being confronted with a vision that might not be the one they usually see.
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it. —Bertolt Brecht
I’ve never been sure if I fully agree with Brecht. Sometimes I feel that the most effective art is in fact a very precise mirror of reality—it shows us who we are and how we live, and in doing that it shapes who we become. Art that tries to act as a hammer can easily be nothing more than polemic, a platform for the artist to have his or her say and try to persuade. Sometimes the best art is more chisel than hammer, working away at us rather than smashing us over the head. But I’m probably just getting tangled in semantics; the point he’s making, I think, is really that the function of art is to ask something of us, to make something of us, to linger with us and effect some kind of change in who we are and how we interpret and act in the world.
It’s the question of vision that’s nagging at me as I wrap up this project of being an audience member for eleven solid days. I think that what an audience goes into a theater expecting, waiting for, hoping for, is to see an artist’s vision and feel it resonate in their own bones. The vision that is most stunning is that which is unexpected, never seen before, and gives the viewer the curious and thrilling sense of seeing something for the first time that they have somehow always known.
As an audience member, I want to see through your eyes, and I want the vista to be something I have never encountered, and one I can immediately claim as newly my own. I want your vision to shape my reality—not to reassure me that my own reality is sufficient and correct, but to assure me that it is not, and to show me what infinite space exists beyond my tiny world.
That space, seen through your eyes, allows and sometimes forces me to expand. It asks me to venture further from what’s familiar and safe. The best art can shape reality simply by broadening its reach, by extending the vision of those who encounter it.
An audience shapes and inflects the art it sees, especially when that art is performance. The audience is a living, breathing, perceiving thing, actually present in the same space as the artist, a fact of which the artist is sharply aware. Performance is actually a call and response between performer and audience; each is trying to sense the other’s state of mind, guess at their meaning, interpret their every shift and gesture, read their silences and their words. It is the most intricate dance between artist and viewer of all the arts: it is an art of presence, and the vision the artist is trying to share must be shared immediately, in real time, right now.
For me, it’s much easier, and has a less visceral impact—I’m a writer, so when I write I am only imagining an audience I’ll never encounter, hoping that whatever semblance of vision I’m trying to share will be shared by my imagined reader sometime later, in their private world, long after I’ve left the room. I set down this semblance of vision, and then have the luxury of escape. The dance then is between my disembodied, finished/abandoned vision, and an embodied, living, perceiving mind. Once my work is done, it’s done; I have either succeeded or failed at sharing that vision with my reader. The work remains the work, and does not change. The rest of the work is left to the reader, to interpret as they wish and glean what they can and what they want from what I’ve said.
The performing artist must play out their vision to an audience that’s in the same room, sitting before them, waiting, watching, expecting, hoping, prepared to disagree or agree, poised to pounce, prepared to fall in love or leave in disgust. The audience is hungrier. It has both a life of its own, en masse—the mood of the audience changes from night to night, and that mood changes the entire performance—and a sea of lives, each individual watcher dragging in with them their dusty bag of opinions and needs and stories and agendas and hopes and demands. The vision of the performing artist is inflected, constantly, by the nature of the audience’s desire.
Performing arts are the most immediate of the arts; they are performed and consumed in public, in community. We sit elbow to elbow, watching you. We demand to know what you can give us. We want to see as you see. We want you to make us see it as well. We want our reality reflected, or heightened, or utterly changed. We want, we want, we want.
And you give, and you give, and you give.
What I’m aware of most of all, as this Fringe comes to a close, is how very much the performing arts give, to me and to all audiences who arrive hungry. It is an exhausting task, sharing vision: the demand that you shape my very reality, whether by hard impact or by clear reflection, is a staggering demand. The great beauty of the Fringe, I think, is this: there is no limit on which vision can be shared, which is the right kind of vision, which is the vision we most want or need. The artists are free to offer their vision, and we are free to see through their eyes if we can. The vistas available to us, in these eleven days, are nearly infinite. This is the broadest, most far-reaching, most multi-faceted world any of us will see for a while. This breadth and variety of visions shows us an infinite reality, and changes who we are.
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Last minute note: This year I saw one of those shows that strips performance down to its bones, and in doing so cuts straight to the audience’s heart. Scream Blue Murmur, a group of performance poets from Ireland, offers no sets, no script, no invitation to escape our reality into another one. The show’s intent was to get through to us—not us, an imagining audience, but us, ourselves, as we really are. It digs into collective memory and asks us to examine things we’ve forgotten that we badly need to think about now. Scream Blue Murmur performs twice today—they won the encore slot at 8:30 at Intermedia—so if you didn’t see their show, you have a last chance, and if you did see their show, you should still go see the encore, because they’re doing something different. Don’t miss this show.
1:15 P.M. August 8, 2009
It’s a hot and steamy summer morning, and my friends, I am fried. I’m on Day 10 of too little sleep and too much caffeine, addled by an onslaught of theater and people and theater people, and my head’s a haze of images and ideas and conversations and things overheard and passing thoughts and the general befuddlement brought on by spending all one’s waking hours in the dark, watching an alternate reality take shape before one’s eyes, letting go of one’s familiar bearings and context and drifting instead into a created world where reality shapeshifts according to the whims and of the creators, and where I am nothing more than another heartbeat in the dark—
in short, the Fringe has had its way with me. I now eat, sleep, and dream theater. The good, the very good, the brilliant, the ghastly, it doesn’t matter—it has invaded me completely, and I am aware of little else. As I sit here today trying to organize a coherent thesis of what the Fringe is and why it works, I find that I am my own best specimen: I have found that it’s possible to become the perfect audience member. Until your show begins, I barely exist. It’s when the lights go down and you start to move or speak that I come alive.
The perfect audience member isn’t necessarily the one who laughs at all your jokes or sighs at all your stunningly crafted lines. She’s the one who is willing to follow you where you’re going, no matter how unlikely or insane or absurd. She’s as willing to shed her skin as you are to shed yours, and when you say Now shed your skin, she says, Ok, and does. She trusts you implicitly, probably foolishly; she should know better by now, but does not, and goes to play after play with the expectation that she will give herself over completely, and be transformed.
The Fringe works because there are a lot of us, audience members with enough of a childlike faith in the power of performance to heighten, alter, and transform reality that we will go to one show after another looking for it. It doesn’t have to be a grand, crashing sort of transformation. Just a little transforming will do. But when the lights go down and I take off my skin, I want to feel the power of theater playing on my bare nerves.
And I have. The Fringe has worked on me. At this point, I have lost all access to a hyper-critical sensibility. This doesn’t mean I’ve lost my ability to discern what’s good and not so good, what works and what doesn’t; it means I’ve lost that part of myself that feels I should like something or not, that snarky tendency to measure things against my notions of what’s hip/sexy/ironic/flashy enough to get through to me. This is because, I think, if you go to enough shows, your own pretenses toward what performance should be get eroded, and things start getting through to you that ordinarily wouldn’t. Things start getting through to you that you might need.
We don’t know what we need from theater, from stories, from comedy, from dance. We don’t know, and so we can’t quite say why we go. But if we want to receive it, we need to be open to any journey when the lights go down. We need to cede power to those on the stage. They may or may not know where they’re going, or what they’re doing. But if they do, they take us places that our day-to-day reality can never reach. Our only road there is through them. To refuse the journey is to stay trapped in our limited selves, telling and retelling the three or four stories we know. To accept is to risk bad actors, boredom, but it is also to risk the grand possibility of seeing more clearly, feeling more deeply, being transformed into more than we are.
At the moment, I’m not much to speak of. The full-on Fringe experience, while heavenly, has got me dragging ass in a very significant fashion. But I’m a glutton for punishment, and I’m on my way out into this sultry August day, with every intention of shedding my skin.
1:19 P.M. August 6, 2009
It was always late afternoon, and a little breezy, wasn’t it? —“Winnemucca (Three Days in the Belly)"
It was, in fact, afternoon, and a little breezy, a hazy blue August sky. I was sitting on a bench outside a venue, watching a steady stream of chattering Fringers pass me on the sidewalk, mingling with the flotsam and jetsam of the loitering crowd. Four women, wildly overdressed for 5 p.m., tossed their hair and watched themselves in the window as they walked. A young pierced and tattooed couple went by with their three giggling blonde little girls. A family of four arrived, trailing a sullen daughter. The performers huddled by the back door for some kind of animated, arm-waving exchange. Joe Scrimshaw loped by.
Sort of wishing I could just sit outside on my bench and watch the world, I finally got up and went in and settled into my seat in the dark. A tall bald man with the shoulders of Shrek settled in right in front of me. I moved back a row. Weirdly, another tall bald man sat down right in front of me again. I moved back a row. Then, I shit you not, a third tall bald man sat down right in front of me, and I moved to the back of the house, practically sitting in the light box, tiny on my perch and peering at the stage.
The show began. I watched one untalented performer think he was talented because he had probably been told in high school that he was, a semi-talented performer work his ass off and give a very solid performance, and an extremely talented performer totally phone it in because he was talented and knew he could.
I began wondering this: what on earth is talent?
Talent and a quarter, kid—that’ll buy you a cup of coffee.—My father
Talent is subjective, sort of. It’s a word like ‘brilliant’ or ‘sexy’ or ‘genius’—vague, without criteria, up for debate. We can disagree on who is and who isn’t, who has it and who doesn’t, though there are people who are so obviously talented that we can all agree they are, even if we hate the work they’re doing.
And that’s when I get annoyed—when I see talented performers kick back and do half-assed work because they think their talent is enough.
I don’t think it is. Call me picky. Call me overly demanding. Maybe I should feel lucky enough that I’m being graced by the presence of a talented person who feels they’re gracing me with their presence. But I don’t.
Alan’s post of today, wherein he rightly says that one of the great things about the Fringe is that artists can relax a little , made me think, and made me wonder if I’m asking too much. I agree thoroughly with him that part of the beauty of the Fringe, for artists and audiences alike, is that shows can stop trying so hard. People can stop feeling they have to make something “self-consciously GREAT…that has something BIG to say about SOMETHING BIG,” as he aptly put it.
This ability to shake out their hair allows artists to create a vastly broader range of work, with fewer constraints on what it should be or say; and audiences likewise can expect and enjoy a broader range of experience when they sit down in their seats. And I agree with Alan when he says, “I think the performing arts at the Fringe are better than performing arts year round, more accessible, more fun, more creative, more worthwhile.”
The only thing that drives me nuts about this increased freedom of range is that it sometimes decreases artists’ demands on themselves as performers. I want every artist in the Fringe to feel that he or she can and should shoot for the moon this time of year, say whatever they want, do any show they can think up, design and perform it with the utmost of individuality. But I don’t think that means they have to throw craft, skill, effort, and attention out the window. To me, relaxing into greater artistic freedom means giving oneself the room to move with artistic freedom, not telling the audience they should expect the lowest common denominator of what you can do.
And I don’t think that’s what Alan’s saying. I’m just piping up on the matter of what creative range at the Fringe can be, for better and worse. Last night, I saw a show where an insanely talented performer might as well have been painting his toenails on stage for all the effort he put into his work. That’s what he was willing to give us. That’s all we got. Maybe everyone in the theater was totally blown away by his cleverness. But I’ve seen these performers work before. I know what they can do when they’re giving everything they’ve got. That’s what I came to see. And it wasn’t there.
So, unexpectedly, I wound up loving “Winnemucca (Three Days in the Belly).” I wound up loving it, despite a convoluted, probably ill-conceived premise, one really bizarre modern dance sort of moment, one terrible cast member, and one who was only ok, because the third could seriously act. He had talent, and lots of it, whatever that means. So did the playwright, I think; the script disappeared a little bit behind the so-so acting and the bewildering premise, but when that one, talented actor had the language all to himself, it lifted up and soared.
He knew his role in a bone-deep way, had absorbed the written character and made it come to life. He knew this character’s gestures, expressions, mannerisms, tones of voice. He knew the character’s history and weaknesses and secrets. The actor was young, uneven, imperfect, but he was also very clearly gifted with an ability to take on a truly strange character and get it under his skin. And so I left the theater renewed in my faith in a good performer’s ability to reach the audience deeply, by doing the brutal work of translating mere talent into craft and skill.
And then. And then I saw Allegra Lingo’s “Crecendo,” and my friends, it was a delight. It’s news to no one that the woman is talented, but any performer who can circle an arena stage for an hour and hold an audience totally breathless has my undying admiration. She was funny and touching and her language was gorgeous and the story she told was beautiful and real and gentle without being sentimental, and her ability to weave her show into and around Aaron Copeland’s scores was fantastic—it seems an unlikely thing to attempt, but it worked, and God it was good.
The show is, in part, a beautiful, often hilarious soliloquy on the way art gets made and the way the artistic process mirrors life, a subject that can fall totally on its self-referential face in the wrong hands, but one that here is completely absorbing and insightful and inspiring.
Lingo takes huge raw talent and turns it to gold in her writing and performance alike, never letting up on craft for a minute, never getting sloppy, never resting on her considerable experience just because she can, and she takes the audience on a marvelous and unexpected trip we never could have imagined taking on our own. In this show, I saw the kind of wonderful artistic freedom to explore and imagine and create that’s allowed by the Fringe.
Now it’s another hazy August afternoon, and people, I’m getting a little addled. 25 shows down, 15 to go. And while I’m underslept and overstimulated beyond belief, this full-on Fringe thing is divine.
11:45 A.M. August 4, 2009.
“I say that I can't make anything up. I think of myself as a collage artist. I'm cutting and pasting memories of my life. And I say, I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it because telling you're always in control, you're like God.” —Spalding Gray
Note: This is about storytelling. I know it sounds sort of arcane and ridiculous, but in fact most one-person shows are storytelling; by my count, there are thirty (30) works in this year’s Fringe that are essentially storytelling. Not talking about one-person dramas. Talking about people getting up and talking about stories of their own. That means that a) a lot of people have stories interesting enough to mount a show and produce at a theater festival, and or/tell their stories in such an interesting way that the content doesn’t matter all that much; and b) a lot of people have neither interesting stories nor interesting ways of telling, but get up there and, God love ’em, expect you to listen anyway.
I saw a storyteller at the 2004 Fringe who blew my socks off. I still haven’t forgotten that show, and I doubt I will. And I saw a couple of storytellers at the 2008 Fringe who were so bad I could hardly conceive of their work as the same animal. And I’ve been trying to sort out what the difference was ever since.
I decided that the primary difference was this: the first storyteller was out to seduce the audience, and it worked. He was trying to make us fall in love with the story he was telling, the way he was telling it, and the way he made us feel while we basked in his words. He created a persona we could have listened to for hours, and told a story we wanted to hear, one we’d never heard before but suddenly and utterly understood. He was attentive to every shift and sigh from the audience. He was there for us, and for that one hour he gave us everything he had.
The other storytellers were listening to themselves talk. They were lazy. They were smug. They found themselves remarkably entertaining. They stood there with their pages and read us stories that they’d written to make us think they were smart and witty and impressive and cute. They were like the guy at the party who finds himself positively fascinating, and assumes you must agree; he seems to have no idea that you exist independently, and believes that your entire function is to be amazed by him so that he can further be amazed by himself.
Storytelling’s a tough gig. It’s raw. It’s a weaving of genres—the best storytelling is poetry and memoir and stand-up comedy and playwriting all at once—that takes a very sure hand. There’s no fourth wall between actor and audience. It runs the risk of utter solipsism and total irrelevance. It can easily cross the line from memoir into masturbation. It requires on the part of the teller an exquisite sensitivity to the audience, a constant intuitive sense of whether the story is carrying the listener. It requires a balance between the semi-arrogant faith that there’s an audience out there that will find your story as engaging as we all find our own, and the humility to recognize that you need to work your ass off to give this audience what it needs.
It’s not a reading, though a lot of storytellers seem to think their only job is to read you the clever story they wrote and thought was pretty great. And it’s not strictly performance, either—the writing has to be really, really powerful, or the listener starts to shift in their seat and wonder how soon they can get out of there and stop listening to you prattle on. It takes more than a good writer, and more than a strong performance.
But the range of what works as storytelling is vast. The common factors in good storytelling, I think, are these, and one or both must be present:
1. You, the teller, need to make me fall in love with the persona you create. If you do this, I will listen to you unquestioningly for as long as you so wish to talk.
2. Your story needs to suck me in and carry me from beginning to end. If it’s a story I know, fine. If it’s utterly foreign to my experience, fine. Either way, I need to be drawn in and carried along.
1. If you choose to make me fall in love with your persona—
—which is different than making me fall in love with you, the performer, personally; you may be a fantastic person, certainly, but we are not here to discuss that, we are here to listen to a story, and no matter how cute you are, no matter how witty and sassy and ironic and hip, I don’t give a rat’s ass if you can’t pull me into your world and make me want to be there with you—
then you need to know how to perform the part of yourself. Your performance needs to rise above the you-ness of you and become a commanding, seductive force strong enough to pull me along with nothing more than your words and the way that you use them.
2. If you choose to suck me in with your story rather than your persona, then be advised:
—getting up there and talking about yourself qua yourself is a waste of my time. Getting up there and somehow, from the stage, speaking to me personally about things you know that I either know and recognize deeply, or about things I have never encountered before in my life and now badly need to hear about—that is good storytelling.
The storyteller needs to be more than the sum of his/her parts. Being onstage with yourself and your stories is not enough. You need to be able to perform, write, intuit, carry, guide, and seduce. You need to be there, in the theater, with me. When I walk out, I need to feel that I know you, and that you know me in a way no one else does. You need to make your story my own. I’m not saying it needs to be about me—I’m saying you need to pull me into it so thoroughly that when I emerge, it has become a part of who I am, a part of my lexicon, a story that lives in me for good.
Go see “An Intimate Evening with Fotis,” for a study in the near-impossible: a storyteller who literally sits in his chair reading from his pages and makes you fall in love with his character and tells you stories so powerfully and at such a madcap shrieking cackling pace that you are left breathless, laughing, and ready to believe anything that Mike Fotis tells you is true.
And go see Loren Niemi’s “Moby Dick Tonight.” Difficult, uneven, in need of an edit, and fascinating, this show has left me mulling it over ever since I left the theater, which is exactly what I want good storytelling to do. I am still caught up in the story of the whale, which becomes the story of the storyteller, which becomes a dark and surreal story of an old lover, which becomes the story of the listener, all told in language so rich and detailed you can smell the blood and sweat on the boat, feel the needle bite the lover’s skin, all spoken in quiet, mild tones by an odd little man in a white linen suit.
The two shows are the absolute inverse and converse of each other. They are not perfect. But they are powerhouse storytelling, and if you want to be seduced, go.
11:15 AM. August 3, 2009.
There aren’t a lot of women playwrights making much noise these days. Historically, too, the women writing plays were few and far between. Those there were have received little attention, and their work often hasn’t held onto a place in the canon of theatrical lit. I’m not entirely sure why this is the case. The easy, and not entirely inaccurate, answer is that women’s writing in general has had to elbow for a little space in that canon, women’s plays more so than their other written work. While I can rattle off a long list of plays I’ve seen, loved, and hated over time, only a handful of those works have been written by women.
And so there are few major stage works out there written about women, either. I’m not talking about whether there are parts for women. Obviously there are. I’m talking about plays that try to capture aspects of an essential human condition, as seen through a woman’s eyes. The human condition—this isn’t news—is often understood as a condition felt by men. And while there are many plays that try, and sometimes succeed, at getting to the heart of what make us humans human, few of those plays center on a woman’s life. Women have no “Death of a Salesman,” no Hamlet, no Beckett, no Chekhov, no Lear.
We have, most famously and recently, “The Vagina Monologues.” Which is, dammit, a hell of a piece. And it does in fact haul a great many experiences had by women into the light of center stage. It makes the attempt to capture a woman’s life and tell it in a woman’s voice.
But it is not “Nine Parts of Desire,” a truly stunning one-woman play written by a woman about a woman’s experience, but a play I fear will not be remembered in twenty years; I could be wrong, and hope I am. But “Nine Parts” is something that “Monologues” is not: it is more than women trying to describe what it is to be a woman. It is textured, deep as a well, complex; it is a play, where “Monologues” is monologues; it is a play about one woman’s life, not about Women’s Lives, in the same way that “Salesman” is about one man’s life; and yet both of those plays, in writing about the singular character, say more about the complexity of men’s and women’s and humans’ vast experience than “Monologues” ever could.
As Hemmingway said, don’t write about War; write about a man in war.
Or a woman in war. See also “Nine Parts of Desire.”
Point is: as strong and really important as “Monologues” is, it falls prey to the most difficult of problems faced by plays by and about women: because there is a paucity of women’s experience in theatrical literature and in theater itself, women’s plays are still catching up. Not in talent, not in quality, not in skill. None of that. But in content. There is a sense of urgency felt in many women’s plays that the playwright is attempting to capture and argue for The Female Experience all at once.
When you try to cast your net too wide, try to contain an ocean in a seashell, you will write a bad play. The play will be bad because it will do little more than paint broad and generalized images of its women characters and their experience; rather than creating a sense of universality, it will create a set of stereotypes. There’s an enormous difference. There are experiences which are, if not universal, resonant among and between us; they share nothing with stereotypes, which simply distill experience and character not down to its essential and accurate core, but to its simplistic and superficial shell.
Women’s plays are a hard sell; they are assumed to be interesting solely to women, because a woman’s experience is assumed to be other than the human experience. And, at times, a play by a woman is indeed about an experience that is particular to women. And sometimes it succeeds. And sometimes it does not. I think that it succeeds when it goes deeper into its characters and their motives and their lives than many recent plays by women do.
Which (finally) brings me to the Fringe.
There are a lot of shows by women this year, especially one- and two-woman shows, and some of them are wonderful. I’m not talking about all of them en masse, or which ones work and which don’t, across the board. I’m talking about two. One fails beyond hope; one almost succeeds, but not quite; and it’s the ways in which these two shows cross over and part ways that concern me here. Because both are plays by women, and say they are about women’s lives.
“Cherry Cherry Lemon” makes an attempt to be about women, and women’s sexuality, and women’s friendships. It isn’t, though; it’s about men. It’s about women’s relationships with men, and their sex with men, and their friendships with each other which in this play are nothing more than a pretty unkind conversation about men.
I have no problem with a play that deals with relationships—they fill and in many ways define our lives. And I certainly have no problem with plays that try to dig into the complexities of sex, or the complexities of men, or the complexities of how men and women have sex or do not. But the play has no complexity at all.
It splits itself along flat stereotypes: stereotypes of women and of men; stereotypes of how women think about and have sex; stereotypes of how women “are,” generally speaking—needy/clingy, cold/detached, devouringly sexual/sexually repressed; stereotypes of how women relate to each other, i.e. through an incessant conversation about stereotypes of men.
The play tries to be About Women, but the two characters it uses to try to illustrate that Universal Woman resemble no woman I know, or would care to know. These women never break out of the mold in which they’ve been cast to show us any depth of spirit, despite an uneven attempt to deepen the play by tossing in a couple of subplots (a dying father, a divorce). The actors, who had a lot of potential, couldn’t break out of that mold; the mold was the script. The mold was the writing. It was a woman’s play, written by a woman who—my opinion, anyway—felt she had to speak for Women, and failed.
I think she thought she could substitute flat, graphic sexual dialogue for erotic exploration of and with language; and I think she thought that if she tacked on a couple of loose threads about friendship and “other” kinds of love, she could give the play a nuance and texture it lacked. It didn’t work. It made the worst of all dramatic missteps: it made the work merely sentimental. And in doing so, it made itself a stereotypical Women’s Play. This is the kind of work we don’t need.
“The Most Massive Woman Wins” is another state of affairs. It isn’t a great play; it’s almost entirely monologues, and it doesn’t succeed in many ways. It, too, is after something: it’s a strong and articulate attempt to explore the quagmire of women’s relationships with their bodies, and the world that to some extent shapes that relationship, and shapes the body itself. And there are moments, in this play, where you really feel they nailed it—an unexpectedly sharp line here and there, a difficult and uncomfortable monologue done fearlessly.
In this play, the inclusion of details about the four women’s relationships with men was effective and often painful; though it tipped too far toward essentializing men as one mass force against women, the individual scenes where the man/woman/woman’s body triad were gut-hitting and apt.
There is a range of women characters, a range of ways the women battle their bodies, strong direction, and strong actors attempting this broad reach. The actors did everything right. But again I find myself confronting a script I feel falls short. As monologue/plays often do, it seemed each character was to represent some category of person or woman or type. That rarely works, and it didn’t here; it made things that were complex simplistic, and that could have been avoided.
These actors were capable of going deeper, but there were depths the script wasn’t willing to plumb. One area of depth was this: the play offered up examples of how women’s relationships with their bodies are affected by the men in their lives, and in one case how the woman is affected by her mother, but there was nothing about how women themselves actively perpetuate a culture in which this play’s set-up would occur: four women sitting in a cosmetic surgeon’s office, about to undergo, as one character says, “the ultimate purge."
These two plays leave me asking mostly this:
Why do we tiptoe along the shores of our experiences—plural—and never quite dive in? What aren’t we exploring in these plays, the ones that stay safely stereotypical and sentimental and shallower than they could be? Because until women’s plays begin claiming the full range of human experience as their own, their plays will not fully succeed, and audiences will never see their most honest, stripped-bare selves on the stage.
1:00 PM. August 2, 2009.
Because Matt & Alan have such great blogs on here today, full of lots of meaty stuff to think about, and I do not have any meaty stuff to say today because I'm slightly fried by this Full-on Fringe thing and the fact that I'm still spinning from "An Intimate Evening with Fotis," plus which I'm late for today's six shows, I'll keep this insubstantial.
